Matthew Rampley “A lucid historiography of the many manifestations, in art, of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Summing Up: Recommended.”—D. L. Schuld, Choice
The surge of evolutionary and neurological analyses of art and its effects raises questions of how art, culture, and the biological sciences influence one another, and what we gain in applying scientific methods to the interpretation of artwork. In this insightful book, Matthew Rampley addresses these questions by exploring key areas where Darwinism, neuroscience, and art history intersect.
Taking a scientific approach to understanding art has led to novel and provocative ideas about its origins, the basis of aesthetic experience, and the nature of research into art and the humanities. Rampley’s inquiry examines models of artistic development, the theories and development of aesthetic response, and ideas about brain processes underlying creative work. He considers the validity of the arguments put forward by advocates of evolutionary and neuroscientific analysis, as well as its value as a way of understanding art and culture. With the goal of bridging the divide between science and culture, Rampley advocates for wider recognition of the human motivations that drive inquiry of all types, and he argues that our engagement with art can never be encapsulated in a single notion of scientific knowledge.
Pdf) Evolutionary Theories And Design Practices
Engaging and compelling, The Seductions of Darwin is a rewarding look at the identity and development of art history and its complicated ties to the world of scientific thought.
“A lucid historiography of the many manifestations, in art, of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Summing Up: Recommended.”—D. L. Schuld, Choice “For decades, neuroarthistory, neuroaesthetics, and other biological approaches have been assembling a version of art’s history that is alien to the discipline of art history. Outlandish claims have been made about the significance of brain functioning to works of art, provoking defensive criticism about the pertinence of science to art history. Matthew Rampley advances and opens the discussion by taking up the same scientific criteria advocated by the writers he analyzes, including questions of evidence, hypothesis forming, and explanatory value. In that sense this book is not a polemic but an attempt to find ground for conversation. At its heart is a broad and widely informed concern with the sense of culture that art history might bring to bear in the coming decades.”—James Elkins, editor of The Stone Art Theory Institutes series “A thoughtful examination of the attempts to reduce aesthetics and art history to neurophysiology or evolutionary science. It provides a comprehensive survey and penetrating analysis of the efforts to impose biological models on the understanding of the arts that have proliferated in recent decades.”—Branko Mitrović, author of Rage and Denials: Collectivist Philosophy, Politics, and Art Historiography, 1890–1947
Matthew Rampley is Chair of Art History and Head of the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History, and Music at the University of Birmingham and the author of The Vienna School of Art History (Penn State, 2013).
Theory Definition In Science
In 1959, the novelist and chemist Charles Percy Snow delivered a now famous lecture titled “The Two Cultures.” The cultures in question were those of the scientific community and the literary intelligentsia, and Snow’s lecture analyzed the polarization of intellectual life due to the estrangement and gulf of incomprehension between the two. Indeed, he argued, more than just incomprehension, there existed mutual hostility and suspicion: “Thirty years ago the cultures had long ceased to speak to each other, but they at least managed a frozen smile across the gulf. Now the politeness has gone and they just make faces.”
Snow’s lecture remains perhaps the best-known expression of what one commentator has referred to as his “technocratic liberalism, ” an optimistic embrace of the idea of a meritocratic and technologically advanced society that he set in opposition to the “Luddite” tendencies of the artistic and literary community of the 1950s. It was the culmination of a larger debate in postwar Britain about the place of scientific inquiry, and, in the wake of the 1951 Festival of Britain, it drew on a wider process of introspection about the future of British society. Snow’s diagnosis focused on the specialization in education that occurred too early, and his consequent remedy was to broaden the educational curriculum. While he overstated the differences, his argument was to prove enormously influential, and it continues to be invoked as a point of reference in debates in this area. Indeed, the call for a dialogue between the arts and humanities and the sciences has become a recurring theme; national and international research councils and funding bodies frequently and actively encourage projects that cross the boundaries between the two.
A response to the immediate historical circumstances of postwar Britain, Snow’s lecture was also rooted in a longer debate over the relation between the social and natural sciences in Germany before the First World War. Occupying the attention of major thinkers of the time, including Max Weber, the debate concerned the status of historical and social knowledge. If empirical historical findings could not be generalized into normative statements comparable to the laws “discovered” by the natural sciences, how could the humanities defend their scholarly status? Famously, Weber’s response to this question was to assert the distinctiveness of inquiry in the humanities. They did not need to mimic the natural sciences in order to attain legitimacy. “There is no absolutely objective scientific analysis of culture, ” he argued, for it consists of the “empirical science of concrete reality” and its aim is the “understanding of the characteristic uniqueness of the reality in which we move.” This purported difference was summarized by Weber’s contemporary, the philosopher Wilhelm Windelband, as the distinction between the “nomothetic” concerns of the natural sciences and “idiographic” approach of the humanities.
