GRAHAM MCFEE

Defusing Dualism: John Martin on Dance Appreciation

i. dualism in dance studies

As David Best recognized, much early writing on

dance was conceptually flawed because theorists
implicitly embraced various destructive kinds of
dualism. But what is wrong with urging that, say,
muscular sympathy is a key aspect of an audience
members appreciation of a dance performance?
Best notes that, on dualistic conceptions:
just as . . . fear-behavior is supposed to be the external
manifestation of the inner mental/emotional feeling of
fear, so language is supposed to be an external symbol
of the inner mental thoughts, ideas, conceptions which
give linguistic terms their meaning.1

Bests points apply to several theories about

dance art understanding. As with the Other
Minds problem, dance theorists relying on such
notions as muscular sympathy or mirror reflexes to explain appropriate dance art appreciation must make sense of the psychological in
relation to our physical structures: for example, to
explain the correlation between mind states and
brain states, or meanings and dance movements,
or dance movements and symbols.2 In a clear case,
one sees the movement of the windmill sails and
correlates it with the winds blowing; given that
each is independent of the other, these phenomena can be linked. But key cases (say, linking your
thoughts or feelings to your behavior, or linking
an audience members bodily or neurological responses to experiences of the dancers) lack crucial
features of the idealized one. Key cases lack crucial features for several reasons.
First, there is no independent access to another
persons psychological or physical state. So the
correlation between another persons behavior

and mental states, or between my neuronal firings and the physical experience of the dancer I
observe, can be established only by assuming what
is at issue: namely, that there is such a correlation
in contentious cases. This is especially puzzling
when the correlation invokes brain states: given
the plasticity of the brain, there are no absolutely
exceptionless relations here, nor should any be
expected given our best scientific evidence about
the remarkable capacity of the brain to retrain
itself.
Second, you cannot literally feel my pain; any
talk of your feeling my pain is a kind of
metaphor, relating perhaps to sympathy, where
(roughly) you imagine my pain.3 But you can easily be wrong here. By contrast, once dualistic pictures are discarded, we can acknowledge, say, your
recognizing my pain; that need not be dualistic.
Third, if I begin from my own case, why is it not
idiosyncratic? Even supposing I know what I am
thinking or feeling, why should that be any kind
of blueprint for others? Replying, Because of our
shared biology simply begs the question.
Fourth, is there one uniform response to a
dance performance? Must my response somehow
mirror that of another audience member, given
the differences in our experience and sensitivity?
This seems unlikely. Moreover, the matter cannot be treated statistically without assuming what
is at issue: namely, that my experiences typically
accord with yours.
Fifth, what could be inferred about my appreciation of a work of dance art from facts about
particular events in my brain? For many, particular brain functions are uniquely located in specific
brain architecture. But granting that sophisticated
treatments of such cases recognize neural plasticity, on even the best scientific accounts a gap
remains between what is claimed (say, about my

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:2 Spring 2013


C 2013 The American Society for Aesthetics

188
thoughts or feelings, on the basis of my behavior)
and what is so.
Crucial here is Freges dictum that error and
superstition have causes just as much as correct cognition, that is, both good works (or
responses) and poor ones have causal stories.4
Therefore, such stories cannot reflect the normativity whereby such-and-such is, say, a good move
in chess, for poor moves too have causal explanations. But if the normativity is not acknowledged,
one is not really discussing chess, viewed as a human practice, since good moves cannot be distinguished from bad on mere causal grounds. Frege
illuminates the limitations of the causal explanations science deploys and so highlights a way one
cannot respond to dualism.5 Too few writers, in
applying these topics to dance, acknowledge that
fact.
More positively, as Freges dictum clarifies, explanation of dance art and its appreciation operates at the human level; that is, at the level of
choice and decision (which includes the dancers
or choreographers decision to accept what comes
about by chance). Hence, typical discussion of
danceworks in performance should refer to the
ideas ofand choices made bydancers and
choreographers, to their various kinds of training,
and to the way their training impinges on the ideas
they may plausibly bring to the stage. Rather than
concentrate on the errors implicit in drawing on
causal stories from contemporary science to explain the understanding of dance, I shall defend a
line of thought readily obscured by such scientism.

ii. was martin a dualist?

