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 neuroscience. The analysis situates Smith’s notion of “cooperative naturalism” within a broader critical framework that questions how the humanities can…

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, I will address the broad topic of a rigorous usage of phenomenological evidence by touching upon three main points: 1)…

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 engagement with movies within this framework, he rarely discusses what underlies our visual engagement with films: the fact that they…

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 can and should be experienced in a certain way. Works of art are artifacts whose functions are stabilized by communities…

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 experiences.

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 on the ways in which character, and emotion, are related to morality, while also acknowledging the specifically political dimension of…

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 show how sensory liberalism can be defended and why it should be preferred to its main competitor within the liberal…

Hilary Putnam’s paradigm-changing clarifications of our methods of inquiry in science and everyday life are central to his philosophy. He takes for granted that the judgments of scientists are for the most part reasonable and not in need of philosophical support, and that no part of our supposed knowledge is unrevisable or guaranteed to be true. He infers from key episodes in the history of science that our language contains terms whose references may remain unchanged despite radical changes in our theories, and that some statements are so basic for…

Modern philosophy of emotion has been largely dominated by what I call the Tracking Dogma, according to which emotions aim at tracking “core relational themes,” features of the environment that bear on our well-being (e.g. fear tracks dangers, anger tracks wrongs). The paper inquires into the empirical credentials of Strong and Weak versions of this dogma. I argue that there is currently insufficient scientific evidence in favor of the Tracking Dogma; and I show that there is a considerable weight of common knowledge against it. I conclude that most emotions…