Winfried Menninghaus is Director of the Department of Language and Literature at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt) and Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. His empirical, evolutionary, and philosophical work on aesthetics has a special focus on the nature and the emotional effects of poetic language.

Introduction
1. Competitive Courtship and Aesthetic Judgment/Choice: Darwin's Model of the Arts
2. The Arts as Promoters of Social Cooperation and Cohesion
3. Engagement in the Arts as Ontogenetic Self-(Trans-)Formation
4. A Cooptation Model of the Evolution of the Human Arts: The Special Role of Play Behavior, Technology, and Symbolic Cognition

Bibliography
Index