People have been kind enough to mention my bioaesthetics primer on various other blogs. On AlphaPsy, a new blog dedicated to cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, a short discussion even broke out, provoked by this comment to my post. (I will post my “defence” of neuroaesthetic here in a couple of days!) Through this discussion I learned that a group of French philosophers is starting a new journal to be called Art and Neurosciences Review. According to its website, the Art and Neurosciences Review aims to
serve as an interdisciplinary platform where all interested in art can discuss key themes at the junction of aesthetics and empirical sciences – every aspect of what we might call “the cognitive revolution” of aesthetics and art.
I wrote the editor-in-chief, Emmanuelle Glon, asking her for additional information, and she tells me that they plan to publish the journal bi-annually, both electronically and in print form. The focus will be on the philosophical implications of empirical data and various theories. This is probably a wise choice, as neuroscientists are surely prone to first attempt to get their experimental data published in a more conventional neuroscience journal. Since the neuroaesthetics field, as I wrote, is still very much in its infancy, there is a clear need of a common and unifying platform for debating and keeping up with the growing literature. Art and Neurosciences Review could very well be such a place. Today, there is really only two journals serving this need, the Empirical Studies of the Arts and the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (a new journal published by Division 10 of the APA), and both these journals cater primarily to psychologists.
One small thing, though. The Art and Neurosciences Review plans to run papers in both English and French. I think the editors should reconsider this policy if they want to attract a truly international audience. Even at the humanities departments here in Denmark nobody reads anything in French anymore. I agree that this is nothing to brag about, but it is a fact about the modern academic world.
– Martin
UPDATE (November 1). As it turns out, the good people behind the Arts and Neurosciences Review also runs a blog. Check it out here. So far, though, only entries in French!
To begin with, I thank warmly Martin for having mentioned and presnted our journal. Concerning the last comment, I perfectly agree with him but I would like to precise further the aim of ANR. The default language of the journal will be English but some papers will be also accessible in French. In fact, I think that people answering this sort of call for papers know that it is the only way for their work to enjoy a broad audience, and we plan to keep the papers in French for the electronic version exclusively, while articles in paper version will be originally in English or translated if needed. In fact, for the moment, the concern is double: the first one, and the most important, is to be an international plateform for recent research about neuroaesthetics and the second one is to encourage the development of cadres for persons outside the academic community of cognitive science, that is, mainly those from art and aesthetic philosophy departments. For example in the case cinema and audiovisual media institutions which I know the most, there are in France, at least in my opinion, good experts and specialised schools, but with no or inappropriate methodological and epistemological basis, at least when they are not exclusively concerned by techniques learning. It is not that French post-modernism is readily mentioned as a default norm; it is just anachist and idiosyncratic. The problem is more important than it might seem because the lack of french-speaking articles about what I think to be appropriate for the issue allows for opacity to be maintained whithin the student and young researcher´s intellectual life, in the favor of an unfortunate corpus cherished by the academic establishment. One-line reading, easily accessible and flexible as it is, is indeed suited for supporting this task. Of course, it is not only a matter of mother tongue; French post-modernism still remains a greatly prized theoretical value in schools and departments of arts in USA, far more than in France by the way. Above all, the French academic tradition in Humanities is strongly on political influence. Simply, through the translation task, we hope doing our best for accelerating the process by rendering as visible as possible – and in a well determined format- an empirical and conceptual scheme of knowledge, in order to make from it at the very least a matter of choice and a valuable option for more conventional editors.
Best,
emmanuelle
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