In contrast to many from the early days of dance

studies who had choreographic credentials, John
Martin was a theorist of dance and, perhaps, primarily a dance critic.6 As Best noted, dualism of a
destructive kind was rife in texts from dance studies at that time. Martin sometimes wrote as though
understanding dance should be modeled on a
broadly perceptual process, distinctive of dance,
reflecting the causality characteristic of natural
science. Would such an attitude make Martin a
dualist? His writing seems committed to dualism;
for instance, in understanding the dancer as aiming to direct his emotional reactions so that even
his most subjective experiences become visibly externalized, or seeing all dance [as] . . . the exter-

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

nalization of inner, emotional force of some kind
in terms of bodily movement with references to
the innerimplicitly contrasted to the outeror of
being externalized in contrast to internalized.7 He
emphasizes the inner man, movement sense,
and inner mimicry.8 Each expression permits a
dualist reading of the kind Best might decry. But
need Martins reference to muscular sympathy
be read dualistically?9
When first discussing transmission of the
movement sense from body to body in The Modern Dance, Martin urged that this sixth sense
derived from the fact that [m]ovement . . . in
and of itself is a medium for the transference of
an aesthetic and emotional concept from the consciousness of one individual to that of another.10
Initially, Martin called the phenomenon metakinesis. He saw its externalisation in some form
which can be comprehended by others . . . by feeling through with a sensitive body.11 In Introduction to the Dance, Martins emphasis remains on
the movement sense, characterizing the mechanism in terms of muscular sympathy and inner
mimicry, where a sympathetic awareness of our
own bodies . . . [means that] . . . all types of gesture and facial expression convey meaning to us
automatically.12 Martin grants the artisthere,
the choreographera special gift . . . recognized
as having meaning for the whole group such that
[g]ood art speaks directly from its creators emotions to our own.13
Was Martins dualism just a consequence of the
period in which he lived and the circles in which
he moved? Only a person-based normative story
can relate to making sense of dance and hence
reflect Martins focus as dance critic. But that
requirement is regularly set aside when Martin
writes about the importance of inner mimicry or
metakinesis. In part, he seems mesmerized by his
felt need to explain the process of understanding
dance; he (mistakenly) thought such an explanation must draw on a distinctive mechanism. Urging
that we have grown insensible to the medium in
which dance operates, Martin believed that filling the gap required a source . . . [of] sensorimotor experiences, . . . a sixth sense which concerns
. . . that elaborate and intricate world which is
comprised in the body itself.14 Martin seems to
stress metakinesis (or its later incarnation) as such
a sixth sense, a distinct sensory modality.
This is problematic in several ways. First, the
kind of causal answer invoked here is neither

McFee Defusing Dualism: John Martin on Dance Appreciation

required nor possible. Like Martin, I begin from
the fact of people appreciating dances. He asks
how this is possible, sometimes acting as though
the question requires a causal answer describing
the mechanism. When I recognize my legs position by seeing it in a mirror, a sensory modality
(sight) is deployed in knowing that position. That
might tempt some, including Martin, to urge
that in other cases some sixth sense explains the
mechanism of knowing the positions of our limbs,
and allows us sympathy for the movement and
position of others. But the causal story is not
relevant to our understanding even where we
know the sensory modality (for instance, vision).
Having conceded that causal story, one still cannot
guarantee that the person in fact knows, say, the
position of her legthat is Freges criticism of reliance on the causal. Her getting it wrong has a
causal story too. Moreover, her feeling that the leg
is correctly placed cannot guarantee its position.
And the issue is further complicated since, somehow, the accuracy of the sympathy also needs a
guarantee (ideally, some criterion of appropriate
sympathy, reflecting the others position).15
Could our bodily reactionsour toe-tapping,
sitting up straighter, holding our breaths, tensing
our legs, and so onsomehow play into our appreciation of dance? This is precisely what makes
no sense, what Bests prohibition on dualism proscribes. As Wittgenstein noted, for an outsider my
tapping my toe might be evidence that I understood the dance.16 That behavior might be taken,
in context, to indicate understanding, but only because the understanding itself is independent of
these responses. It would not be how I understood
the dance, as though I might conclude, from studying my behavior, that since I am doing these things
I must understand the dance. Indeed, there is no
how here. One does not have (or need) criteria for
ones own understanding in such cases: this is just
a capacity people have, often improved by practice. In this respect, it resembles our capacity to
know where our limbs are: to the degree that we
can do this, there is no manner in which we do it.
Second, Martins perspective as dance critic is
in tension with the account of dance appreciation
he seems to recommend. To explain ones understanding dance, Martin should focus on humanistic explanation that takes dance as its object.
But he often wrote as though the capacity originally identified as metakinesis applied equally
to aspects of the nonhuman world, or, at least,

