What have the Arts and Humanities ever done for us? Disruptive Contributions and a 4E Cognitive Arts and Humanities

Citation

Wheeler M (2023) What have the Arts and Humanities ever done for us? Disruptive Contributions and a 4E Cognitive Arts and Humanities. In: Besser S & Lysen F (eds.) Worlding the Brain: Neurocentrism, Cognition and the Challenge of the Arts and Humanities. Experimental Pratices, Volume 3. Leiden and Boston: Brill, pp. 258-273. https://brill.com/display/title/64719?language=en

Abstract
First paragraph: The term ‘cognitive arts and humanities’ refers to an active field of interdisciplinary research that brings the cognitive sciences and the arts and humanities into a mutually productive relationship. Having written this opening sentence, I have to confess that it suffers from two shortcomings. The first is that there isn’t really a recognized field of scholarship that is widely referred to in academic circles specifically as ‘the cognitive arts and humanities’. So much is true. The term doesn’t currently return many complete matches from a Google search, for example, although the term ‘cognitive humanities’ (without the explicit extension to art)does better. However, the failure here is innocuous. ‘The cognitive arts and humanities’ is (in my humble opinion) a perfectly appropriate moniker for a rich, vibrant and growing body of interdisciplinary research that unquestionably does exist, the unifying aim of which is precisely to bring the cognitive sciences and the arts and humanities into a mutually productive relationship. There is no space here for any sort of conceptual or historical introduction to this body of work.1 Arguably, it all began with pioneering work by thinkers such as Spolsky (1993)and Turner (1991),among many others, has its strongest roots in the area known as cognitive literary studies (where the relevant links are specifically between cognitive science and literary interpretation –see e.g. Zunshine 2015), and is admirably represented by the ongoing series of international conferences that goes under the name of ‘Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities’.2 If, for whatever reason, you want to call the domain in question something other than ‘the cognitive arts and humanities’, that’s fine with me, although you’ll have to put up with my favoured terminology for the rest of this chapter.