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Both thinkers acknowledged that this difference was not absolute. Windelband noted that “one and the same object can be the subject of nomothetic as well as ideographic inquiry.” A language might be studied in terms of its grammatical, morphological, and syntactical structures and rules, but at the same time, “each language is a unique, temporary phenomenon in the life of human speech.” Likewise, Max Weber highlighted the use of the “ideal type” as a heuristic procedure in sociology. The ideal type, a “synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena . . . arranged . . . into a unified analytical construct, ” serves as the basis for the identification of historical and social patterns against which individual cases can be contrasted. Despite such concessions, both men sought to mark out the distinctiveness and legitimacy of a domain of inquiry the objects of which could not be defined in terms of conformity to “objective” lawlike behavior. Linked to this, too, was the claim that the natural sciences are concerned with the objective, third-person explanation of observed phenomena, in contrast to the central role of understanding in the humanities, where actions and events are seen as the product of human agency and subjective intentions.
Knowledge of the details of the dispute among German scholars of the early twentieth century is now of limited resonance except to specialists, but it laid down the outlines of a debate that has continued to the present. Definitions of science still revolve around notions of the role of “covering laws, ” as the philosopher Carl Hempel termed them. To quote Hempel, “Scientific explanations, predictions, and post-dictions all have the same logical character: they show that the fact under consideration can be inferred from certain other facts by means of specified general laws.” It is often assumed, Hempel suggested, that the historical and natural sciences are distinguished on this very point, that the former deal with singularities that cannot be accommodated within a framework of generalized rules.
Hempel formulated this distinction in terms of the opposition between the nomological and the idiographic. Rather than thereby dismiss history as lacking the objectivity of the natural sciences, Hempel tried to argue that it, too, operates in a similar manner. “Historical explanation, too, aims at showing that the event in question was not ‘a matter of chance’ but was to be expected in view of certain antecedent or simultaneous conditions. The expectation referred to is not prophecy or divination, but rational scientific anticipation which rests on the assumption of general laws.” Hempel’s formulation now belongs to the history of the philosophy of science, but the basic framework was taken up by scholars in the humanities.
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Michael Baxandall, for example, used it in his analysis of art-historical interpretation. Recognizing that historians employ “soft” generalizations, Baxandall emphasized that art history is nevertheless a primarily idiographic enterprise. This is not only because “our interest as historians or critics is . . . towards locating and understanding the peculiarities of particulars, ” but also, he argued, because of the distinct focus of art historians. Historians study actions and events that may or may not be subsumable under covering laws, but art historians are concerned with artworks as the deposits of those actions. The historian may be concerned with works of art and other historical artifacts, but “his attention and explanatory duty are
Both thinkers acknowledged that this difference was not absolute. Windelband noted that “one and the same object can be the subject of nomothetic as well as ideographic inquiry.” A language might be studied in terms of its grammatical, morphological, and syntactical structures and rules, but at the same time, “each language is a unique, temporary phenomenon in the life of human speech.” Likewise, Max Weber highlighted the use of the “ideal type” as a heuristic procedure in sociology. The ideal type, a “synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena . . . arranged . . . into a unified analytical construct, ” serves as the basis for the identification of historical and social patterns against which individual cases can be contrasted. Despite such concessions, both men sought to mark out the distinctiveness and legitimacy of a domain of inquiry the objects of which could not be defined in terms of conformity to “objective” lawlike behavior. Linked to this, too, was the claim that the natural sciences are concerned with the objective, third-person explanation of observed phenomena, in contrast to the central role of understanding in the humanities, where actions and events are seen as the product of human agency and subjective intentions.
Knowledge of the details of the dispute among German scholars of the early twentieth century is now of limited resonance except to specialists, but it laid down the outlines of a debate that has continued to the present. Definitions of science still revolve around notions of the role of “covering laws, ” as the philosopher Carl Hempel termed them. To quote Hempel, “Scientific explanations, predictions, and post-dictions all have the same logical character: they show that the fact under consideration can be inferred from certain other facts by means of specified general laws.” It is often assumed, Hempel suggested, that the historical and natural sciences are distinguished on this very point, that the former deal with singularities that cannot be accommodated within a framework of generalized rules.
Hempel formulated this distinction in terms of the opposition between the nomological and the idiographic. Rather than thereby dismiss history as lacking the objectivity of the natural sciences, Hempel tried to argue that it, too, operates in a similar manner. “Historical explanation, too, aims at showing that the event in question was not ‘a matter of chance’ but was to be expected in view of certain antecedent or simultaneous conditions. The expectation referred to is not prophecy or divination, but rational scientific anticipation which rests on the assumption of general laws.” Hempel’s formulation now belongs to the history of the philosophy of science, but the basic framework was taken up by scholars in the humanities.
What Is Natural Selection?
Michael Baxandall, for example, used it in his analysis of art-historical interpretation. Recognizing that historians employ “soft” generalizations, Baxandall emphasized that art history is nevertheless a primarily idiographic enterprise. This is not only because “our interest as historians or critics is . . . towards locating and understanding the peculiarities of particulars, ” but also, he argued, because of the distinct focus of art historians. Historians study actions and events that may or may not be subsumable under covering laws, but art historians are concerned with artworks as the deposits of those actions. The historian may be concerned with works of art and other historical artifacts, but “his attention and explanatory duty are
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