Aesthetic Judgement from Philosophical, Psychological and Neuroscientific Perspectives

Title: Aesthetic judgement from philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific perspectives Author: Tereza Hadravová Department: Aesthetics Department Supervisor: prof. PhDr. Vlastimil Zuska, CSc. Abstract: How does science relate to aesthetics? This question usually reads as a question concerning scientific contribution to aesthetics. Philosophers are most- ly skeptical about the application of scientific results in their domain, wheras psychologists and, in recent years, neuroscientists are optimistic. In the thesis, I argue that both of these positions, in their extreme versions, impede the mutual enrichment of science and aesthetics. The starting-point of the thesis is George Dickie's radical claim that no scientific information has ever been relevant for aesthetics. The claim, I argue, is firmly embedded in the aftermath of logical positivism: it is related to the e↵ort to "rescue" aesthetics from progressive eli- mination. As a consequence, most of analytic aesthetics discourse has ignored psychologically informed conception of aesthetic judgement, including some fine distinctions that such a conception enables, e.g. the di↵erence between judgements about pleasure and aesthetic judgements. The distinctions are further elaborated and, in the last part of the thesis, the results of this elaboration are..