While the extent of the dependence between theories of aesthetics and models of the mind is a matter of lively debate, it is fair to claim that current approaches to consciousness suggest new perspectives about the nature of aesthetic experience. Recent findings of neuroscience have affected how we see aesthetics and art. Nevertheless, while it is often suggested that neuroscience will soon off...

The art world changed forever when Jackson Pollock picked up a can and poured paint onto a vast canvas rolled across the floor of his windswept barn. Fifty years on, art theorists recognize his patterns as being a revolutionary approach to aesthetics. A significant step forward in understanding Pollock’s aesthetics occurred in 1999 when my scientific analysis showed that his paintings are fract...

A long debate in aesthetics concerns the reasoned nature of criticism. The main questions ask whether criticism is based on (normative) reasons, critics communicate reasons fo...

Everything that is mass-produced is designed. Every designed object has its own evident quality of beauty. But how can we help students understand the nature and form of beauty as something that is an integral part of the design process. In this paper we explore the notion of beauty as it is represented through aesthetics. Students’ experience of making designed objects, their engagement with t...

Much has been said on matter of aesthetics and mathematics—perhaps most commonly articulated in relation to properties such as ‘beauty’ and ‘elegance,’ which are used to distinguish good from not-so-good mathematical products. Despite its importance in the work of mathematicians, it has been argued that aesthetics cannot be incorporated into school mathematics given students' difficulties with ...

About a decade ago, psychology of the arts started to gain momentum owing to a number of drives: technological progress improved the conditions under which art could be studied in the laboratory, neuroscience discovered the arts as an area of interest, and new theories offered a more comprehensive look at aesthetic experiences. Ten years ago, Leder, Belke, Oeberst, and Augustin (2004) proposed ...

The paper engages with Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from the perspective of essential duality embedded in every one’s nature: it explicates the entangling nature of binaries and the aesthetics of non-disjunction of the binary self/Other as embodied in the figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde respectively. By the novel’s end, the two aspects, the Jekyllean and the Hyde...