The Aesthetics of Science
The Aesthetics of Science

Author: Milena Ivanova

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-01-16

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0429638558

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This volume builds on two recent developments in philosophy on the relationship between art and science: the notion of representation and the role of values in theory choice and the development of scientific theories. Its aim is to address questions regarding scientific creativity and imagination, the status of scientific performances—such as thought experiments and visual aids—and the role of aesthetic considerations in the context of discovery and justification of scientific theories. Several contributions focus on the concept of beauty as employed by practising scientists, the aesthetic factors at play in science and their role in decision making. Other essays address the question of scientific creativity and how aesthetic judgment resolves the problem of theory choice by employing aesthetic criteria and incorporating insights from both objectivism and subjectivism. The volume also features original perspectives on the role of the sublime in science and sheds light on the empirical work studying the experience of the sublime in science and its relation to the experience of understanding. The Aesthetics of Science tackles these topics from a variety of novel and thought-provoking angles. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of science and aesthetics, as well as other subdisciplines such as epistemology and philosophy of mathematics.

Aesthetic Science
Aesthetic Science

Author: Alexander Wragge-Morley

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-04-17

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 022668105X

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The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. In Aesthetic Science, Alexander Wragge-Morley challenges this interpretation by arguing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. To show how early modern naturalists conceived of the interplay between sensory experience and the production of knowledge, Aesthetic Science explores natural-historical and anatomical works of the Royal Society through the lens of the aesthetic. By underscoring the importance of subjective experience to the communication of knowledge about nature, Wragge-Morley offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of scientific representation in the early modern period and brings to light the hitherto overlooked role of aesthetic experience in the history of the empirical sciences.

Aesthetic Science
Aesthetic Science

Author: Arthur P. Shimamura

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2012-01-02

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 0199732140

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What do we do when we view a work of art? What does it mean to have an 'aesthetic' experience? Are such experiences purely in the eye of the beholder? This book addresses the nature of aesthetic experience from the perspectives of philosophy psychology and neuroscience.

Truth and Beauty
Truth and Beauty

Author: S. Chandrasekhar

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-11-15

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 022616277X

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Seven lectures detailing the author’s thoughts on motivations in the pursuit of science and patterns of scientific creativity. “What a splendid book! Reading it is a joy, and for me, at least, continuing reading it became compulsive…. Chandrasekhar is a distinguished astrophysicist and every one of the lectures bears the hallmark of all his work: precision, thoroughness, lucidity.” —Sir Hermann Bondi, Nature Does aesthetics play a role in science? Can it be that science is given impetus by a search for beauty? What relation exists between the beauty of an idea and its power to account for some aspect of the natural world? Throughout his distinguished career, S. Chandrasekhar has given time and thought to these questions and to their implications for his work and the work of others. Truth and Beauty gathers the fruits of his meditations. Heisenberg, observes Chandrasekhar, spoke eloquently of the sheer force of his aesthetic experience when he discovered the key to the quantum theory. Weyl characterized the process of working out his gauge theory as a choice of the beautiful over the true, a choice strongly supported by subsequent research. Einstein also felt the aesthetic power underlying his discoveries. While most of the seven essays in Truth and Beauty deal generally with the nature of science and the process of research, two essays explore the work of individuals. —Edward Arthur Milne and Arthur Stanley Eddington The late S. Chandrasekhar was best known for his discovery of the upper limit to the mass of a white dwarf star, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983. He was the author of many books, including The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes and, most recently, Newton's Principia for the Common Reader.

Thinking about Science, Reflecting on Art
Thinking about Science, Reflecting on Art

Author: Otávio Bueno

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781138687325

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Thinking about Science, Relecting on Art is the first book to systematically examine the relationship between the philosophy of science and aesthetics.

Aesthetics, Industry & Science
Aesthetics, Industry & Science

Author: M. Norton Wise

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-06-15

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 022653149X

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On January 5, 1845, the Prussian cultural minister received a request by a group of six young men to form a new Physical Society in Berlin. In fields from thermodynamics, mechanics, and electromagnetism to animal electricity, ophthalmology, and psychophysics, members of this small but growing group—which soon included Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brücke, Werner Siemens, and Hermann von Helmholtz—established leading positions in what only thirty years later had become a new landscape of natural science. How was this possible? How could a bunch of twenty-somethings succeed in seizing the future? In Aesthetics, Industry, and Science M. Norton Wise answers these questions not simply from a technical perspective of theories and practices but with a broader cultural view of what was happening in Berlin at the time. He emphasizes in particular how rapid industrial development, military modernization, and the neoclassical aesthetics of contemporary art informed the ways in which these young men thought. Wise argues that aesthetic sensibility and material aspiration in this period were intimately linked, and he uses these two themes for a final reappraisal of Helmholtz’s early work. Anyone interested in modern German cultural history, or the history of nineteenth-century German science, will be drawn to this landmark book.

Epistemologies of Aesthetics
Epistemologies of Aesthetics

Author: Dieter Mersch

Publisher: Diaphanes

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783037345214

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Art as research, art-based research, and research as art have become popular issues since the 1990s. This conceptual understanding aims at combining the methods of arts and sciences, but oftentimes falls short of considering the different forms of knowledge that arts and sciences create. This essay investigates the long tradition of the philosophical struggle with and for the epistemological status of the Aesthetic and its relation to scientific truth. Its aim is to deconstruct and displace the common terminology that constitutes this struggle. Furthermore, the purpose of this essay is to identify artistic practice as a mode of thought which does not utilize language in its propositional form and therefore cannot be translated into the discursive strategies of science: an aesthetic mode of thought beyond the linguistic turn and the (self-)understanding of philosophical hermeneutics and post-structuralism, a way of thinking which cannot be substituted by any other system than itself."

Art, Aesthetics, and the Brain
Art, Aesthetics, and the Brain

Author: Joseph P. Huston

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 567

ISBN-13: 0199670005

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What neural processes underlie the appreciation of painting, music, and dance? How did such processes evolve? This book brings together experts in genetics, psychology, neuroimaging, neuropsychology, art history, and philosophy to explore these questions. It sets the stage for a cognitive neuroscience of art and aesthetics.