What can we learn from fiction? I argue that we can learn about the consequences of a certain course of action by projecting ourselves, in imagination, into the situation of the fiction's characters.

What is aesthetic appreciation? What values is it concerned with? This dissertation consists of three distinct papers tackling problems related to these questions. Chapter One According to what I call the Merit Principle, roughly, works of art that attempt to elicit unmerited responses fail on their own terms and are thereby aesthetically flawed. In the first chapter, I show how the principle leads to paradox when applied to an undertheorized class of artworks I call “seductive artworks”, which invite an (...) unmerited first-order response in order to invite a repudiation of that response. I consider a number of unsuccessful solutions to the paradox, before rejecting the Merit Principle as it stands. I conclude by briefly discussing what is challenging about seductive artworks and by proposing a revision to the Merit Principle. Chapter Two Generally, we cooperate imaginatively with literary fictions, however bizarre, and the things authors write into their stories become true in the fiction. But for some claims, such as moral falsehoods, this seems not to be straightforwardly the case, which raises the question: Why not? The puzzles such cases raise are sometimes grouped under the heading “imaginative resistance”. In this paper, I argue against what I take to be the best attempts to dismiss the puzzles and solve them. I also tease out subtleties not sufficiently addressed in the existing literature and end by defending a unified solution of my own. The solution’s novelty lies in its giving a normative rather than psychological or alethic explanation for the puzzling phenomena. Chapter Three The third chapter looks at the tenability of understanding our engagement with sport along the lines of our engagement with works of fiction. Specifically, it addresses an incongruity in our attitudes towards the outcomes of competitive games and asks why these outcomes frequently prompt intense reactions, while often also seeming utterly trivial. I show why the temptation to understand our engagement with sport as akin to our engagement with works of fiction—as involving games of make-believe—faces serious theoretical obstacles. I end by exploring two alternative possibilities to the proposal. (shrink)

Authors have a lot of leeway with regard to what they can make true in their story. In general, if the author says that p is true in the fiction we’re reading, we believe that p is true in that fiction. And if we’re playing along with the fictional game, we imagine that, along with everything else in the story, p is true. But there are exceptions to these general principles. Many authors, most notably Kendall Walton and Tamar Szabó Gendler, (...) have discussed apparent counterexamples when p is “morally deviant”. Many other statements that are conceptually impossible also seem to be counterexamples. In this paper I do four things. I survey the range of counterexamples, or at least putative counterexamples, to the principles. Then I look to explanations of the counterexamples. I argue, following Gendler, that the explanation cannot simply be that morally deviant claims are impossible. I argue that the distinctive attitudes we have towards moral propositions cannot explain the counterexamples, since some of the examples don’t involve moral concepts. And I put forward a proposed explanation that turns on the role of ‘higher-level concepts’, concepts that if they are satisfied are satisfied in virtue of more fundamental facts about the world, in fiction, and in imagination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Demise of the Aesthetic in Literary StudyEugene GoodheartAnumber of years ago at an MLA convention I was on a search committee interviewing candidates for a position in Victorian literature in our department. One of the candidates had done a dissertation on Christina Rossetti in which “Goblin Market” played a prominent role. As I recall, the candidate was putting forth a New Historicist or feminist argument about the (...) poem, when one of my colleagues on the committee interrupted her with the question: “But is it a good poem?” The question took me by surprise, for I didn’t remember such a question having been asked of students in years. It dumbfounded the candidate. She had apparently never considered the question. The poem was there as an occasion for... I was about to write interpretation or analysis, but it would be more accurate to say: a placement in a particular discourse—historicist, feminist, deconstructionist, ideological. The candidate’s fluency about the poem came to a halt. She spluttered a few phrases about the power of the poem. She was unprepared to answer the question, having never been asked or taught to ask it by her teachers of any poem or novel or play that she had read.We may not have been fair in our judgment of her. If we had been consistent and asked the same question of all the candidates, I don’t think we would have met with greater success. Our candidate’s disability was, indeed still is, built into the profession of literary studies at the present time. That aesthetic judgment is not one of the current professional practices is clear not only from its absence in the content of literary study but from the styles of the discoursers. No longer written [End Page 139] in a vernacular style, criticism has become a species of sociological prose once held in contempt by literary scholars: ponderous, abstract, obscure, ungainly, jargonish. There are practitioners of New Historicism, ideology critique, and deconstruction who write well, but who seem to regard their own gifts of expression as incidental, and are not in the least discomfited by the bad writing of others.Style is not an incidental matter. Orwell made a compelling case for its political and moral significance. In his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” he preaches the virtues of plain speech, the transparent and elegant style as a mark of self-honesty. (Transparency makes it difficult to conceal your ideas from yourself.) In Writing Degree Zero and subsequent writings, Barthes deconstructed, so to speak, the Enlightenment myth of transparency as a guarantor of honesty and truth. Reality was not as perspicuous to “natural” plain writing as the Enlightenment believed. Barthes’s own style (rich, inventive, personal, alternately perspicuous, and obscure) is that of an imaginative writer. I don’t want to adjudicate the differences between Orwell and Barthes, but I should note what may not be obvious: they have a shared aesthetic concern with style, a concern that has virtually disappeared from academic discourse.It has become almost an embarrassment to speak in behalf of aesthetic value in the academy. One of the few unembarrassed exceptions is the voice of Harold Bloom whose jeremiad The Western Canon begins defiantly with an affirmation of the aesthetic against its demystifiers. “‘Aesthetic value’ is sometimes regarded as a suggestion of Immanuel Kant’s rather than an actuality, but that has not been my experience during a lifetime of reading.” 1 I take it that Bloom is saying that aesthetic value is an experience and not a theory. Indeed, if we insist on a theoretical justification of the aesthetic, we will end up speaking as does Barbara Herrnstein Smith of its contingent and subjective status (it is in the eye of the beholder and every beholder sees things differently) or we may find that the aesthetic is inescapably contaminated by political, moral, and philosophical interests. “Contaminated” perhaps, but as Bloom says, not reducible to these interests. It is useful to remember that aesthetics has been traditionally associated with the idea of disinterestedness. As Jerome Stolnitz remarks, we perceive beauty when it is the object of a “disinterested and sympathetic attention... (shrink)