189

as though a perfectly general human power unrelated to dance was operative here. He takes
for granted that we respond muscularly to the
strains in architectural masses [human and arguably art-based] and the attitudes of rocks [obviously nonhuman].17 Thus, the scope of Martins
sixth sense picture is unclear, and it lacks any
special connection to dance if one needs only a
perfectly functioning neuromuscular system and
an equally healthy general physical organism.18
Yet artistic appreciation requires more: one
must see the red patch in the painting (depicting
the cottage roof, say), but one must also see the
cottage, and recognize that painting as balanced
where the balance is achieved by the red patch.
One must recognize the artistic properties of the
artwork. And the same must be true for dances.
Martin makes this point in urging that, for dance
appreciation:
it is necessary to appreciate the stuff of which dance is
made, namely the movements of the human body . . .
[but also to appreciate] form, or the arrangement of
this essential material of movement into such sequences
and relationships that it assumes significance for the onlooker.19

Martin also mentions style. Clearly such features cannot be transferred by inner mimicry.
Doing justice to Martins insights here requires
stressing additional, and more traditional, concepts from aesthetics. This puts pressure on the
importance his account gives to inner mimicry
or other mechanisms of dance art perception, running together two themes that dance critics should
keep apart: first, the concern with explaining how
one appreciates dance (that mechanism must, in
the end, reflect a projective sensory modality)
and, second, intentional (or noncausal) questions
about the understanding of dance. In recognizing
the force of the movement in this particular dance,
one really recognizes the complex intentions involved in dance-making, reflecting the normativity of judging dances. This reading respects Freges
dictum: dance-making and appreciation are intentional rather than causal, having fundamental cultural elements of a kind Martin recognized explicitly in relation to music.20
One then confronts a difficulty Martin had in
writing as a dance critic: one requires training
to appreciate the movement in dance. Someone
whose perceptual apparatus functions correctly

190
may still fail to see the dance as dance, still less
to appreciate it as dance. You can know that suchand-such is a dance, but, as John Wisdom remarked, parrots may not know it, yet perhaps
they have even better eyesight than yours.21 The
visual acuity of the parrot does not allow her to
see dance or, better, to recognize dance when she
sees it. Your capacities exceeding those of parrots
might be explained by, first, your mastery of the
relevant concepts, and, second, your sensitivity to
differences between what is dance and what just
resembles it, between good and better dances, and
so on, where we recognize these as cultural, evaluative, and beyond the scope of the parrot. Martin
was well aware of this. Indeed, his criticism functions as a maker of taste precisely because one can
learn from it to see the dance as dance, and hence
learn to appreciate it as dance.22
Nothing said here denies the biological substrate that underlies dance appreciation. Eyes are
a prerequisite of vision, but the eyes do not see
and neither does the brain: vision is a property
of the person. Similarly, some of the structures
beloved by critics in this symposium (such as mirror reflexes and mirror neurons) might play a
role, perhaps, as a prerequisite for our developing the causal powers that many humans typically
have. But improved insight into the structures explored by contemporary neuroscientists cannot
offer what Martin ultimately sought in using the
vexed language of inner mimicry or metakinesis: an account of how persons come to see,
understand, and evaluate performances of dance
art.

