Art and Embodied Aesthetic Emotions
May 30, 2026 Joerg Fingerhut, Corinna Kühnapfel preprint
Aesthetic emotions such as being moved, interest, and wonder play a central role in how people engage with artworks. Within the embodied-enactive framework of the mind, these emotions structure the exploratory activities that artworks afford through their distinctive embodied cognitive styles. They also contribute critically to evaluating artworks as artworks. Exploration and evaluation are closely intertwined in aesthetic engagement. By bringing empirical work on embodiment in aesthetics into dialogue with enactive theories of art, the chapter advances a critical neuro-aesthetics and a better understanding of aesthetic emotions as an under-explored class of mental processes within philosophy of mind and 4E cognition.