**Acknowledgements**

Danto's emphasis on this last point made some authors think that it was precisely the aes‐ thetic qualities that could serve to complete his definition of art. He had argued that there were two necessary conditions that every work must fulfill, but he had failed to establish suf‐ ficient conditions. Could aesthetic qualities be the answer? I personally consider that if Danto did not explain them, it was because he felt that those conditions were, to a certain extent, included in the necessary conditions. That is, the aesthetic qualities would be framed within the second condition of possibility: the embodiment. This point is important because it leads us out from the subjective aesthetic perception and forces us to take into account the concrete work, in its fullness and united to its historicity. All these do not give us a scientific and purely objective vision of what art or beauty is, but it puts the necessary counterpoint to consider that

in order to reach a unified view of reality we must go beyond subjective perception.

lematic result of the perception of beauty in the artistic field.

**5. Conclusions**

94 Perception of Beauty

Danto's theory of how we perceive art and distinguish it from ordinary objects, as well as his refusal to identify art and beauty, seems to me a perfect counterpoint to maintaining a dialogue with current neuroaesthetic theories. This dialogue can, in turn, illuminate the prob‐

After all this, it is worthwhile reviewing the main ideas and conclude this exposition. In the first section, I have developed the psychological conversion of beauty in modernity. Through Hume's philosophy, we have seen how beauty goes from being considered an attribute of real things to be a property of the intellectual faculty of taste. By means of this analysis, we have seen how beauty was considered as an objective attribute before modernity, while in modern times the weight is placed on what beauty causes in the subject. The development of the fac‐ ulty of taste can thus be seen as an anticipation of neuroaesthetic analysis. In turn, it can also be seen that neuroaesthetics begin from many hypotheses that were initiated in modernity. The psychological view continues to develop for several centuries until the emergence of neu‐ roscience. Neuroaesthetic research is enormously valuable in understanding more about how we capture something as complex as beauty. However, on more than one occasion neuroscien‐ tists draw conclusions about beauty in art that go beyond their field of study by not taking into account issues of historical or philosophical order. This is the case especially of the theses of Ramachandran that fall in several reductionisms. It can be said that his theses are reductionist because of six important reasons: (1) he argues that the fact that beautiful art exists is due to a merely evolutionist question, since it served for human survival; (2) he identifies the power to determine how beauty is perceived with knowing what beauty is; (3) he reduces beauty to what is merely"nice"or pleasurable; (4) he identifies beauty only with art, leaving out the perception of beauty in nature; (5) he reduces art and artistic practice to an issue that can be explained as psychophysiological; and (6) despite not having sufficient evidence to determine what beauty or art is, he risks to enact laws about art that claim to have universal reach.

Just as beauty is not reduced to its expression in the art world, neither must art necessarily be identified with beauty. Although the mechanisms through which we perceive beauty can be I would like to thank the researchers of the Chair of Aesthetics and Contemporary Art of the University of Navarra for their help in the preparation of this chapter, especially to Rosa Fernández Urtasun. My acknowledgment also to the Mind and Brain team of the Institute of Culture and Society of the University of Navarra, especially to Jose Ignacio Murillo, Carlos Blanco and Nathaniel Barrett, who have helped me to deepen the advances and problems posed by neuroaesthetics.