iii. martins dualism

There is no logical bar to knowing the thoughts

and feelings of other people. But that knowledge
operates defeasibly, reflecting how well we know
the person in question. In particular, understanding others is a capacity people possess: no specific mechanism is deployed here, neither sympathy nor empathy nor some distinctive sensory
modality. Martin sometimes wrote as though his
model was the central nervous system narrowly
conceived: he grants that the postural change
involving this movement sense . . . [includes]
the movement of the eyeballs in following an object [and] . . . the periodic contractions of the
stomach.23 Yet these are precisely not objects of

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

perception; we are typically unaware of them. So
these claims can be set aside.
In addition, Martins remarks about the choreographers intentions may sometimes refer to
human intentions as embodied-in-the-performedworks: one does not interrogate the choreographers psyche, but looks instead to the dance itself, properly understood. As Monroe Beardsley
said, one is a poem-reader, not a mind-reader.24
This is consistent with our having relinquished the
conception of intention as prior planning in the
head of the artist, at best causally connected to
the artwork itself.25 So, when Martin claims that
the artists purpose is to arouse us to feel a certain
emotion about a particular object or situation, is
that emotion on his account at best causally related to the artwork itself?26 If it is, the account is
dualist in the ways criticized above. Yet Martins
account may instead reflect the artists intention
as embodied in the dancework, which requires rejecting a dualistic picture of intention.
Martin must also explain how what he claimed
was there could be recognized in the dance performance, first by him and, later, by a suitably
informed and sensitive audience. He denied that
appreciation of this dancework requires of audience members sophisticated knowledge of dance
history; such knowledge alone cannot generate
artistic understanding. So Martin adopted a line
from New Criticism according to which one need
only scrutinize the dance itself to understand it,
although that may involve recognizing it as dance
of a certain kind. Further, dance understanding
could not be forever unavailable to an audience
willing to make appropriate efforts: for instance,
by becoming educated from Martins reviews.
Of course, Martin was literally inventing the
role of the dance critic as we know it. Hence, his
work implicitly stressed two roles central to art
criticism: first, as consumer guide, with the audience advised of the value of particular performances currently on offer as a way to generate
attendance here rather than there and, second, as
maker of taste.27 Martin sought to lead potential
audiences to appreciate what he saw as valuable
in much modern dance. His task as critic was educational insofar as his audience was being encouraged to widen its perceptions beyond familiar forms of ballet.28 Since Martin wanted to show
that dance critic represented a role to be fulfilled,
his implicit view of dance appreciation is more easily located in our conceptual mastery and cultural

McFee Defusing Dualism: John Martin on Dance Appreciation

assimilations than in some special metakinesthetic
sense.
Moreover, Martin rightly grants the logical importance of an audience by stressing the centrality, for art, of communication: With the desire
for communication, then, there comes . . . the
beginning of art.29 So Martins project, unlike
Barbara Monteros aesthetics for dancers, has
the audience for dance (roughly the audience for
his reviews) coming to understand dances seen in
performance.30 Since Martins target is an account
of the audience for dance, metakinesis cannot be a
capacity only (or especially) possessed by dancers
but must operate in general audiences for danceworks.
This offers a rational reconstruction of Martins
position, given his other commitments. For example, he later comments that [i]t is useless to approach any work of art with the notion that it must
be understood before it can be responded to.31
But one must grasp that this is a cubist painting or
a piece of atonal music to avoid misperceiving it:
in both cases, some understanding is a prerequisite
for (appropriate) response, as Martins own comments on the dances of Martha Graham and Mary
Wigman illustrate. We should look to what Martin meantto the contrasts that were important
to himrather than what he actually said, where
these conflict. Tension between the two licenses
our reconstructing passages in which he refers to
metakinesis or inner mimicry in a way that no
longer commits him to mysterious sense modalities or pernicious forms of dualism.
iv. appreciating dances

