Dancing Around the Issues: Prospects for an Empirically Grounded Philosophy of Dance

Abstract

To what extent can knowledge of empirical and theoretical progress in science further the attempts of philosophers of art to refine aesthetic theory and answer particular philosophical questions concerning the arts? To what extent should philosophers of art keep abreast and take account of developments in relevant branches of empirical science? These are different but related questions. One might extol the virtues of empirically informed work in the philosophy of art, for example, while maintaining that few philosophical questions about art can be settled by appeal to empirical results. One might think this is a minimally pessimistic position—who, after all, would want to defend empirically uninformed philosophical deliberation about the arts? But even such extreme pessimism has its champions. For example, Graham McFee maintains that contemporary neuroscience is irrelevant to our philosophical reflections upon an art form like dance.1 My aim in this article is to defend a moderate pessimism with respect to what philosophers of art can reasonably hope to gain from engaging in empirical inquiry or availing themselves of the fruits of others’ inquiries.2 In arguing for this view, I first examine a representative argument for what I term “moderate optimism” about empirically grounded work in the philosophy of art.3 After presenting some challenges to moderate optimism so construed, I assess how much pessimism these challenges warrant. My target here is the extreme pessimism defended by McFee. Focusing on particular empirical studies cited favorably by moderate optimists but dismissed by McFee as having no bearing on philosophical questions about dance, I defend a more sympathetic reading of the philosophical interest of these studies while remaining unmoved by some of the claims made for such work by moderate optimists. We should be moderate pessimists, I argue, because we thereby give the cognitive sciences their due while also rightly insisting on a significant degree of methodological autonomy for the philosophy of art.

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