Is there a problem of aesthetics? Aesthetics, arts and cognition

Aesthetics is today one of the issues of cognitive sciences. The good old dualisms of the aesthetic tradition reemerge forcefully in a debate opposing the conquering perspectives stemming from cognitivism and the supporters of aesthetics anxious to preserve its integrity. Such debates concentrate on the naturalisation of aesthetics. They depend mostly on the ambiguous situation already described by Dewey in his book Art as experience and the way aesthetics became a special field in philosophy as arts acquired their autonomy. This paper intends to show that if you get rid of “intrinsequalism” and all dualisms implied in it, there is not any “problem of aesthetics” — except the persistence of our misunderstandings. What matters is the part played by arts and the aesthetic experience in the whole culture, and not the magical status that we are used to ascribe to the arts. Pragmatism sides with “mother Nature” and against ontology. Its concerns go towards our vocabularies, actions, interactions and their consequences.