Moral imagination has been described by Murdoch as ‘a way of seeing’. The focus of concern here is the influence of belief upon moral imagination and those attitudes that are needed if moral imagination is to be developed. The perspective adopted endorses a Humean recognition of the potent influence of personal experience upon those beliefs that are held, and therefore upon how we see the world. Kantian commitment to the power of the will, and to the ability of individuals to (...) choose who they wish to be, allows room for optimism, a view which is supported by the findings of Liaschenko. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I explain the psychological impact of narrative fiction films and some of their effects on social and moral life. This puts my project at one of the intersections between aesthetics and moral psychology. In the first half of the dissertation, which focuses on moral psychology, I develop an account of empathy that specifies its essential characteristics and distinguishes it from several closely related phenomena that are often confused with it. I define empathy as a complex (...) psychological process during which we imaginatively inhabit the perspective of another individual, while at the same time preserving a clearly differentiated sense of self. After defining empathy, I consider its role in social and moral life. The second half of the dissertation concerns the question of how we engage characters in narrative fiction films. I argue that we typically empathize with one or more characters, though this is only one dimension of our film viewing experience. To characterize this process and its effects on social and moral life, I utilize the account of empathy developed in the first half of the dissertation. My project is primarily descriptive and draws from several areas of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Shows the relevance of Schiller’s thought for contemporary philosophy, particularly aesthetics, ethics, and politics. This book seeks to draw attention to Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) as a philosophical thinker in his own right. For too long, his philosophical contribution has been neglected in favor of his much-deserved reputation as a political playwright. The essays in this collection make two arguments. First, Schiller presents a robust philosophical program that can be favorably compared to those of his age, including Rousseau, Kant, Schelling, and (...) Hegel, and he proves to be their equal in his thinking on morality, aesthetics, and politics. Second, Schiller can also guide us in our more contemporary philosophical concerns and approaches, such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and politics. Here, Schiller instructs us in our engagement with figures such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Roberto Esposito, and others. María del Rosario Acosta López is Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She has published several books, including La tragedia como conjuro: el problema de lo sublime en Friedrich Schiller. Jeffrey L. Powell is Professor of Philosophy at Marshall University and the editor of Heidegger and Language. (shrink)

It is a familiar thesis that art affects moral imagination. But as a metaphor or model for moral experience, artistic production and enjoyment have been overlooked. This is no small oversight, not because artists are more saintly than the rest of us, but because seeing imagination so blatantly manifested gives us new eyes with which to see what can be made of imagination in everyday life. Artistic creation offers a rich model for understanding the sort of social imagination that is (...) essential to moral deliberation. The " moral " of the arts is that everyday moral decisions can be as richly consummated as artistic productions. The distance is narrowed between this ideal and actual deliberations to the degree that a culture focuses beyond sedimented moral criteria to education of aesthetic virtues of sensitivity, perceptiveness, discernment, creativity, expressiveness, courage, foresight, communicativeness, and experimental intelligence. (Note: The key concepts and main line of argument in this article are further developed in ch. 7 of John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics (Indiana University Press, 2003).). (shrink)

Peter Viereck and the imaginative conservation of order -- The Nazi revolt against decency -- Arbitrary caprice -- The crux of civilization -- Ahistorical rationality and human nature -- Will and the ethical imperative of inner action -- The moral imagination -- The dream-nexus -- An imaginative conservatism -- The standardless threat to liberty -- The unadjusted incarnation of order.

Shows the relevance of Schiller’s thought for contemporary philosophy, particularly aesthetics, ethics, and politics. This book seeks to draw attention to Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) as a philosophical thinker in his own right. For too long, his philosophical contribution has been neglected in favor of his much-deserved reputation as a political playwright. The essays in this collection make two arguments. First, Schiller presents a robust philosophical program that can be favorably compared to those of his age, including Rousseau, Kant, Schelling, and (...) Hegel, and he proves to be their equal in his thinking on morality, aesthetics, and politics. Second, Schiller can also guide us in our more contemporary philosophical concerns and approaches, such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and politics. Here, Schiller instructs us in our engagement with figures such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Roberto Esposito, and others. (shrink)

Children, even very young children, distinguish moral from conventional transgressions, inasmuch as they hold that the former, but not the latter, would still be wrong if there was no rule prohibiting them. Many people have taken this finding as evidence that morality is objective, and therefore universal. I argue that reflection on the phenomenon of imaginative resistance will lead us to question these claims. If a concept applies in virtue of the obtaining of a set of more basic facts, then (...) it is authority independent, and we therefore resist the attempts of authorities to claim that it does not apply. Thus, the moral/conventional distinction is a product of imaginative resistance to claims that a concept does not apply when its supervenience base is in place (or vice versa). All we can rightfully conclude from the fact that children are disposed to make the moral/conventional distinction is that our moral concepts belong to the class of authority-independent concepts. Though the set of basic facts in virtue of which an authority-independent concept obtains must be objective, the concept itself might be conventional, inasmuch as we could easily draw its boundaries wider or narrower, or fail to have a concept that corresponds to these properties at all. (shrink)

This paper explores the significance of Adam Smith's ideas for defending non-cognitivist theories of aesthetic appreciation of nature. Objections to non-cognitivism argue that the exercise of emotion and imagination in aesthetic judgement potentially sentimentalizes and trivializes nature. I argue that although directed at moral judgement, Smith's views also find a place in addressing this problem. First, sympathetic imagination may afford a deeper and more sensitive type of aesthetic engagement. Second, in taking up the position of the impartial spectator, aesthetic judgements (...) may originate in a type of self-regulated response where we stand outside ourselves to check those overly humanizing tendencies which might lead to a failure in appreciating nature as nature. (shrink)

