Science and the Numinosity of Beauty: Beyond Culture and Religion

Ellen Philpott-Teo

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Chapter 13 Science and the Numinosity of Beauty: Beyond Culture and Religion

In: Numinous Fields: Perceiving the Sacred in Nature, Landscape, and Art

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Ellen Philpott-Teo

Ellen Philpott-Teo
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 351–379

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004687387_015

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Abstract

Over the past few decades, there has been a shift from a concept of the “mind” as the basis for everything we do, to a recognition that the brain is the basis for human experience, thought, emotion, creativity, and perception. Aesthetics and the perception of beauty have become a subject matter for neuroscience and instigated the new field of neuroaesthetics. Neuroaesthetics uses the tools of contemporary neuroscience to uncover the neural bases of aesthetic experience. This neural-biological approach to aesthetics raises questions about long-held culturally differentiated conceptualisations of aesthetics, and the universality or neutrality of contemporary scientific ways of thinking about aesthetics. This paper examines how pre-modern science dealt with aesthetic experience and concepts of the mind and brain. It focuses on the Kitāb al-manāẓir (Book of Optics) written by the 11th-century Muslim natural scientist Ibn al-Haytham, arguing that while most medieval Islamic writers connected the perception and experience of beauty with the divine, Ibn al-Haytham was the exception. While Ibn al-Haytham uses the word soul, his concept of the soul operated in a manner closer to that of the brain than to a spiritual apparatus which connected with the divine. Assigning Islamic aesthetics to a position of cultural relativism limits the potential impact of lessons which may be drawn from Islamic aesthetics for contemporary aesthetics. Understanding this alternate scientific strand of medieval Islamic aesthetics and how the soul, perception, beauty, and science were considered within aesthetic discourse, gives insight for our present challenges into the way science explains the inexplainable and neuroscience explains aesthetics.

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Numinous Fields: Perceiving the Sacred in Nature, Landscape, and Art

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004687387

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 06 Mar 2024

Subjects

Front Matter

Part 1 Understanding: Universal Presence

Part 2 Blessing: Devotional Practices

Part 3 Belief: Sacred Manifestations

Part 4 Retrospection: The Mind and the Heart

Part 5 Rediscovery: Modern Reflections

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African Studies	Education	Media Studies
American Studies	History	Middle East and Islamic Studies
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Asian Studies	International Relations	Religious Studies
Biblical Studies	Jewish Studies	Slavic and Eurasian Studies
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Chapter 13 Science and the Numinosity of Beauty: Beyond Culture and Religion

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Numinous Fields: Perceiving the Sacred in Nature, Landscape, and Art

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