Is metakinesis a normative human property, associated with the actions of persons? One might
think so. As dance critic, Martin seems never to
have imagined responding metakinetically to, say,
the behavior of stilt-birds (as described by Kurt
Sachs [1937]). This is appropriate if metakinesis is
a response to dance, that is, to culturally inflected,
normatively positioned actions comprising an art
form, since these are the province of persons only.
But then the worry is clear: talk of muscular sympathy will be dualist precisely to the degree that
a property of the dancework is located on or in
the persons in the audience.
In general, constituting an audience to make
sense of the resultant dancework typically requires more than the contiguous sensory

191

modalities.32 Standard examples of dance appreciation require that, as it were, the dancework reaches over the footlights to the audience members, who then recognize its features. Roughly, one only appreciates (as audience)
danceworks one has seen on the basis of ones
seeing them. Hence, even leaving open which sensory modalities there are, the operation of an audience for dance requires (at least) that only what
I call projective sensory modalities be involved
in dance appreciation.
Martin sometimes writes as if this movement
sense is projective, but offers no explanation of
how it might be. He discusses knowing how heavy
a log is.33 But the logs weight is not typically perceived at all, but rather inferred; were it perceived,
the sensory modality would be visualwe see the
log. Humans can often prepare to lift the log: nothing in that process seems essentially perceptual
or sensory. Reference to the sensorimotor here
cannot concede what has been denied, for that just
names the set of human powers and capacities.
My objection was never to the words here, but
to the implications others sought to draw from
them. I no more aimed to deny others the use of
the expression kinaesthetic sense than I denied
sense of direction, sense of humor, or even moral
sense. But I did dispute that they are senses in
the ways that sight and hearing are. Noting the
distinctiveness of sight and hearing as projective
stresses their connections to the requirement for
an audience for dance.
Such a focus on the audience is easily misunderstood. Montero reads my claim that the focus
on the performer is not appropriate to an artform
such as dance as my repudiating any mention of
the dancer (for example, in dance criticism).34 But
of course dance criticism can invoke the dancer,
just as criticism concerning painting might mention the quality of brush strokes. These are part of
this artwork and hence part of the art form. But
to think only about brush strokes is not really to
discuss the painting itself, and mutatis mutandis
for dance. The context of that comment was my
rejection of appeals to a kinaesthetic sense understood as offering special artistic insight to dancers
as they perform. I doubt that the dancer is typically
well placed to judge the dancework she presently
dances, and certainly kinaesthesis plays no part in
our audience-style understanding of the dance.35
No judgments from the dancers perspective can
replace that kind of understanding.

192
Montero, however, has argued that ex-dancers
might have special insight into the aesthetic properties of danceworks in performance. Like Montero, I accept that practice in judging dances is
likely to be advantageous.36 Admittedly, practice makes perfect; but what is thereby perfected
is what is being practiced, not some other activity. The ex-dancers experience here involves her
watching many sequences of dance; the relevant
practice lies in watching dances, not in performing
them. Whatever is said at the practical level, such
roles can be distinguished in theory.
This opens up two broad strategies. First, someone can assert a distinctive kind of projective sensory modality here, explaining both the nature of
the modality and its relation to dance appreciation
as well as its origins. Is this modality the province
of trained dancers only, as Montero seems to
think, or can be it mobilized by others?37 Either
answer must be justified.
I have urged that no sensory modality can explain our capacity to know the location of, say, our
limbs.38 Although I will not here rehearse that argument, it does not imply that the positions of our
limbs escape us.39 In a related discussion, Hanna
Pickard reports the case of Ian Waterman, who:
suffers from a unique form of neuropathy: . . . a virus
briefly damaged most of his sensory fibres but none of
his motor nerves. As a result, he lacks virtually all feeling in, and awareness from the inside of, his body. . . .
[At first] Waterman . . . was effectively paralyzed despite
the continued functioning of his motor nerves. But . . .
he has managed to learn to control his movements using
vision. If he looks down at his body, constantly and assiduously monitoring it through vision, he can guide his
movements in this way.40

Pickard describes Waterman as a living

counter-example to the claim that bodily awareness is what sustains ones knowledge of what one
is doing over time.41 On one reading, this case
supports my view that, typically, one just knows
where the parts of ones body are (with some of the
prerequisites, or mechanisms, for this knowledge
depending on what Waterman damaged). Then
this knowledge could be augmented, should it
need to become very precise, as in a dancers leg
position, in exactly the way it is augmented in the
dance studiothrough the use of mirrors.
The second strategy (roughly mine) accepts
that there is no additional sensory modality, urg-

