The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast · Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, Rose de Castellane, Gregory Mill

Episode 140, 'Interpersonal Art' with Harry Drummond (Part I - Collective Experience)

February 23, 2025·35 min·3 clips

Harry Drummond reveals how others amplify and redirect aesthetic experiences in ways impossible alone.

Episode 140 of the Panpsycast opens by noting that despite the proliferation of on-demand private media, people continue to carve out time for shared public aesthetic experiences -- concerts, football matches, cinemas, dance floors. Dr. Harry Drummond is introduced as a teacher in the Department of Continuing Education at Liverpool, co-editor of the British Society of Aesthetics journal Debates in Aesthetics, and editorial assistant for the British Journal of Aesthetics. His work sits at the intersection of aesthetics, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Drummond describes philosophy as taking something exciting or puzzling and finding that any answer implicates every other question you have asked -- and that getting the right question is often as valuable as getting the right answer. He situates aesthetics broadly, beyond mere philosophy of art, drawing on Yuriko Saito's concept of everyday aesthetics to suggest that the smell of folding laundry is also an aesthetic experience. Drummond came to aesthetics without an artistic background: he was excluded from GCSE art due to poor skill, discovered the field through an architectural tour with professor Andy Hamilton at Durham, and fell in love with it through a Master's and PhD. His intellectual hero shifted from Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialist phenomenological ontology to Sean Gallagher, founder of 4E cognition, whom Drummond visited at the University of Memphis in 2022. The core philosophical question of the episode is why we experience art in groups rather than alone. Drummond argues that other people function as cognitive scaffolding: we read each other's cues and reactions, creating experiences that would not be accessible in private. The synchronized movement of a dance floor, the shared laughter of a comedy show, the silence of a cinema -- these are constituted by collective presence, not merely accompanied by it. The episode explores how the extended mind hypothesis (Andy Clark and David Chalmers) applies to aesthetic experience.

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