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Abstract
In this article, I reply to the eleven commentaries on Film, Art, and the Third Culture gathered here, organizing my responses thematically and seeking to find points of similarity and difference among the commentators as well as with my own perspective. I address arguments on embodied simulation; the analogy between films and dreams; aesthetic experience and the “expansion” of ordinary experience; the relationships between culture and cognition and between fiction and emotion; theories of the extended mind and of niche construction; the place of neuroscience in aesthetics; and the relationship between naturalism and normativity. I conclude with some reflections on naturalistic methodology.
Contributor Notes
Murray Smith is Professor of Film at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, where he has taught since 1992. He is a founding member of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, and served as president from 2014 to 2017. For 2017–2018, he was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values. He has published a number of books and essays, but these days he mostly fills out forms on behalf of the bureaucracies of various British institutions, including the University of Kent, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and HM Revenue and Customs. Email: m.s.smith@kent.ac.uk