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

ing instead that, properly understood, the mechanisms of ordinary perception are sufficient.
This requires a richer reading of the objects of
perception than is sometimes adopted. My interest in perception here lies in the human capacity to recognize and enjoy dances. So Martins
account reconstructed might treat his emphasis
as on human powers and capacities. In its most
full-bodied version, metakinesis is a complicated
name for a capacity humans have to recognize
the bodily or embodied character of the movement of (preeminently) early modern dances. It
need be nothing more, especially once the point is
expressed as about powers and capacities rather
than senses. Although Martin sometimes writes as
though dance appreciation involves a modality of
sense, his talk of metakinesis is best understood on
the model of the sense of direction or of humor
familiar invocations of complex packages of human powers and capacitiesrather than taken as
a literal reference to some kind of sixth sense.
v. the dancers role

Given Monteros misplaced emphasis on the importance of the dancer in an account of dance appreciation, several more substantive dimensions
of the dancers role can be articulated. Further, a
number of claims seemingly supported by talk of
metakinesis or inner mimicry can be sustained
without relying on any suspect theoretical structure. These are claims Martin might easily embrace.
We typically know where (in space) the parts of
our bodies are. This is the ability the unfortunate
Waterman lacks. But no sensory modality need
be invoked to achieve this knowledge: it simply
reflects a capacity most humans have.
Dancers respond to seeing dance in ways they often
regard as bodily. Dancers are trained to recognize and discriminate movements from one another. Sometimes, like the rest of us, they must
depend on sight; typically they are better trained
and more sensitive even at that. But with no
special aesthetic for dancers, this capacity to
respond bodily to human movement in performance is not crucial to all dance appreciation,
even if some dancers speak of it this way.
The rest of us may well think we can respond viscerally (also roughly bodily) to some dance. This is

McFee Defusing Dualism: John Martin on Dance Appreciation

a regular description. Martin rightly recognizes
a capacity here, ascribable to us all, mobilized
in appreciating dances. Yet the basis of that response is what we see, in the context of what we
have learned to see. Martin thought a sensory
modality operative here, but no sensory modality could do what he wanted of it since any regularly deployed in other human activity would
lack the required connection to dance to permit
the appreciation to be of dance.
Sensitivity here is partly a human capacity and
partly a reflection of training within the culture.
Dance appreciation is typically open in principle
to anyone who gives it time and energy, possibly
with the help of a teacher.
Appreciation of dance is (appropriate) appreciation of bodily movement. The movement must
be recognized as transfigured into dance.42
A dancers aesthetic must be sharply contrasted
with a (real) aesthetics of dance, which involves
the artworks appeal to its audience. This is contentious only from the perspective of a putative
dancers aesthetic. No one gives credence to a
similar conception for any other art form.
The possibility of accommodating these ideas
within a sophisticated aesthetic theory of dance
may remove the tendency to treat various ways
of talking about bodily responses to dance art
as the sort of thing dancers want to claim, but
that I would deny. Indeed, a proper understanding of dances requires recognizing the distinctive
role dancers have in making concrete the dancework, though that role is independent of the issues
here.43
vi. conclusion

Some things dancers and dance theorists rightly

talk about might be retained, but without trying to expand them beyond the bounds of sense.
First, metakinesis or inner mimicry may offer a
metaphor for a human power or capacity (namely,
the capacity to make sense of dance) without being a structural function of our bodies. Designating
such a structure would be a reason it was unsuitable for the task assigned it. Further, it has no
specific bodily realization. But this does not render talk of it worthless, if suitably understood.
Second, perhaps this capacity is more highly
developed in those who are drawn to dance, and
hence drawn both to study and appreciate it. But

