Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

This essay is the English translation of the foreword to the Italian edition of Film, Art, and the Third Culture, published in 2022 as Cinema, evoluzione, neuroscienze: un’estetica naturalizzata del film (Rome: Dino Audino). It approaches Murray Smith’s study as a key entry point into the ongoing dialogue between film theory and the cognitive sciences, and as a catalyst for rethinking the epistemological foundations of film studies in light of…

At the heart of Murray Smith’s proposal of a methodological “triangulation” is the principle that in our research we take into serious account three levels of analysis, with their respective types of evidence: the phenomenological level; the psychological level; and the neurophysiological level. However, the author’s trust in phenomenological evidence appears to be fluctuating, and the issue of how to concretely take advantage of it appears underexplored. On this grounding,…

Smith’s Film, Art and the Third Culture is dedicated to developing a naturalized aesthetics of film, and at the heart of his proposal for a methodological “triangulation” is the principle that our research should take serious account of three levels of analysis, each with its respective type of evidence: the phenomenological level, the psychological level, and the neurophysiological level. While Smith addresses many aspects of our perceptual, emotional, and cognitive…

This paper rejects the autonomy myth that treats works of art as self-contained worlds and instead situates them within nature. Following Murray Smith’s “Third Culture” program, I retain triangulation—structure, function, and appearance—as necessary to explain how artworks affect perceivers: material structures impinge on perceivers’ brains, recruit psychological functions, and yield phenomenal experience. But triangulation is incomplete. I propose a fourth vertex—normativity—thus “squaring the triangle.” Normativity explains why works of art…

This paper critically examines Murray Smith’s proposal of building ‘the third culture’, a research paradigm that unites sciences and the humanities. While I am sympathetic to Smith’s proposal, exemplified in what he calls naturalized aesthetics, I argue that it is lacking in two respects: by not giving a proper account of the spectators’ moral engagements with films, and by ignoring a wider social nature and cultural embeddedness of spectators’ artistic…

I respond to the commentaries of each of my critics, while seeking to offer a through line of argument distilling some central themes addressed in the symposium. In response to Terrone, I focus on the place of normativity in the model of triangulation, noting that “proto-normativity” is already present in the biological world. Sticking with normativity but shifting the focus specifically onto moral questions, I respond to Vidmar Jovanović’s comments…

The paper addresses the question of whether the representability of high-level properties in the content of perceptual experience is compatible with a purely sensory characterization of high-level perceptual phenomenology. Two positions are distinguished, sensory liberalism and cognitive liberalism, which respectively provide an affirmative and a negative answer to the above question. After presenting the “conceptualist argument” against sensory liberalism and the main challenges that it raises, the paper proceeds to…

In this paper, first of all, I want to give a criterion for the perceivability of higher-level properties, i.e., the properties that depend for their own instantiation on the instantiation of low-level properties (colors, shapes, sounds, textures …); namely, conditions that are necessary and jointly sufficient in order for such a property to be perceivable. Here it is: the higher-level property is given i) immediately; ii) via a grouping operation…