Aesthetics After Darwin, Dewey, and Dissanayake: a Reassessment

Where did art originate (evolutionarily) and why? Can we even define art? Is there a common denominator that characterizes all the arts? What is “aesthetic experience”? The present paper sets out to relaunch these and similar questions by integrating original perspectives and hypotheses from disciplines as different as philosophical aesthetics, evolutionary biology, human ethology, anthropology, cognitive science and developmental psychology. In particular, the paper examines the interdisciplinary ideas and hypotheses of the evolution of the arts developed by American evolutionary scholar Ellen Dissanayake over more than forty years of her intellectual career. Dissanayake’s hypotheses, along with her self-education as an interdisciplinary scholar and her unconventional academic career, are described in the paper and her ideas are reassessed in light of some recent research developments in evolutionary biology and cognitive sciences, with special attention to the ecological (and therefore habitual) nature of the human aesthetic attitude