Satellite Workshop
This year, the conference will be preceded by a one-day satellite workshop on “The Repeated Experience of Beauty”. The workshop aims to explore the phenomenon of repeated aesthetic experiences, focusing on the paradoxical interplay between novelty and familiarity in aesthetic appreciation. The workshop will take place on 15 October 2025 from 13:30 to 19:00 and will be followed by a welcome drink reception. It is open to all registered conference participants at no additional cost.
Workshop Programme
13:30 – 14:30
Paolo Barbieri & Irene Ronga (University of Turin) — Repetition and Novelty in Aesthetic Experience: Some Insights from Neuroscience
14:30 – 15:30
Arto Haapala (University of Helsinki) — The Varieties of Beauty: From Refreshingly New to Comfortably Repeating
15:30 – 15:45
Coffee Break
15:45 – 16:45
Jan R. Landwehr (Goethe University Frankfurt) — The Aesthetic Ups and Downs of Visual Typicality
16:45 – 17:00
Coffee Break
17:00 – 18:00
Jérôme Dokic (Institut Jean Nicod, EHESS Paris) — The Experience of the Sublime in the Face of Repetition
18:00 – 19:00
Alessandro Bertinetto & Jacopo Frascaroli (University of Turin)— The Pleasure of Habituation. Aesthetic Appreciation Between the Novel and the Familiar
19:00 – 20:00
Drinks reception
Abstracts
Paolo Barbieri & Irene Ronga – Repetition and Novelty in Aesthetic Experience: Some Insights from Neuroscience
Subjective aesthetic preferences are the subject of an intense interdisciplinary debate across philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. On one side, a substantial body of work (grouped under the so-called learning theories of aesthetics) suggests that beauty is closely tied to learning and the acquisition of new information from the environment. According to this view, novelty and the opportunity to expand one’s knowledge enhance aesthetic appreciation, as we take pleasure in the process of learning previously unknown stimuli. This theoretical account, however, leaves important phenomena unexplained. If aesthetic pleasure were driven exclusively by novelty, it would be difficult to understand why we enjoy listening to our favorite song repeatedly, or why we are drawn to reproductions of artworks we already know well. These experiences point instead to the role of familiarity and ease of processing in aesthetic experience, as proposed by fluency theories of aesthetics. From this perspective, aesthetic pleasure may arise when stimuli are efficiently processed by the perceptual-cognitive system. In the present contribution, we will examine this tension between novelty and repetition through a neuroscientific approach. We will begin by reviewing the neurophysiological correlates of uncertainty, novelty, and repetition, and then discuss neuroscientific studies that investigate the relationship between aesthetic appreciation, perceptual processing, and stimulus novelty. By integrating theoretical perspectives with recent neuroscientific findings, our aim is to show how aesthetic pleasure may emerge from the process of learning and how it can be affected by the dynamic interplay between novelty and familiarity.
Arto Haapala – The Varieties of Beauty: From Refreshingly New to Comfortably Repeating
The notion of beauty has a long and varied history in philosophical aesthetics. It has clearly been one of the key notions, and the question “What is beauty?” has been discussed and debated over centuries. More recently, in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, this central concept of Aesthetics was widely neglected. The focus turned to art, and the different philosophical puzzles that works of art raise. It is also true to say that beauty played a minor role in the Western 20th century art. More recently, however, beauty has come back to philosophical discussions, and to some extent to the arts, too.
In this presentation, I want to continue in this vein and reclaim the notion and the phenomenon of beauty. My approach is, however, somewhat different from those who have more recently given prominence to beauty. I will claim that beauty is a “flexible phenomenon,” or an “open concept,” and accordingly, it might be better to speak of beauties in plural rather than assume a single phenomenon of beauty.
Many things are beautiful on the first sight, and they attract us immediately. It might be a work of art; it might be another kind of artefact or a natural object. However, after the initial attraction we might lose our interest, the beauty of the object fades. On the other end of the scale are experiences of beauty which arise exactly because we are familiar with the object. We experience beauty because we know what to expect.
I want to explore beauty in the scale of singularity and repeatedness. To some extent this distinction goes hand in hand with the distinction between strangeness and familiarity. My emphasis will be in the repeated experiences of beauty.
Jan R. Landwehr – The Aesthetic Ups and Downs of Visual Typicality
Aesthetic artifacts high in visual typicality may be liked due to feelings of processing fluency and familiarity. In contrast, visually atypical artifacts may be liked due to the novelty and innovativeness they express. Accordingly, it is not straightforward to predict how visual typicality is related to aesthetic appreciation and liking. The current talk presents a set of contextual variables (i.e., visual complexity, repeated mere exposure, and prior familiarity/trust) that influence whether visual typicality or visual atypicality leads to higher aesthetic liking. The covered empirical studies have an applied focus and use exterior car designs as aesthetic stimuli and market success as an indicator of aesthetic appreciation. From a theoretical perspective, the empirical results are discussed based on the processing fluency framework of aesthetic appreciation that proposes that aesthetic liking is a function of the ease or difficulty of visually processing a stimulus. The talk will also cover the methodological question of how visual typicality can be measured objectively with easy-to-use software solutions.
Jérôme Dokic – The Experience of the Sublime in the Face of Repetition
According to some authors, who follow a tradition initiated by Burke and Kant, the experience of the sublime differs categorically from the experience of beauty. It involves a negative metacognitive experience: the inability to comprehend what seems to be cognitively immeasurable. However, this limit-experience alone is insufficient to generate the aesthetic experience of the sublime, which also involves the need for accommodating the sublime by restructuring the ordinary categories through which we confront reality. It might then seem that the experience of the sublime can only occur once, because accommodating the sublime prevents us from subsequently feeling a need for accommodation. However, this implication contradicts everyday experience: some of us can contemplate a sublime scene, whether natural or artistic, several times, even if we may eventually tire of it. In this presentation, I examine this apparent paradox and attempt to resolve it by distinguishing different ways of conceiving the effect of repetition on the experience of the sublime. Hopefully, the discussion will also clarify the relationship between that experience and the experience of beauty.
Alessandro Bertinetto & Jacopo Frascaroli – The Pleasure of Habituation. Aesthetic Appreciation Between the Novel and the Familiar
In contemporary aesthetics research, habituation is said to play a paradoxical role. On one hand, becoming habituated to an object or action through prolonged or repeated engagement usually weakens the vividness with which we experience it and the pleasure we derive from it. On the other hand, however, becoming habituated to an object or action can also strengthen our sense of mastery over it and lead us to like it more than we initially did. This “double law of habit” has been explored by philosophers like Hume, Butler, Maine de Biran, Ravaisson, and Tedeschi among others, and has parallels in contemporary research in empirical aesthetics. In this talk, we will seek to shed light on the exact role of habituation in aesthetic appreciation by bringing together the philosophical literature on the topic and the latest relevant models and evidence in empirical aesthetics. To do so, we will start by discussing the evidence and theories supporting a preference for stimuli to which we are habituated. We will then argue that, upon closer examination, none of these evidence or theories hold. What they instead point to is a more complex picture in which what matters for aesthetic appreciation is not the degree to which we are already habituated to the stimuli in question, but rather the degree to which these stimuli allow for new habituation. As we will show, this latter interpretation of the empirical evidence does justice to the complex role that habituation plays in our aesthetic encounters and fits perfectly with an age-old line of thought about the plastic nature of habits spanning from Aristotle to present-day cognitive science. In conclusion, we will also highlight the relevance of our proposal for other important issues in contemporary aesthetics, such as the debate on whether aesthetic value is subjective or objective.