Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film
Published with Oxford University Press, 2017
Abstract
In the mid-1950s C.P. Snow began his campaign against the 'two cultures' - the debilitating divide, as he saw it, between traditional 'literary intellectual' culture, and the culture of the sciences, urging in its place a 'third culture' which would draw upon and integrate the resources of disciplines spanning the natural and social sciences, the arts and the humanities. Murray Smith argues that, with the ever-increasing influence of evolutionary theory and neuroscience, and the pervasive presence of digital technologies, Snow's challenge is more relevant than ever.
Working out how the 'scientific' and everyday images of the world 'hang' together is no simple matter. In Film, Art, and the Third Culture, Smith explores this question in relation to the art, technology, and science of film in particular, and to the world of the arts and aesthetic activity more generally. In the first part of his book, Smith explores the general strategies and principles necessary to build a 'third cultural' or naturalized approach to film and art - one that roots itself in an appreciation of scientific knowledge and method. Smith then goes on to focus on the role of emotion in film and the other arts, as an extended experiment in the 'third cultural' integration of ideas on emotion spanning the arts, humanities and sciences. While acknowledging that not all of the questions we ask are scientific in nature, Smith contends that we cannot disregard the insights wrought by taking a naturalized approach to the aesthetics of film and the other arts.
Published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 76, Issue 3.
"Murray Smith's new book offers an elaboration and defense of scientifically informed theorizing about the arts and in particular film. Interestingly, this is also a defense of philosophical naturalism applied to humanistic film theory. Smith is ideally placed to provide such a defense, since he has an insider's knowledge and understanding of both the world of film theory and the world of philosophy. Any review of Smith's book is likely to be written by someone less ideally placed, a citizen in only one of these worlds and a mere tourist in the other. That this particular review is written by a philosopher is important to note. As a philosopher, and specifically as a philosophical aesthetician, I propose that Smith's book has to convince me of far less than if I were, say, a psychoanalytic film theorist. As Smith points out at the beginning of the book, naturalism is the long‐dominant methodology in philosophy in general, although he also claims naturalism has only recently risen to prominence in philosophical aesthetics. By contrast, naturalism is “virtually unknown in art and film theory” (p. 21). This raises an intriguing question about the intended audience for the book. If you ask the author (as I have done), he will insist that he wrote Film, Art, and the Third Culture for aestheticians. But there is fairly strong evidence in the book to suggest that the target audience is the film theorist and not the philosopher. On the one hand, the diverse methods of film theory are not described and analyzed in the book, only some of the basic assumptions underlying those methods. Smith cannot assume that philosophers know what film theorists do, but he can assume film theorists’ familiarity with their own practices, such that he does not need to point out to the film‐theory audience that their existing practices diverge from those of naturalism. On the other hand, Smith provides exegesis of philosophical problems and views and is careful to link his ideas with key figures in the history of philosophy or within contemporary debates. This feels like important contextualizing work for readers outside philosophy."
Cinematic Romanticism: Sketching The Ethical, Cognitive And Aesthetic Value Of Art
Appeared on fourbythreemagazine
"Murray Smith’s Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film is a powerful intellectual force whose impact will be difficult to reckon due to the depth of its analysis and breadth of its scope. At the basic sub-disciplinary level Smith’s theory is, as the subtitle implies, a sophisticated theory of cinema, a study of the art form of film from the perspective of philosophical aesthetics. As such, the monograph has the potential to change the way in which aesthetics is researched and written and is, along with Bence Nanay’s Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception, the most influential publication of the new century so far. At the disciplinary level, Film, Art, and the Third Culture provides philosophers with a new methodology that takes phenomenology, psychology, and neuropsychology as complementary rather than competing modes of explanation. Finally, at the cultural level, Smith provides a model for a genuine third way between art and science as two different – and often opposed – means of revealing reality, setting out a blueprint for a Third Culture that maps the relations between the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. What is particularly impressive about a work of such ambition is that film, as an artistic medium with a firm basis in modern technology, unites all three levels in a coherent whole. As Smith demonstrates, a full appreciation of cinema requires a combination of knowledge of both artistic and scientific method, of the aesthetics of painting, poetry, theatre, and music and of the disciplines of phenomenology, psychology, and neuropsychology."
