Cognitive Aesthetics in Classical German Philosophy

The authors focus on the reconsideration and re-evaluation of the legacy of the aesthetics of German classical idealism and the demonstration of its viability in the contemporary neuroaesthetic and cognitive scientific discourse. In the book, we shall attempt to focus attention on two basic factors of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline. The first is the presentation of the fundamental historical concepts within the aesthetics of German idealism with some crucial concepts, ideas and constructs highlighted which are characteristic of its leading representatives. The second aim is discussions regarding the structure of sensuality and the sources of feelings of pleasure and its relationship to the higher cognitive functions in aesthetic judgements, the structure and nature of the neuronal correlates of aesthetic experience, the individual and socially conditioned creation of an ideal, but also the influence of various social beliefs on the formation of taste in recent cognitive-aesthetical research. Inhaltsverzeichnis Birth of Aesthetics as Gnoseologia Inferior in German Thinking - Receptive-Reflective Concept of I. Kant - Aesthetic Holism of Romanticism - Beauty Viewed through Philosophy of Identity - Dynamic Aesthetics - The Aesthetics of Will - Phenomenology as Aesthetics - Aesthetics as a Science of the Cognition of the Beautiful - Neuroaesthetics