Showing results for "Humans" in Aesthetics

In Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.

In the fall of 1984, in a darkened lecture hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, two professors offered competing arguments about why beauty matters. The art historian said beauty connects. The film scholar said beauty instructs. Both were right, and both were incomplete. The question that has taken forty years to formulate is the question this book attempts to answer: if beauty connects and instructs, who controls the connection, and who writes the lesson plan? The Human Universal Beautiful proposes a new framework for understanding how beauty operates as a historical force.