To begin, I draw a parallel between why it is challenging for philosophers to define open concepts such as art and why it is difficult for scientists to study artistic encounters and aesthetic experience, noting that only exceptional cases of neuroaesthetics attempt to locate what is salient about particular artworks as a function of medium, style, culture, and era, thus placing the natural sciences in a more robust dialogue with the humanities. Next, I introduce the second-order method of natural philosophy, which engages in theory construction via bidirectional influence between the empirical and the conceptual to better understand a shared first-order object such as art. This approach suggests that naturalized aesthetics ought to decentre art as a perceptual ‘stimulus’ and instead draw attention to the imagination, affect, embodiment, and aesthetic pleasure. Finally, I argue that what might seem to be the particular challenges of cognition and the arts are actually challenges for cognitive science generally. This is because the first-order topic of cognition—like art—is not a natural kind that exists apart from human understanding. Further, the second-order, interdisciplinary field of cognitive science—like naturalized aesthetics—is a historically contingent natural philosophy that has the potential to be reimagined.

The book concludes with a brief epilogue that recapitulates the exploration of cognition and the arts.