Published in Screen (Volume 58, Issue 4, Winter 2017, Pages 508–511)
"In recent decades, the overlapping disciplines of evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have provided insights, tools and methods to researchers and scholars in the arts and humanities. Evolutionary psychology argues, with the support of a wealth of anthropological, experimental and statistical research, that there is such a thing as human nature, bequeathed to our species by its particular quest for reproduction and survival. Two of the main preoccupations of ‘literary Darwinism’ to date have been to debate whether art and fiction are ‘adaptations’ – that is, whether they confer a direct and immediate edge to us in reproduction and survival – or are instead secondary by-products of human evolution;1 and to map evolutionary psychology’s explanations of human behaviour onto literary works, in order to explain the recurrence, persistence, credibility and compellingness of many key tropes of narrative fiction. If the key metaphor of evolutionary psychology is mind-as-survive-and-reproduce-machine, that of cognitive psychology is mind-as-information-processor, and research in the arts and humanities has used this paradigm to open up and refine our understanding of several aspects of our engagement with artworks. One of the best and most prolific cognitivists in any arts discipline is film studies’ David Bordwell, who has, with exemplary rigour and clarity, used cognitivism to shine a light on topics ranging from narration, to visual style, to the act of film interpretation.2 Neuroaesthetics, it is fair to say, remains more of a niche field, possibly due to the expense of its procedures and its unavoidably dense and technical vocabulary. Currently it probably circulates most widely as a method that can offer evidence to substantiate theories formulated in its more well-established evolutionary and cognitive neighbours."
Published in The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 58, Issue 3, July 2018, Pages 336–34.
"I am full of admiration for Murray Smith’s Film, Art, and the Third Culture. For one, it is among the most enjoyable reads I have ever had from a book in aesthetics. For another, it manifests more breadth of mind and a wider philosophical scope than most books in aesthetics, including my own, which usually confine themselves to narrower debates internal to that academic domain. And for a third, it contains a host of analyses of individual cinematic works of art in illustration and support of the book’s main thesis, that a naturalistic, scientifically aware approach to artworks and aesthetic experience is not only compatible with a critical, humanistic approach to them, but can fruitfully complement and amplify such an approach, and that artworks and aesthetic experience, richly described and interpreted, may in turn serve to confirm, challenge, enrich, or fine tune scientific theories and tools brought to bear on their elucidation. The lessons of this book are ones that I earnestly hope will be taken to heart.
But I will now, in this review, express some reservations on a few of the aspects of the programme that Smith sets out to make aesthetic theory safe for naturalizing, and then offer some cinematic examples not discussed by Smith that I believe illustrate nicely certain specific theses advanced by him concerning the special capacities of film. My focus in this discussion will be selective, restricted largely to Chapter 2 (‘Triangulating Aesthetic Experience’), Chapter 4 (‘Papaya, Pomegranates, and Green Tea’) and Chapter 8 (‘Feeling Prufish’) of Smith’s engaging book."
Published in Philosophy in Review, XXXVIII (August 2018), no. 3.
"Antagonism between scientific and humanistic approaches to truth and knowledge has been with usat least since Plato famously hinted at the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry. In more recent times, this antagonism is often framed in terms of the ‘two cultures,’ with scholars from both camps praising and criticizing their opponents’ approach. However, after years of sharp divisions, optimists on both sides are now claiming that the long anticipated ‘third culture’ is on the horizon. Murray Smith’s latest book just might be the shiniest example of what C.P. Snow hoped for when he first urged scientists and humanists to work together. Taking inspiration from Snow himself, Smith not only testifies to the advantages that such cooperation might bring, but provides pointers on how to build it."
