Poetic language differs from everyday communication because it often brings words together in unexpected or even contradictory ways. This talk draws on the aberrant salience account of creativity, which suggests that creative thinking involves noticing and connecting things that might seem unrelated. Poets use different kinds of connections between words—through sound (as in rhyme), meaning, and metaphor. I will explore how these connections shape the way we pay attention and create meaning when reading poetry, showing how poetry reveals the mind’s ability to find coherence in inconsistency.

TBD

This presentation examines how psychological and neuroscientific research connects epistemic emotions—such as curiosity, wonder, and surprise—to exploratory behaviour in the arts and aesthetic experience. It highlights how artistic engagement stimulates the human drive for knowledge, linking aesthetic experience to broader processes of understanding and meaning-making.

This presentation explores the concept of the epistemic arc as a framework for understanding how art—and increasingly, new media—engages our drive for knowledge and meaning. It contrasts the horizon-expanding dynamics of artistic experience with the often narrowing epistemic patterns found in contemporary media environments such as AI, memes, and social media. By examining how epistemic, aesthetic, and ethical values can be integrated into the architecture of emerging technologies, it highlights pathways toward fostering more open, curiosity-driven forms of knowledge in the age of intelligent media.

TBD

In this talk, I'll aim to i) discuss the relevance of 'reflective equilibrium' (as developed by Nelson Goodman, John Rawls, and Catherine Elgin) to our appreciation of films (and art) in general, and then ii) drill down into the application of that idea to our engagement with characters, and the moral dimension thereof. This discussion will serve to set up some reflections on interdisciplinary enquiry, focussing on how the argument on reflective equilibrium, character, and moral understanding as it stands might be enriched and advanced by drawing on empirical and experimental methods. 

TBC

Many people think that art delivers us philosophical insights. In this presentation, I will advance a novel way to articulate this idea. I propose that artists and audiences often seem to be interested in coming to better understand broad topics and subject matters. This requires them to see the connections between their commitments and to wield them to improve their epistemic standing. Philosophers call this holistic, active kind of epistemic achievement ‘objectual understanding.’ However, I argue that audiences can’t just acquire understanding from art; rather, art encourages them to understand the world for themselves. I argue that this gives us a new way to see how art can be philosophical. I claim that the epistemic goal of philosophy is not just to learn other people’s theories, but to get others to engage in the activity of reasoning for themselves to improve their objectual understanding of philosophical topics. Given art’s capacity to encourage active inquiry, we should assess its philosophical value not by its ability to convey theories to us, but rather its ability to get us to engage in the activity of philosophising.