Emerging research suggests that an organization’s ability to sustain a competitive advantage is increasingly linked to its successful pursuit of a business strategy that generates mutual benefit where the business is both profitable and functional for the common good. The question remains, however: What are the attributes of decision makers that enable them to realize mutually beneficial outcomes? This dissertation argues that one critical key to solving this question is a better understanding of moral imagination in organizational decision making. (...) To test this hypothesis, a new vignette-based cognitive measure for moral imagination in organizational decision making was created to explore empirically the relationship between moral imagination and mutually beneficial decision making. Overall, findings from 180 respondents supported the hypothesis that individuals, who exercise moral imagination, including the ability for discerning moral issues and developing a range of possible outcomes during the decision-making process, are indeed more likely to generate a mutually beneficial outcome for a situation compared to those who do not exercise moral imagination. Implications and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

While examining the important role of imagination in making moral judgments, John Dewey and Moral Imagination focuses new attention on the relationship between American pragmatism and ethics. Steven Fesmire takes up threads of Dewey's thought that have been largely unexplored and elaborates pragmatism's distinctive contribution to understandings of moral experience, inquiry, and judgment. Building on two Deweyan notions—that moral character, belief, and reasoning are part of a social and historical context and that moral deliberation is an imaginative, dramatic rehearsal of (...) possibilities—Fesmire shows that moral imagination can be conceived as a process of aesthetic perception and artistic creativity. Fesmire's original readings of Dewey shed new light on the imaginative process, human emotional make-up and expression, and the nature of moral judgment. This original book presents a robust and distinctly pragmatic approach to ethics, politics, moral education, and moral conduct. [The downloadable sample is Chapter Seven, "The Moral Artist."]. (shrink)

In recent pragmatist-leaning philosophy and ethics, the Jamesian notion of the cries of the wounded has reemerged as a method of evoking moral progress. Philosophers like Philip Kitcher have argued that a surefooted approach to the complaints of those harmed by given social moral arrangements may lead to an improvement of moral thought, practices and institutions. Yet, at the same time, it has been acknowledged that this comprises a most evident problem: many wounded stakeholders do not cry out about their (...) sorrow, not at last because they may not be capable of doing so. In this paper, we aim at providing a more detailed account on the communicative range of social unrest, capable of overcoming the reductive vision of some possibly harmed as being silent. Some moral philosophers have highlighted the role of the arts and the humanities in the fostering of a more empathetic imagination. With the aid of continental aesthetics (T. W. Adorno and M. Beistegui), we acknowledge the value of artistic imagination as a communicative faculty extending beyond the limits of discursive reason through non-conceptual tools. Taking it into account in moral inquiry effectively expands and provides a more detailed account on the wounded that are apparently silent, as it includes a variety of forms of communication as moral standpoints and conversational apostrophes. This finally leads us to reread James’ take on the notion of the cries of the wounded, to emphasize the necessity to understand it as a fruitful stance about inclusive moral inquiry exceeding the limits of a conceptual-discursive focus. (shrink)

This paper explored the linkages among moral imagination, systems understanding, and aesthetic sensibility as related to the emergence (eventually) of wisdom. I develop a conceptual framework that links these capacities to wisdom through the capacity to “see” moral and ethical issues, which I argue is related to “the good”, to see a realistic understanding of systems in which the observer is embedded, or “the true”, and to appreciate the aesthetic qualities associated with a system or situation, or “the beautiful”. The (...) relationship between the good, the true, and the beautiful is used to argue that all three types of seeing are building blocks for achievement of wisdom. The paper then briefly explores some of the ways that these capacities can potentially be incorporated into the classroom. (shrink)

This edited collection sets forth a new understanding of aesthetic-moral judgment organised around three key concepts: pleasure, reflection, and accountability. The overarching theme is that art is not merely a representation or expression like any other, but that it promotes shared moral understanding and helps us engage in meaning-making. This volume offers an alternative to brain-centric and realist approaches to aesthetics. It features original essays from a number of leading philosophers of art, aesthetics, ethics, and perception, including Elizabeth Burns Coleman, (...) Garrett Cullity, Cynthia A. Freeland, Ivan Gaskell, Paul Guyer, Jane Kneller, Keith Lehrer, Mohan Matthen, Jennifer A. McMahon, Bence Nanay, Nancy Sherman, and Robert Sinnerbrink. Part I of the book analyses the elements of aesthetic experience— pleasure, preference, and imagination—with the individual conceived as part of a particular cultural context and network of other minds. The chapters in Part II explain how it is possible for cultural learning to impact these elements through consensus building, an impulse to objectivity, emotional expression, and reflection. Finally, the chapters in Part III converge on the role of dissonance, difference, and diversity in promoting cultural understanding and advancement. Social Aesthetics and Moral Judgment will appeal to philosophers of art and aesthetics, as well as to scholars in other disciplines interested in issues related to art and cultural exchange. (shrink)

At first sight it might seem that John Locke had about as much to do with the romantic agony as his Whig patricians with working-class radicalism, yet the dialectic of history plays with the logic of ideas, in epistemology and social philosophy alike, to elicit conclusions unexpected by those who enuntiated the premisses. Mr. Tuveson’s careful argument traces the cult, and in some cases the fine frenzy, of communing with the ‘natural sublime’ through the special faculties of moral sense and (...) imagination back to its roots in an empiricism which held that the reason reaches to our impressions of reality rather than to reality itself: as has happened before and since the defects of a dominantly subjective cognition were supplemented from elsewhere. He could have gone back earlier, yet as Aristotle had been ‘the Philosopher’ for the medieval schoolmen so was Locke for the literary men of the eighteenth-century. (shrink)