Volume 12 (2018): Issue 2 (Dec 2018): Symposium on Murray Smith’s Film, Art, and the Third Culture
- Pages 1–8: Film, Art, and the Third Culture, A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film—Précis, Murray Smith
- Pages 9–18: A Moderately Pessimistic Perspective on “Cooperative Naturalism”, David Davies
- Pages 19–27: Naturalized Aesthetics and Criticism, On Value Judgments, Laura T. Di Summa-Knoop
- Pages 28–38: Embodied Seeing-In, Empathy, and Expansionism, Joerg Fingerhut
- Pages 39–4: Collaboration in the Third Culture, Stacie Friend
- Pages 50–59: Naturalizing Aesthetic Experience, The Role of (Liberated) Embodied Simulation, Vittorio Gallese
- Pages 60–70: FACT Is a Fact of Both Life and Art, Jerrold Levinson
- Pages 71–75: Questions about Aesthetic Experience, Paisley Livingston
- Pages 76–85: Naturalized Aesthetics and Emotion Theory, Rainer Reisenzein
- Pages 86–94: “Mind the Gap”, Between Movies and Mind, Affective Neuroscience, and the Philosophy of Film, Jane Stadler
- Pages 95–100: The Role of Scientific Research in Film Theory, Katherine Thomson-Jones
- Pages 101–110: Putting the Culture into Bioculturalism, A Naturalized Aesthetics and the Challenge of Modernism, Dominic Topp
- Pages 111–136: Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Response, Murray Smith
From the editor, Ted Nannicelli: "[...] The bulk of the issue consists of a symposium dedicated to Murray Smith’s new book, Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film. One of the features of Smith’s book that makes it of particular interest to our readership is its abiding commitment to interdisciplinarity. More specifically, Smith proposes that the study of our aesthetic experience of cinema ought to be approached through a process of “triangulation.” On Smith’s view, triangulation involves (roughly speaking) a process of theory-building that considers and weighs the evidence of three distinct levels of experience—the phenomenological, the psychological, and the neurophysiological. Given this particular emphasis on interdisciplinarity in Smith’s book, not to mention its scope and ambition, we’ve recruited a large group of leading and emerging scholars across a number of disciplines—film studies, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience. What emerges is a lively and stimulating debate about a book that offers not only an account of our aesthetic experience of film, but which sensitively explores some of the most important and difficult questions we face about the relationship between the humanities, the sciences, art, and aesthetics."
Is Psychology Relevant to Aesthetics? A Symposium with Elisabeth Schellekens, Bence Nanay, Murray Smith, and Sherri Irvin
Published in Estetika, 56 (2019): 87–138. (open access)
"The symposium published here began life as a somewhat unusual ‘author meets critics’ session at the British Society of Aesthetics annual conference, at St Anne’s College, Oxford, on 16 September 2016 – unusual inasmuch as the focus was not on a single book, but on two books (Bence Nanay’s Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception and Murray Smith’s Film, Art, and the Third Culture) exploring different but related themes. In addition, rather than encompassing all the issues these two books address, the session focused on one general question that both books explore in some depth: is psychology relevant to aesthetics?"
A one-day symposium at the University of Kent with Catharine Abell (Manchester), Jerrold Levinson (Maryland), Murray Smith (Kent), and Dominic Topp (Kent).
Introduction
Part I - Building the Third Culture
1: Aesthetics Naturalized
2: Triangulating Aesthetic Experience
3: The Engine of Reason and the Pit of Naturalism
4: Papaya, Pomegranates, and Green Tea
Part II - Science and Sentiment
5: Who's Afraid of Charles Darwin?
6: What Difference Does it Make?
7: Empathy, Expansionism, and the Extended Mind
8: Feeling Prufish
Conclusion: The Art and Science of Emotion
Some sample sequence analyses from the monograph.
