text of abstract Investigating what goes on in the heads of creative artists and appreciative audiences (or the relations between artist and work and work and audience, respectively) is not just important to aesthetics (as may seem obvious) but absolutely vital (as a review of the aesthetics literature reveals). However, philosophers of art tend to be skeptical of, or merely give lip service to, the contributions to art theory that might be made by the cognitive and neurosciences, while many scientists who have ventured into art theory seem less than ideally informed about art's character (e.g., the beauty bias) and purpose (e.g., the knowledge bias). In this paper I will champion a genuinely interdisciplinary aesthetics. I will argue (by elimination) that an aesthetic (sometimes 'functionalist') approach is our best hope for a theory of art, and that the objections to this approach can be handled successfully. Identifying the theoretic gaps that remain, I will then examine various contributions from the cognitive and neurosciences to see what can be extruded for art theory and what desiderata remain to be had. I will then make an admittedly (and unavoidably) speculative proposal about the nature of aesthetic experience, in which a certain tradition in aesthetic theory dovetails nicely with certain work in evolutionary neuropsychology. The proposal, very roughly, is that aesthetic experience consists in a special kind of resolution of conflict between intellect (parts of the cortex) and emotion (diencephalon, limbic system, plus cortical elaboration) and as distinct from, say, a mundane in-phase activation of the thalamocortical loop. I will finish off by making a few suggestions about what sort of empirical research (using fMRI, etc.) would best further an interdisciplinary study of art and aesthetic experience.