In this dissertation I indicate a source of harmony between the respectively sociable, and solitary accounts of human individuality in the work of John Dewey and George Santayana. Each account, I argue, emphasizes one side of the same, aesthetic coin, emphases that correspond to certain conspicuous forms of life found in contemporary culture. Four such forms of life, two negative and two positive, correspond to these different emphases: passive versus active, sociable individuality, and passive versus active, solitary individuality. These (...) distinguished forms of life, I conclude, are helpful heuristic tools towards conceiving human individuality aesthetically. This examination ultimately provides the framework for a more focused and sustained analysis of the many fundamental social-cultural-political issues that beset individuals in contemporary life. (shrink)

Since Wittgenstein's Tractatus first appeared in 1921 two interpretations of it have been offered. The received view emphasizes the book's philosophy of mathematics, logic, and language. The alternative view stresses its philosophy of religion, ethics, and aesthetics; it thereby takes seriously Wittgenstein's assertion that the "point" of the Tractatus is ethical. The aim of my dissertation is to build upon and improve the alternative interpretation in three ways. First I show through examination of the Western mystical canon that Wittgenstein's (...) axiology is based on a conception of mentality in which the subject-object distinction is annulled. This clears the ground for clarification of the metaphor of the Tractatus as a "ladder" of transcendence. Next I illustrate through scrutiny of Schopenhauer's theory of art how this metaphor ties up with Wittgenstein's claim that "Ethics and Aesthetics are one." Like Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein holds that moral transformation may be wrought by aesthetic contemplation. I then conclude with a sketch of the Lebensform implied by such transformation which depends on the parallels implied by such transformation which depends on the parallels between Tolstoy's idea of the life outside of time and Wittgenstein's notion of das gute Leben. In so doing I depict the Tractatus's ethical point as gestural, recommending a kind of existence of which the book itself is an expressive part. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 440-444 [Access article in PDF] Arnd Kerkhecker. Callimachus' Book of Iambi. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. xxiv + 334 pp. 5 plates. Cloth, $85.00. The Iambi have been slow to profit from Callimachus' recent popularity, even though our much changed sense of the archaic iambicists, especially Archilochus, makes the collection due for a major reassessment. In Hellenistica Groningana 1 (1993), the Iambi claim scarcely (...) two pages out of two hundred, and in Alan Cameron's iconoclastic Callimachus and His Critics (1995) a bit more than five out of five hundred. Though Callimachean polyeideia cannot be well understood without the Iambi, readers continue to be daunted by these difficult fragments, which in places are little more than a tale told by a diegete, signifying nothing very certain.Now, twenty years after Dee Lister Clayman's fine, short survey of the Iambi, we have not one, but two, book-length readings of the collection. As if the [End Page 440] poet had suddenly risen to sow discord while preaching eunoia, Kerkhecker's formidable Oxford dissertation of 1997 comes to us already in pitched disagreement with Benjamin Acosta-Hughes's Stanford thesis (1995), forthcoming from the University of California Press as Polyeideia: The Iambi of Callimachus and the Archaic Iambic Tradition. Callimachus would not have it any other way.These rival projects complement each other as well as disagree. Acosta-Hughes accommodates the Greekless reader with translations of the Diegesis and the ten Iambi he discusses; in addressing classicists generally, Kerkhecker provides close guidance to the papyri for nonspecialists. As his title indicates, Acosta-Hughes focuses on aesthetics; Kerkhecker revives J. K. Newman's question, "Do the Iamboi make no moral appeal?" (9). Where Acosta-Hughes reads the collection by thematic groupings, Kerkhecker reads the Iambi in sequence and, importantly, as a single composition in thirteen parts. The operative word in his title is "book." I limit myself below to Kerkhecker's monograph, which provides an indispensable ancilla to and partial updating of Pfeiffer's edition, and which constructs as strong a case as can be imagined, on the current evidence, for the designed unity of the Iambi: "Callimachus is not just collecting and editing his own poems, much like those of others; he is composing with the collection in mind, with a view to the scholarly edition, for the Book" (290).Kerkhecker presents an impressive range of mastery, from papyrology to connoisseurship of a later Aufklärungszeitalter. Wieland, Lessing, Herder, and even Fielding offer a reminder of what was once at stake in debates about art. Kerkhecker writes lucid, lively, and often witty prose that is worthy of his tastes and subject. To counter the current age of theory, he reasserts a reminiscently Enlightenment faith in the text; "social text" and "intertext" join Euhemerus in silence and disgrace. Kerkhecker reads the Iambi as a self-enclosed poetic universe, without relying on speculations about chronology, Ptolemaic patronage, designed correspondence to the Aetia, Horatian imitation, or Cameron's questions about performance. On Greek "poetry books," Cameron and Kerkhecker stand in diametrical opposition. In Kerkhecker's view, Callimachus' book articulates a "new Iambic Spirit" (293) by looking inward: to manners more than morals, to Selbstkritik rather than Zeitkritik, and to self-parody beneath feigned polemic. As in later ages, the mark of such hermetic and self-conscious Buchdichtung is multilayered irony.Reconstructions of Greek poetry books proceed against stiff resistance, but Kerkhecker's monograph securely earns a place on the shelf near Pfeiffer by the rigor and erudition of his interpretation on all levels. Chapters on individual Iambi begin with a reassessment of Pfeiffer's edition based on Kerkhecker's collation of the papyri and with an explanation of Pfeiffer's rationale in combining papyri, quotations, and other evidence. Kerkhecker discusses unpublished readings by Coles, Maas, and Rea, and differs in some sixty places from Pfeiffer, whose authority survives this scrutiny intact. Until the now faded Oxyrhynchus Papyri VII.1011 can be reedited, the reader has a full and fair assessment of how the evidence stands. Kerkhecker forthrightly discloses the extent of his own... (shrink)

