**2. The psychological conversion of the perception of beauty in modernity**

Aesthetic reflection, the question of beauty, art and its connection with knowledge, has been present since antiquity. This is shown in the thought and the influence by authors such as Plato or Aristotle. However, we must be cautious when attempting to bring to current discus‐ sions the concerns about beauty as found in *Dialogues* or the Aristotelian description of art as techné, since the problems of present‐day aesthetics have started in the Modern Age, since aesthetics became a discipline of its own.

The philosophers of antiquity considered that beauty was a property of the real objects, not only of the artistic ones, and therefore could be known in an objective way. The medieval phi‐ losophers continued to consider that the perception of beauty was objective and, in addition, human beings could discover the creator of such beauty through the contemplation of natural beauty. But all these conceptions changed completely in the modern era.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, aesthetics did not escape the influence of the ratio‐ nalist scheme of Wolff and Leibniz and focused on the need to establish a science of perfect sensory knowledge. This is the context in which we find Baumgarten, the initiator of this study as a science. In his work *Aesthetica* (1750/1758), he gave the name of aesthetics to the philo‐ sophical science that studies beauty and art. Baumgarten conceives aesthetics as the"science of sensible knowledge"[1]. That is to say, it is based on the gnoseological criterion of the per‐ fection in the specific realm of sensibility. But since he considers this capacity to be inferior to the rational, he also believes it has an inferior gnoseological value. Therefore, Baumgarten collects various aesthetic approaches and systematizes sensitive knowledge. With this, he led modern aesthetics to the terrain of subjectivation through the path of empiricism.

Empiricism is the fundamental trend in British philosophy since the influence of John Locke. Empiricism is characterized, among other things, as the rejection of the existence of innate ideas and the assertion that all our knowledge necessarily arises from sensible experience, that is, it has its origin in the senses. Within empiricist aesthetics, we find several figures, among which the most prominent is Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. This author considers that the human being possesses a moral and aesthetic nature that has its organ in feeling. Both the emphasis on empiricism and moral sentimentality will greatly influence Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, especially in the investigation and development of aesthetic"taste."

David Hume (1711–1776) was the empiricist philosopher who would have the greatest impact on the psychologization of beauty. There are several principles that stand out in his empiricist philosophy. In the first place, he affirms that all our ideas come from sensible impressions. In the second place, he makes a critique of the idea of cause that has greatly influenced contem‐ porary theories of science. For Hume, the causal relation means that one phenomenon follows another but not that one is the cause of the other: the only thing we can affirm is that it has always happened this way. On the other hand, he makes a very strong criticism of inductive reasoning. He considers that induction is never complete and thus the foundations of univer‐ sal laws must be established on a principle other than induction.

In this sense, I wish to begin by setting forth some historical issues related to the concept of beauty. In the first place, it should be noted that the perception of beauty underwent a psychological conversion in modernity, especially with the empiricist aesthetics of David Hume. This change resulted in a relativization of the concept of beauty, which neuroaesthet‐ ics is still trying to address at present. Thus, secondly, and for this reason, I will analyze the main contributions of neuroaesthetics and its defense of objectivity, especially developed by V.S. Ramachandran. Finally, I will confront Ramachandran's position on artistic beauty with that of the philosopher Arthur Danto in order to problematize the question about whether

**2. The psychological conversion of the perception of beauty in modernity**

Aesthetic reflection, the question of beauty, art and its connection with knowledge, has been present since antiquity. This is shown in the thought and the influence by authors such as Plato or Aristotle. However, we must be cautious when attempting to bring to current discus‐ sions the concerns about beauty as found in *Dialogues* or the Aristotelian description of art as techné, since the problems of present‐day aesthetics have started in the Modern Age, since

The philosophers of antiquity considered that beauty was a property of the real objects, not only of the artistic ones, and therefore could be known in an objective way. The medieval phi‐ losophers continued to consider that the perception of beauty was objective and, in addition, human beings could discover the creator of such beauty through the contemplation of natural

In the first half of the eighteenth century, aesthetics did not escape the influence of the ratio‐ nalist scheme of Wolff and Leibniz and focused on the need to establish a science of perfect sensory knowledge. This is the context in which we find Baumgarten, the initiator of this study as a science. In his work *Aesthetica* (1750/1758), he gave the name of aesthetics to the philo‐ sophical science that studies beauty and art. Baumgarten conceives aesthetics as the"science of sensible knowledge"[1]. That is to say, it is based on the gnoseological criterion of the per‐ fection in the specific realm of sensibility. But since he considers this capacity to be inferior to the rational, he also believes it has an inferior gnoseological value. Therefore, Baumgarten collects various aesthetic approaches and systematizes sensitive knowledge. With this, he led

