ABSTRACT
In this paper I critically discuss Murray Smith’s attempt in Film, Art and the Third Culture (2017) to reconcile or integrate scientific explanations and humanistic understanding in “a third culture” which overcomes C. P. Snow’s famous image of science and the humanities as ‘two cultures’ at loggerheads with each other. I argue that Smith’s laudable ambitions are undermined by adopting a form of scientific naturalism at the very beginning of his inquiry. I go on to challenge Smith’s account of empathy in art and its supposed neurophysiological basis. And I contest his related claim that the only way to generate “thick” explanations of aesthetic or cultural phenomena is in terms of sub-personal (neural) mechanisms. From the perspective of a liberal naturalism, we can appeal to Stanley Cavell’s critical method of letting an object of interpretation (in this case our experience of art) become a means of interpretation. That is, the depth of art, and the human world, is in the appearances, and the subtle details they reveal, not hidden beneath them.