이 논문의 주된 목적은 듀이의 자연주의적 관점에서 도덕적 경험과 심미적 경험의 연속 성의 의미를 밝히는 것이다. 심미적 경험을 모든 경험의 완결적 국면으로 보는 듀이에 따 르면, 여타의 경험과 마찬가지로 도덕적 경험 또한 심미적 경험이 될 수 있다. 그런데 듀 이는 어떻게 도덕적 경험이 심미적 경험이 될 수 있는지를 구체적으로 해명하지 않았다. 그 결과 듀이의 윤리학은 심미적 경험의 관점에서 이해되기보다 과학적이고 실험적인 방 법 및 그 결과만을 우선시하는 이론으로 오해되는 측면이 있다. 연구자는 듀이가 가능성으 로만 제시한 도덕적 경험과 심미적 경험의 연속성 (...) 논제를 구체적인 맥락에서 조명함으로 써, 듀이의 윤리학이 자연과학적 확실성에 기반한 이론이 아니라 경험의 질적 성장을 위한 방법론이라는 점을 드러내 보일 것이다. (shrink)

Imagination occupies a central place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle. However, following a period of relative neglect there has been an explosion of interest in imagination in the past two decades as philosophers examine the role of imagination in debates about the mind and cognition, aesthetics and ethics, as well as epistemology, science and mathematics. This outstanding _Handbook_ contains over thirty specially commissioned chapters by leading philosophers organised into six clear sections examining the most important aspects of the philosophy (...) of imagination, including: Imagination in historical context: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl, and Sartre What is imagination? The relation between imagination and mental imagery; imagination contrasted with perception, memory, and dreaming Imagination in aesthetics: imagination and our engagement with music, art, and fiction; the problems of fictional emotions and ‘imaginative resistance’ Imagination in philosophy of mind and cognitive science: imagination and creativity, the self, action, child development, and animal cognition Imagination in ethics and political philosophy, including the concept of 'moral imagination' and empathy Imagination in epistemology and philosophy of science, including learning, thought experiments, scientific modelling, and mathematics. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy _of Imagination_ is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind and psychology, aesthetics, and ethics. It will also be a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as psychology and art. (shrink)

Edmund Burke’s speeches and writings during the trial of Warren Hastings—from 1788 to 1795—remain one of the most comprehensive assessments of the effects of colonial trade and territorial expansion on Britain’s nationalist self. A rhetorical reading of his prosecution speeches reveals how they affected the public response to the trial by evoking the sublime and framing terror as the basic feature of Britain’s mercantile imperialist agenda in the colonies. Moreover, by associating Hastings’s governance of Bengal with sublime terror, Burke altered (...) the interpretations of virtue and corruption, thus distancing both Britain and India from the rampant profiteering of the East India Company. Burke’s critique of the degenerative influences of commercial imperialism along with the reformulation of his ideas in subsequent colonial historiography is crucial for assessing how the aesthetics of the sublime conferred greater moral force to the sporadic and fragmented reports about the Company’s abuses of power in India. (shrink)

Richard Wright gave a series of lectures in Europe from 1950 to 1956, collected in the following year in the volume, White Man, Listen! One dominant theme in all four essays is that expanding the moral imagination is centrally important in repairing our racism-benighted globe. What makes Wright’s version of this claim unique is his forthright admission that expanding the moral imagination necessarily involves pain and suffering. The best place to hear Wright in regard to the necessary pain of expanding (...) the moral imagination, I would argue, is his poetry collection, This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner. To wit, for Wright the necessary pain of expanding one’s moral imagination is the loneliness that results from delegating to others—in the etymological sense of “deputizing or committing”—one’s whiteness qua privilege or social capital. In conclusion, lonely delegation constitutes an imperative template from Wright regarding the painful expansion of our own moral imagination, in the service of social justice for economically oppressed communities of color across the globe. (shrink)

