Expressive Experience. An Inquiry Concerning The Expressiveness of Objects

How is it possible that we hear music or see paintings as expressive of affective states? How is it that this bizarre phenomenon extends to natural landscapes, atmospheres, and also to simple colours, sounds, shapes? This research aims at inquiring the phenomenon of expressiveness. In particular, it focuses on the expressiveness of inanimate objects. What is especially intriguing about expressiveness is that it mobilizes a number of issues concerning the nature of perception and that of affective experiences. Questions about the possibility that affective states such as anxiety, melancholy, sadness, solemnity, liveliness are ascribed to non-sentient beings such as artworks, represent a challenge for theories of perception on the one hand, and for theories of emotions on the other hand. Moreover, most of these questions lay at the crossroads of aesthetics and the philosophy of mind, licking the domains of developmental psychology and cognitive sciences more generally. Main players are analytic philosophers of music and aesthetics that have been dealing with this problem in recent years. Yet, also accounts elaborated within different traditions – like phenomenology and Gestalt psychology – and tracing back in time are analysed.