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

This concluding chapter revisits naturalized aesthetics, in which our understanding of art and aesthetic experience is clarified through a bidirectional exchange between philosophy and the empirical sciences, arguing for further collaboration with history and literature—disciplines whose existing cognitivist subfields are known as the cognitive humanities. The first part takes a closer look at the troublesome concept of the ‘natural,’ noting a tendency for neuroaesthetic approaches to search for human universals rather than attending to the particulars of culture and era. By contrast, naturalized aesthetics is—and ought to be—centrally concerned with other ‘natural’ connotations such as coherence with empirical evidence. The second part argues for the historical contingency of mental taxonomies and offers the history of emotions as a model for historicizing cognition and the arts. Awareness of past conceptions helps us ‘denaturalize’ present-day understandings to better appreciate how cognition is emergent and biocultural. The third part discusses scholarship applying the framework of distributed or situated (4E) cognition to aspects of the Early Modern theatre and the Enlightenment novel. Overall, a robust engagement between naturalized aesthetics and the cognitive humanities transforms the topic of cognition and the arts as well as the interdisciplinary exchange known as cognitive science.