How can one be a good person? That, in essence, is the question I ask in this dissertation. More specifically, I ask how we, in general, can best go about the complex and never-ending task of trying to figure out what we should do and then do it. I answer that question in four articles, each dealing with an aspect of the model of morality presented by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The title of the (...) class='Hi'>dissertation, ‘How to be a good sentimentalist’, thus refers to that particular philosophical framework. However, the answers I give should be relevant to any person concerned with how to be a good person. The first article, Moral Tuning, deals with the first part of the question, namely how we can best go about figuring out what it is that we should and should not do. Specifically, it deals with the question of whether, and if so how, individuals like you and I can critically reflect upon the norms of our own society, sorting the chaff of merely conventional norms from the wheat of genuinely moral ones. In brief, it is the question of whether we as individuals are autonomous in our relation to the norms of our own society. In answering this question, my co-authors and I argue that Smith’s use of musical metaphors in TMS, words like tone, pitch, and concord, can be understood as elements of an analogical model of morality. In contrast to earlier interpretations of Smith’s musical metaphors, which have seen music as an aesthetic object, we draw on recent developments in musicology to argue that music may also be construed as a practice. Construing the source domain of this analogical model as musical practice allows us to construe the target domain also as a practice—as moral tuning. This in turn allows us to argue that moral autonomy consists in realising the freedom inherent in the constant need to translate norms into action, and in so doing, to interpret and reinterpret, not only the actions, but the norms themselves. In other words, following the norms of our own society already implies that we are autonomous in relation to them. Being good sentimentalists thus begins with realising that we are free to question and reshape the moral standard of our own society. The second article, Love Redirected, deals with the second part of the question, namely how we can best go about doing what we already think we should do. This, then, is a question of moral motivation, more specifically a question about the difference between genuinely moral motivation and other kinds of motivation, like a selfish desire for praise. Smith himself argues that we not only desire the actual praise of other people, but to be worthy of their praise, to be ‘praiseworthy’. The desire to be praiseworthy, the ‘love of praiseworthiness’ is then the genuinely moral motivation, for it aims at nothing but the satisfaction of having done the right thing. The trouble with Smith’s answer is that he does not adequately connect his claim about praiseworthiness to the rest of his model. This has lead to some confusion in the secondary literature, and in the first part of Love Redirected, I seek to end this confusion by combining what Smith says in the various editions of TMS into a coherent argument for how the desire to be praiseworthy comes from redirecting our desire for praise from other people towards the ideal of the ‘impartial spectator’. I then go on to show how this reading also fits with modern psychological research on the moral development of children. Finally, I conclude that this redirection of our desire for praise requires not just negative, but positive emotional reinforcement. Therefore, becoming good sentimentalists involves taking pleasure in our moral successes, no less than we are pained at our failures. The third article, The Practical Impossibility of Being both Impartial and Well-informed, makes a first pass at dealing with the idea of the impartial spectator itself, an idea that is central to the answers given in the two first articles. The problem with the impartial spectator is that she is also supposed to be well-informed about those she judges. However, the demands of impartiality and of understanding pull in opposite directions: To be well-informed—to properly understand the situation and character of the person we judge—we must, typically, be sufficiently physically close to that person to see with our own eyes what they are going through. At the same time, this kind of physical closeness tends to entangle us in the kinds of emotional bonds that hinder an impartial evaluation. One might think that this tension could be eased or eliminated by relying less on physical closeness and more on the powers of our imagination to, as Smith frequently puts it, ‘bring home to us’ the situation of the person we are judging. However, using Construal Level Theory, I argue that merely imagining someone’s situation in detail and/or taking their perspective produces a similar effect to physical closeness, and hence that the tension between understanding and impartiality is practically inescapable. To be good sentimentalists, we must therefore recognise our limitations, and give up on the illusion of ever being fully understanding and perfectly impartial at the same time. The fourth article, The Partially Impartial Spectator as an Ethical Ideal, makes a second pass at dealing with the idea, or rather ideal, of the impartial spectator. It begins with the recognition that we frequently fail to be impartial spectators, both of others, and of ourselves. This is especially true in those cases where our views conflict with those of someone else. Building on research detailing the various ways in which cognitive and affective biases impact our perception of the world, our reasoning about our own views, and our ability to resolve disputes with others, I argue that merely trying harder to be impartial spectators is liable to backfire, rendering us just as biased as ever, to which is added an unshakeable confidence that we were right all along. Therefore, I go on to argue, we must try smarter. Trying smarter, I conclude, involves aiming for something less ideal, more achievable, and, most importantly, humbler, namely to be partially impartial spectators. Being a good sentimentalist thus beings with realising our freedom to interpret, continues in our taking pleasure in our moral successes, pauses at the realisation that we will never be truly impartial spectators, and ends with a commitment to continued improvement under the lodestar of the ideal of the partially impartial spectator. (shrink)

Debates among contemporary philosophers and literary scholars on the moral value of representational art revolve around how art appreciation influences the audience—whether viewer or reader. Martha Nussbaum, a distinguished scholar in law and ethics who has initiated many lively dialogues on this subject, holds that we have a great deal to learn from literary works—in particular, realist novels—because they so concretely depict the ways in which personal and social circumstances shape human emotions, actions, and choices. While Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (...) can motivate impartial concern, she posits, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl demonstrates how we should conduct moral deliberation.1 Noël Carroll, a principal... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Dewey & Moral ImaginationWilliam T. MyersJohn Dewey & Moral Imagination, by Steven Fesmire. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003, 167 pp., $19.95 paper.The resurgence of interest in pragmatism, especially in regard to the work of John Dewey, has been ongoing for several decades now. In addition to the development of neo-pragmatism with its appreciation of the deconstructive side of Dewey, there have also been numerous books (...) written on the constructive side of pragmatism, including pragmatist aesthetics, metaphysics, politics, and education. An interest in pragmatist ethics, though later coming, seems to be picking up some steam at last, and Steven Fesmire's book, John Dewey & Moral Imagination, is an important contribution to that burgeoning area of inquiry.While Fesmire's book is not a full-blown account of a Deweyan moral theory, a fact he makes clear from the [End Page 107] outset, it is an insightful and important development of the role of aesthetics, inquiry, and imagination within a Deweyan framework. Fesmire is not interested in simply explicating Dewey's view of imagination, but in further developing Dewey's sometimes cryptic comments on the subject. But even more than that, Fesmire explicitly notes that he is going beyond Dewey, though Dewey is his starting point (p. 4). And in this enterprise, the book is successful, as Fesmire's development is very much in the spirit of Dewey's empiricism. That having been said, however, there are some elements of Dewey's ethics that I believe are important to Fesmire's interpretation, but do not receive enough attention in his book. In addition, the centrality of imagination seems somewhat overstated, sometimes to the detriment of other central notions. I will address these concerns later.In the Introduction, Fesmire states three interrelated theses that he builds a case for: "(1) Moral character, belief, and reasoning are inherently social, embodied, and historically situated; (2) Moral deliberation is fundamentally imaginative and historically situated; (3) Moral conduct is helpfully conceived on the model of aesthetic perception and artistic creation" (p. 4). He goes on to note that the first two are clearly and articulately defended by Dewey, and the third is "inspired" by him, but, clearly, this latter one he sees as a further development of Dewey's ethics.In order to build his case, Fesmire spends Part I of the book elaborating the "pragmatic turn" and its conception of "character, belief, inquiry, and intelligence" (p. 4). This first part is necessary in order to keep the second, more developmental part from seeming a piecemeal dialogue with traditional ethical theories. In other words, Part I contextualizes Part II.In the opening chapter, "Habit and Character," Fesmire contrasts the Deweyan notion of character with the traditional atomistic conception of the individual. As Dewey points out, it isn't that moral conduct ought to be social; rather it is social by its very nature (p. 13). Indeed, character and habits are socially derived from our cultural context. Moral inquiry is, then, social at its very base. Using the example of Studs Lonigan, Fesmire continues to develop these notions through a fascinating discussion of the James T. Farrell character. The application of the Deweyan notion of character and habit is a natural fit here, given that Farrell wrote his trilogy as an explicit exploration of Dewey's notion of habit. Through this discussion, we see the ongoing struggle of the individual and the environment, with the ultimate lesson learned being that one cannot be separated from the other, though either can be destructive of the other. Fesmire then applies this same essential idea to nature and culture. As Fesmire notes, "Dewey's goal was to break down the barriers that separate nature from culture, to show that biological drives are transmuted by social life, that neither impulse nor culture simply trumps the other, and that culture lends itself as much to intelligent conservation and critical redirection as to transmission" (p. 23). The lesson to learn from all of this is that the individual is not, as much traditional moral theory has supposed, a detached decision maker who can, by a simple act of will, follow some categorical imperative. Indeed, "[i]ndividuals... (shrink)

