Evaluating The Prospects of the Third Culture: Some Thoughts on Murray Smith’s Naturalized Aesthetics [Book Symposium]
Issue: Issue 22 • Author/s: Iris Vidmar Jovanović
Topics: Aesthetics, Cognitive science, Epistemology, Ethics, Metaphysics
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.