Empiricism is the fundamental trend in British philosophy since the influence of John Locke. Empiricism is characterized, among other things, as the rejection of the existence of innate ideas and the assertion that all our knowledge necessarily arises from sensible experience, that is, it has its origin in the senses. Within empiricist aesthetics, we find several figures, among which the most prominent is Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. This author considers that the human being possesses a moral and aesthetic nature that has its organ in feeling. Both the emphasis on empiricism and moral sentimentality will greatly influence Francis Hutcheson

beauty. But all these conceptions changed completely in the modern era.

modern aesthetics to the terrain of subjectivation through the path of empiricism.

and David Hume, especially in the investigation and development of aesthetic"taste."

beauty and art can be identified completely.

84 Perception of Beauty

aesthetics became a discipline of its own.

Hence, one of the essential theories of Hume's philosophy is that our ideas are associated according to principles, which in turn establish links between them. Ideas are naturally con‐ nected according to three laws: resemblance, contiguity and cause‐effect relationship [2]. These three laws of association will have a decisive influence on the psychologization of per‐ ception. Many of the approaches of the later English psychologists will depart from these premises.

Before proceeding, it is worth making a pause to check the impact of this understanding of perception on the concept of beauty. To do this, we must turn to the fourth of Hume's *Four Dissertations*, published in 1757. In"Of the Standard of Taste" [3], the English philosopher sets forth his consideration of how beauty is perceived. He affirms that beauty is not a quality of the things themselves but only exists in the mind that contemplates them. Beauty is neither a transcendental or innate idea nor a sensory impression that seems to correspond with it. From this point of view, it seems that we can only identify a pleasant feeling, which we can assume that is caused by something beautiful but not that we have known something beauti‐ ful as such.

Beauty, then, is defined in relation to the subject since it is a property that lies in the beholder. That is to say, the feeling of pleasure provoked by beauty in the subject is the only thing that justifies our speaking of it. Taste takes place in the conformity between the object and the faculties of the mind. Research on how the feeling of pleasure is produced in the subject leads one to consider that there must be an organ capable of perceiving beauty. Both the organ and its aesthetic sense were called"taste." The experiences of taste would be immediate and spontaneous and would not be directly related to reason but rather to the realm of sensibil‐ ity. From this point of view, an object is said to be beautiful because certain properties of the object stimulate our sensibility and make us feel its beauty.

In this sense, Hume discards the metaphysics of the beautiful but does not invalidate an empirical science of the aesthetic phenomenon. In fact, he believes that there must be rules in the arts that allow us to judge them. These rules cannot be established a priori but can only be established empirically. Thus, Hume states five conditions that are required to be able to make an aesthetic judgment adequately: (1) delicacy of taste; (2) practice of judg‐ ing; (3) assiduous comparison of works; (4) being free of prejudices; and (5) good sense that avoids the influence of prejudices [3]. However, despite all his attempts, Hume fails to establish universality for aesthetic taste using the principles of his philosophy and the rules just mentioned.

In summary, we can say that the empiricist approach led to the consideration that beauty could only be perceived by the senses, thus reducing it to a matter of mere intellectual plea‐ sure, which in turn provoked a relativistic consideration of beauty. This analysis had a great impact, first of all, among philosophers who reflected on beauty, especially Immanuel Kant. Later, both the enlightened and the romantic spirits, with their interest in the historical, progressively moved the reflection on beauty from a universal concept to concrete artistic work. However, while the post‐Hegelian line focuses on studies on the history of art, the Anglo‐Saxon world continues the research on the possibilities of perception and knowl‐ edge. At this point, it is important to mention the work of the art historian Ernst Gombrich, who investigated much about the laws of perception to develop his artistic theories, as can be seen in studies such as *The Image of the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation* [4].

In particular, it can be said that the legacy of Hume influenced English empiricist writers who were nourishing the associationist psychology, especially [5]. The Humean stance on how ideas combine in our minds influenced them decisively. Associationism will be taken up in particular by James Mill and John Stuart Mill, who laid the foundations of empirical and experimental psychology. The psychic processes, according to these authors, come one after the other, following certain laws of connection. Such laws could be quantified and described, which is why they consider that mental states can be measured to some extent. On one hand, these theories will influence the psychology of the Gestalt, centered on the laws of association and, on the other, they will influence neuroscience. Therefore, it is not surprising that when the techniques of brain and neurological analysis have been developed, the question of beauty has been formulated again.