How do our engagements with fictions and other products of the imagination compare to our experiences of the real world? Are the feelings we have about a novel's characters modelled on our thoughts about actual people? If it is wrong to feel pleasure over certain situations in real life, can it nonetheless be right to take pleasure in analogous scenarios represented in a fantasy or film? Should the desires we have for what goes on in a make-believe story cohere with (...) what we want to happen in the actual world? In Apt Imaginings, Jonathan Gilmore develops a new framework to pursue these questions, marshalling a wide range of research in aesthetics, the science of the emotions, moral philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and film and literary theory. Gilmore argues that, while there is a substantial empirical continuity in our feelings across art and life, the norms that govern the appropriateness of those responses across the divide are discontinuous. In this view, the evaluative criteria that determine the fit, correctness, or rationality of our emotions and desires for what is internal to a fiction can be contrary to those that govern our affective attitudes toward analogous things in the real world. In short, it can be right to embrace within a story what one would condemn in real life. The theory Gilmore defends in this volume helps to explain our complex and sometimes conflicted attitudes toward works of the imagination; challenges the popular view that fictions serve to refine our moral sensibilities; and exposes a kind of autonomy of the imagination that can render our responses to art immune to standard real-world epistemic, practical, and affective kinds of criticism. (shrink)

A Hegelian reading of good and bad luck -- In Shakespearean drama (phen. of spirit, King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, a Midsummer night's dream) -- Tearing the fabric: Hegel's Antigone, Shakespeare's Coriolanus, and kinship-state conflict (phen. of spirit c. 6, Judith Butler's Antigone, Coriolanus) -- Aufhebung and anti-aufhebung: geist and ghosts in Hamlet (phen. of spirit, Hamlet) -- The problem of genius in King Lear: Hegel on the feeling soul and the tragedy of wonder (anthropology and psychology in the encyclopaedia, Philosophy (...) of mind, King Lear) -- Richard II's mirror and the alienation of the Universal Will (of the I that is a We) (Richard II, phen. of spirit c. 5) -- Falstaff and the politics of wit: negative infinite judgment in a culture of alienation (Henry IV parts I & II, phen. of spirit c. 6, philosophy of right) -- Henry V's unchangeableness: his rejection of wit and his posture of virtue reinterpreted in the light of Hegel's theory of virtue (philosophy of right, Henry V) -- Hegel's theory of crime and evil: (re)tracing the rights of the sovereign self (aesthetics, phen. of spirit, phil. of right, Richard II through to Henry V) -- Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth and Henry V: conscience, hypocrisy, self-deceit and the tragedy of ethical life (phil. of right, Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V) -- Negation of the negative infinite judgment versus sublation of it: punishment vs. pardon (phil. of right, phen. of spirit c. 6 and Henry VIII) -- Universal wit : the absolute theater of identity (phen. of spirit c. 6 and 8, Pericles, the Tempest) -- Absolute infections and their cure (phen. of spirit c. 6, the Winter's tale). (shrink)

This article examines Kant’s overlooked concept of “active play,” as opposed to “free play,” in connection with the influence of the Brunonian system of medicine, both of which, I propose, are central to understanding the broader significance of intoxication in Kant’s post-1795 work. Beginning with a discussion of the late-18th century German reception of Brunonian theory, the idea of vital stimulus, and their importance for Kant, I assess the distinction drawn between gluttony and intoxication in The Metaphysics of Morals and (...) Anthropology from a Practical Point of View. Both are analysed in the context of the Brunonian system of medicine, having establishing Kant’s commitment to the Brunonianism system, as corroborated by Wasianski. What emerges is a novel understanding of intoxication in the work of Immanuel Kant, which brings to light a previously unexamined dynamic between imagination, intoxication, and the aesthetic. (shrink)

This dissertation treats two themes crucial for the emergence of modern aesthetics. First, it considers the "aesthetic consciousness," which results from a rejection of the Aristotelian mimesis doctrine, and which seeks to establish art as independent from either morality or nature. Second, it treats the "historical consciousness," required to bring about the aesthetic consciousness, and eventually to raise it to the level of a moral ideal. Thus, the dissertation begins by considering that version of the mimetic argument rejected (...) by the moderns: it treats Lessing's moral interpretation of dramatic catharsis. Lessing's moral interpretation of catharsis, it is argued, jeopardizes the harmony between nature, morality and art on which the mimetic argument rests. Thus, the second chapter treats the first decisive challenge to the mimetic tradition: Rousseau's attack on the moral interpretation of catharsis. This attack follows two steps. First, Rousseau argues that the arts efface man's natural moral character. Second, Rousseau's developmental/historical account of man supports this opposition between art, on the one hand, and nature and morality, on the other. Rousseau, thus, is seen to be the first to introduce a historical consciousness of development into discussions of art, which revises the traditional links between art, nature and morality, and established a direction for Kant and Schiller. ;In light of Lessing and Rousseau, Kant's foundation of an aesthetic consciousness can be more clearly understood. Thus, the third chapter considers Kant's argument for aesthetic by considering three themes: first, Kant's notion of autonomy; second, Kant's analysis of the disinterestedness of the aesthetic judgement; third, his account of genius as the cause of fine art. ;Kant's argument, however, suggests that the aesthetic consciousness supercedes morality. Although Kant himself never pursues this suggestion, Schiller does. Thus, the final chapter treats Schiller's attempt to retrieve the moral and the natural without sacrificing the autonomy of the fine arts. Schiller does this by bringing Rousseau's historical consciousness of the human as a development beyond nature with Kant's aesthetic consciousness. This chapter, therefore, treats three themes. First, it considers how Schiller's distinction between naive and sentimental poetry translates into historical categories: ancient and modern. Second, it shows how the goal of the sentimental poet is a "moral unity" between art and nature, the necessity of which is unknown to the naive poet. Third, it considers how, through the search for a moral unity achieved only through a historical consciousness of progress from naive to sentimental, the nature of art becomes, for the first time, a function of human history. The dissertation concludes with a summary of these themes in terms of the distinction between the good and the beautiful. (shrink)