193

this is speculation. The human powers and capacities at issue here seem shared by nondancers as
well as dancers. Dancers wishing to claim better
access to the properties of danceworks must look
for evidence that their training provides it or that
it was provided by whatever made them suitable
for that training in the first place. They must still
try to give evidence, rather than simply asserting it.
And as the topic is a normative one about understanding, this evidence cannot merely repeat neurobiological data. It must exploit human perspicuousness in the dance context, showing dancers as
more likely than others to not misunderstand.
Finally, Martins account sheds light on contemporary attempts to inform our philosophical
understanding of dance appreciation by deploying
similar discussions of the mechanism of that appreciation, often by focusing on the causal substrate
at the level of neurobiology. The most promising reading of Martin sets aside this aspect of his
claims about dance, understanding him instead as
offering a reaffirmation of the view that the philosophical work required relative to dance art appreciation must be pursued at the level of persons
nonmechanical agents who can improve as understanders of dance by learning and practicing.
GRAHAM MCFEE

University of Brighton
Brighton, UK BN2 4AT
California State University, Fullerton
Fullerton, California 92831
internet: gmcfee@graham-mcfee.co.uk

1. David Best, Dance Before You Think, in Dance,

Education and Philosophy, ed. Graham McFee (Aachen,
Germany: Meyer & Meyer, 1999), pp. 99121, at p. 133.
2. See David Best, Philosophy and Human Movement
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978), pp. 124142.
3. See Graham McFee, Empathy: Interpersonal vs
Artistic? in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 185208.
4. Gottlob Frege, Thoughts (1918), in his Collected
Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1984), pp. 351372, at p. 351.
5. See Graham McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of
Dance (Hampshire, UK: Dance Books, 2011), pp. 192200.
6. Especially in his Invitation to the Dance [1939]
(Brooklyn, NY: Dance Horizons, 1965).
7. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, pp. 26, 232.
8. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, pp. 37, 4252.
9. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, p. 53.
10. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, eds., What Is
Dance? (Oxford University Press, 1983) includes passages

194
from John Martin, especially his The Modern Dance (1933),
p. 23.
11. Copeland and Cohen, What Is Dance? p. 24.
12. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, pp. 48, 53.
13. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, pp. 14, 16, emphasis
mine.
14. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, pp. 22, 43.
15. See McFee, Empathy.
16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 389(a).
17. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, p. 53.
18. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, p. 54.
19. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, p. 26.
20. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, p. 23.
21. John Wisdom, Proof and Explanation: The Virginia
Lectures (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991),
p. 80.
Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures
22. Noel
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 192193.
23. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, p. 44.
24. Monroe Beardsley, The Possibility of Criticism
(Wayne State University Press, 1970), p. 33.
25. McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance, pp.
125126; Graham McFee, Understanding Dance (New York:
Routledge, 1992), pp. 230231.
26. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, p. 53.
27. Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, pp.
192193.
28. Selma Jean Cohen, John Martin, in International
Encyclopedia of Dance, Vol. 4 (Oxford University Press,
1998), p. 273.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

29. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, p. 54.
30. Barbara Montero, Proprioception as an Aesthetic
Sense, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2006):
231242, at p. 236a (a refers to column 1); and McFee, The
Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance, p. 188.
31. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, p. 51.
32. McFee, Understanding Dance, p. 266.
33. Martin, Invitation to the Dance, p. 45.
34. Barbara Montero, Practice Makes Perfect: The
Effect of Dance Training on the Aesthetic Judge, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11 (2012): 5868,
at p. 66. McFee, Understanding Dance, p. 273.
35. McFee, Understanding Dance, p. 270, emphasis
added.
36. See Montero, Practice Makes Perfect, p. 67; and
McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance, pp. 244246.
37. Montero, Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense,
p. 236a (a refers to column 1).
38. McFee, Understanding Dance, p. 266.
39. From G. E. M. Anscombe, On Sensations of Position, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1981), pp. 7174.
40. Hanna Pickard, Knowledge of Action without
Observation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 104
(2004): 206230, at p. 228.
41. Pickard, Knowledge of Action without Observation, p. 228.
42. See McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance,
pp. 1420.
43. See McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance,
pp. 167205.

Copyright of Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not
be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.