ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on recent work in neuroscience to offer a new approach to aesthetics. Aesthetics has historically fallen under philosophy, which in both its continental and analytic traditions has prioritized logic, yielding the definitions (and critiques) of beauty, the sublime, and wonder set forth by theorists such as Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, the New Critics, and the New Historicists. Neuroscience reveals, however, that in addition to logic, the human brain evolved to run another thought-mechanism, narrative, which is integral to a great deal of art, including literature, painting, theater, sculpture, and film. By attending to narrative as well as to logic, a neuroscientific approach to aesthetics can offer richer accounts of beauty, the sublime, and wonder, resolving some longstanding critical disputes and more fully explaining people’s ordinary experiences of art.