The empirical basis for this article is threeyears of experience with ethical rounds atUppsala University Hospital. Three standardapproaches of ethical reasoning are examined aspotential explanations of what actually occursduring the ethical rounds. For reasons given,these are not found to be satisfyingexplanations. An approach called ``imaginativeethics'', is suggested as a more satisfactoryaccount of this kind of ethical reasoning. Theparticipants in the ethical rounds seem to drawon a kind of moral competence based on personallife experience and professional competence andexperience. By listening to (...) other perspectivesand other experiences related to one particularpatient story, the participants imaginealternative horizons of moral experience andexplore a multitude of values related toclinical practice that might be at stake. Inhis systematic treatment of aesthetics in theCritique of Judgement, Kant made use ofan operation of thought that, if applied toethics, will enable us to be more sensitive tothe particulars of each moral situation. Basedon this reading of Kant, an account ofimaginative ethics is developed in order tobring the ethical praxis of doctors and nursesinto sharper relief. The Hebraic and theHellenic traditions of imagination are used inorder to illuminate some of the experiences ofethical rounds. In conclusion, it is arguedthat imaginative ethics and principle-basedethics should be seen as complementary in orderto endow a moral discourse with ethicalauthority. Kantian ethics will do the job if itis remembered that Kant suggested only amodest, negative role of principle-baseddeliberation. (shrink)

This volume is by no means out of place for a reader in the twenty first century as resemblances between the age of the machine and our own digital age are surprisingly numerous, particularly with reference to the patterns of intellectual response to unprecedented stimuli. The worrisome parallelisms and analogues are purposefully kept off stage for the imaginative audience to complement the plot of the real drama of the Industrial Revolution as it was witnessed by such imaginative medievalist 'knights' as (...) Carlyle, Cobbett, Southey, Pugin, Ruskin and Morris, intelligent thinkers who performed the universal 'type' rather than the subjective or egocentric in so far as their intellectual responses to the discrepancy between two dissimilar epochs was concerned. The reader is, therefore, expected to be engaged with the arguments of the 'neo-feudal', the 'moral-aesthetic' and the utopian 'social-aesthetic' arguments at the core of the book both imaginatively and intellectually. On the first level, he is requested to shuttle between two centuries separated by the length of a different century. On the second, however, he is expected not only to appreciate the artistically excellent literary works of prominent belletrists, but also to examine the clever polemics they developed as methods of treatment and persuasion aiming at a solution of the social and psychological problems that arose from the incongruity between the present and the past, with specific references to such significant concepts as those of time, history, progress and authority which are examined against the superheated touchstones of democratization, liberty, laissez-faire ethics, mechanization, poverty and social protest in the industrial city. (shrink)

Scholars who mention the turn to Aristotelian virtue ethics in the Mid-Twentieth Century tend to cite G. E. M. Anscombe’s famous ‘complaint’, and sometimes Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. It is less usual to write of Roger Scruton. Placed in the context of Bernard Williams and John Casey’s works – at the intersection of moral philosophy and the philosophy of the emotions – Scruton’s theory of the imagination is shown to concern the rationality of moral attitudes. In short, it concerns virtue (...) ethics. Of broader interest, following Scruton’s arguments, his aesthetics may be conceived as concerning stores of moral knowledge; this is by virtue of the sensuous conditioning of the thought-content of moral judgement. The centrality of imitation to Aristotelian ethics, in other words, finds its concomitant in the object of imitation as the artwork. It is my view that Scruton’s work, Art and Imagination (his PhD thesis of 1973), is an attempt to provide a framework for the judgement involved in virtue ethics, concerning both intentionality and object. (shrink)

What is Imagination? What is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in a contemporary civilization dominated by the image? How can we reconcile the right to imagine with the right to justice? Are the claims of artistic creativity and moral responsibility compatible? With an extended foreword and an afterword chapter, and fascinating new material on the narrative imagination, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern provides a critically developed and accessible account of the major theories of imagination in modern European thought. (...) It analyses and assesses the decisive contributions made to our understanding of the imaginary life by phenomenology (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard), hermeneutics (Heidegger, Ricoeur), and post-modernism (Vattima, Kristeva, Lyotard). Richard Kearney achieves this with a coherent and committed approach, which displays his own passionate concern for the claims of imagination in our post-modern world of fragmentation and fracture. This is essential reading for those interested in current leading debates on the role of imagining in continental philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, art theory and literary criticism. (shrink)

When we are invited to imagine an unacceptable moral proposition to be true in fiction, we feel resistance when we try to imagine it. Despite this, it is nonetheless possible to suppose that the proposition is true. In this paper, I argue that existing accounts of imaginative resistance are unable to explain why only attempts to imagine the truth of moral propositions cause resistance. My suggestion is that imagination, unlike supposition, involves mental imagery and imaginative resistance arises when imagery that (...) one has formed does not match unacceptable propositions. (shrink)