I am a Research Associate at the Department of Psychology and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.
My research interests are in aesthetics, metaphysics, experimental philosophy, and philosophy of cognitive science. I currently work on the project “Higher Values: Aesthetic Experiences, Transcendence, and Prosociality” with Prof. Simone Schnall and Dr Ryan Doran.
My doctoral work focused on the philosophy of music and the ontology of musical works. As part of my doctoral research, I conducted experimental philosophy studies in musical ontology. I have also investigated other topics in experimental philosophy of aesthetics, such as the folk concept of art, judgments of the identity of artworks, and intuitions on AI-created art.
I earned my BA, MA, and PhD at the Institute of Philosophy, Vilnius University, Lithuania. During my doctoral studies, I spent a year as a visiting PhD student at Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, France.
Before I became a philosopher, I studied violin at Vilnius Conservatoire.
I am a steering committee member of the European Network for Philosophy of Music and a board member of the Lithuanian Philosophical Association.
My collaborators:
Prof. Simone Schnall
Dr Clément Canonne
Dr Ryan Doran
Dr Vilius Dranseika
Dr Brian Earp
Dr Ivar Hannikainen
Dr Markus Kneer
Dr Shen-yi Liao
Dr Peng Liu
Dr Emily McKendrick
Dr Sebastian Porsdam Mann
Dr Jasmina Stevanov
Mey Bahar Büyükbabani
Rosemary Chandler-Wilde
Edoardo Chidichimo
Yueying Chu
Veronica Forslund
Maryam Khan
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Mikalonytė, E. S. (2024). Musical Works Are Mind-Independent Artifacts. Synthese, 203, 4.
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Mikalonytė, E. S., Canonne, C. (2023). Does the Phineas Gage Effect Extend to Aesthetic Value? Philosophical Psychology.
Mikalonytė, E. S., Kneer, M. (2023). What Is Art? The Role of Intention, Beauty, and Institutional Recognition. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Mikalonytė, E. S., Kneer, M. (2022). Can Artificial Intelligence Make Art? Folk Intuitions as to whether AI-driven Robots Can Be Viewed as Artists and Produce Art. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 11(4), 1–19.
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Mikalonytė, E. S., Dranseika, V., (2022). The Role of Teleological Thinking in Judgments of Persistence of Musical Works. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 80(1), 42–57.
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Mikalonytė, E.S., (2022). Intuitions in the Ontology of Musical Works. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 13(2), 455–474.
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Mikalonytė, E. S., Dranseika, V., (2020). Intuitions on the Individuation of Musical Works: An Empirical Study. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 60(3), 253–282.
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Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė 