New Books by BC Faculty Series: Art as Cognition: How Gist Reframes the Aesthetic Experience as Conversation

Join Associate Professor of Philosophy Dena Shottenkirk and Assistant Professor Nicholas Whittaker (Wesleyan University) as they discuss Shottenkirk’s Art as Cognition. The book argues that a satisfactory account of the aesthetic experience would be derived from the perceptual experiences of both artist and viewer. It examines recent findings in visual science that emphasize low-level features, such as texture, illumination, color, shape, movement, etc., within the framework of gist perception. Lastly, the book concludes with a description of how the perceptual and cognitive processes of artist and viewer interact with curatorial/critical testimony to construct the artwork’s meaning.

Dena Shottenkirk writes in the field of epistemology and aesthetics, emphasizing the intersection of the two. She’s the author of Nominalism and Its Aftermath: The Philosophy of Nelson Goodman and Cover Up the Dirty Parts, and co-editor of Perception, Cognition, and Aesthetics.

Nicholas Whittaker earned a Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center and a B.A. at Harvard University. Whittaker’s work focuses on the nature of race and on the role of aesthetics in political, spiritual, and analytic philosophical traditions.

Register for the Zoom meeting