Elisabeth Schellekens

We are very pleased to be publishing a special issue on Art, History, Perception. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Sonia Sedivy, who proposed a special issue at the intersection of art history, aesthetics, and the philosophy of perception, on the basis of a workshop held at the University of Toronto in 2017, which was supported by the American Society for Aesthetics, the SSHRC, and the University of Toronto. The plan for this special issue has evolved since then, and not all of the articles included are based on papers presented at the workshop. But the goal of the workshop, which was to foster integrated, multi-dimensional research into works of art and visual culture, remains the purpose of the special issue, and we are very grateful to Prof. Sedivy for her invaluable advice and assistance during its preparation.

The main aim of this paper is to examine the practice of describing intellectual pursuits in aesthetic terms, and to investigate whether this practice can be accounted for in the framework of a standard conception of aesthetic experience. Following a discussion of some historical approaches, the paper proposes a way of conceiving of aesthetic experience as both epistemically motivating and epistemically inventive. It is argued that the aesthetics of intellectual pursuits should be considered as central rather than marginal to our philosophical accounts of aesthetic experience, and that our views about the relation between the aesthetic and cognitive domains should be reconfigured accordingly.