Situating the Aesthetic Mind

This volume investigates how human and artificial agents jointly shape aesthetic experience in an era of rapidly advancing creative artificial intelligence. Bringing together leading scholars working within the 4Es framework of mind and cognition, the volume explores how embodied, embedded, enactive and extended approaches can illuminate the relational nature of artmaking and art appreciation. The chapters examine the role of emotions—human and artificial—as the relational mechanism of affective coordination, the role of mind-wandering and the role of the artificial artist with its unexpected arrangement of pre-programmed elements as a scaffold for the human artist. Moving beyond dualistic accounts of mind and creativity, the collection offers an original perspective on the co-constitution of experience in interactions with artworks, environments, and artificial agents. It provides a timely contribution to contemporary debates on AI-generated art, aesthetic authorship, and the embodied mind for scholars in philosophy, phenomenology, and cognitive science.