Philosophy

The Necessity of Theater examines the whole art of theater, which teaches us how best to watch and be watched, and is as necessary to human life as language. We practice the art of theater on the formal stage, but also in sports events, weddings, and ceremonies of all kinds. The book begins by defining the art in a broad way, so as to include as many kinds of theater as possible across world cultures. After defining theater, The Necessity of Theater examines in turn each of the main elements of its two main components: the art of watching and that of being watched. Performers practice the art of making their actions worth watching. This means that they should pay attention to such elements as action, choice, plot, character, mimesis, and the sacredness of performance space. All of these are covered in the book. Audiences practice the art of paying attention to the actions before them. To do that they need to know how to find events worth watching. A good audience is emotionally engaged through one of the many forms of empathy that are distinguished in this book, one of which leads to human wisdom. Plato's ancient attack on theater is right in that theater cannot teach us transcendent truths, but theater does each us about ourselves.

Thought, to be thought at all, must be about a world independent of us. But thinking takes capacities for thought, which inevitably shape thought's objects. What would count as something being green—so when it would be true that it was—is identified, somehow, by what those who have being green in mind, are prepared to recognize. Which can make it seem that what is true, and what not, is not independent of us. In which case our thought is not really about an independent world—so not really thought at all. Two apparent truisms thus form an apparent paradox. Much philosophy, from Locke to Quine, from Kant to Frege to Wittgenstein, to Putnam, to John McDowell, is a response to this, often dominated by it. This book contains eleven chapters, each working in its own way towards dissolving this air of paradox, and towards giving the role of the parochial in our thought—features of our thought which need not belong to all thought—its proper, unthreatening, due.

This book argues that what it is to be a picture does not fundamentally concern how such representations can be perceived, but how they relate to one another syntactically and semantically. This kind of approach, first championed by Nelson Goodman in his Languages of Art, has not found many supporters in part because of weaknesses with Goodman’s account. It is shown that a properly crafted structural account of pictures has many advantages over the perceptual accounts that dominate the literature on this topic. Part I (Chapters 1-5) presents the account and draws out some of its immediate consequences. In particular, it explains the close relationship between pictures, diagrams, graphs, and other kinds of non-linguistic representation. Also, it undermines the claim that pictures are essentially visual by showing how many kinds of non-visual representations, including audio recordings and tactile line drawings, are genuinely pictorial. Part II (Chapters 6-10) shows that the structural account of depiction can help to explain why pictures seem so perceptually special. Part III (Chapters 11-12) provides a new account of pictorial realism and shows how accounting for realism relates to an account of depiction in general.

This book presents a series of chapters devoted to two of the most fundamental topics in the philosophy of art: the distinctive character of artworks and what is involved in understanding them as art. In Part I, a wide range of questions about the nature and definition of art are considered. Can art be defined, and if so, which definitions are the most plausible? Do we make and consume art because there are evolutionary advantages to doing so? Has art completed the mission that guided its earlier historical development, and if so, what is to become of it now? Should architecture be classified as an art form? Part II turns to the interpretation and appreciation of art. What is the target and purpose of the critic's interpretation? Is interpretation primarily directed at uncovering artists' intended meanings? Can apparently contradictory interpretations of a given piece both be true? Are interpretative evaluations entailed by descriptions of a work's aesthetic and artistic characteristics? In addition to providing answers to these and other questions in aesthetics, there is consideration of the nature and content of metaphor, and the relation between the expressive qualities of a work of art and the emotions of its creator.

Pictures are representations that depict their objects. Although depiction plays as important a role as language in contemporary culture and communication, its function is relatively poorly understood. This book of specially written chapters by leading philosophers offers to set the agenda for the philosophy of depiction. It addresses a wide range of philosophical issues, concerning the nature and value of depiction, the role of our perceptual processes in interpreting pictures, and the role of depiction in everyday communication.

This book presents in chapter format twenty-two uncollected philosophical essays by Sir Peter Strawson, one of the leading philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. The chapters (two of them previously unpublished essays) are drawn from seven decades of work, from 1949 to 2003. They span the broad range of Strawson's work: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, ethical theory, and history of philosophy, along with metaphilosophical reflections and intellectual autobiography.

Part 1, Philosophy of Novels, defends theories of literary value and interpretation. Literary value, the value of literary works as such, is a species of aesthetic value. Works have aesthetic value when they simultaneously engage all our mental capacities: perceptual, cognitive, imaginative, and emotional. This view contrasts with now prevalent narrower formalist views of literary value. According to it, cognitive engagement with novels includes appreciation of their broad themes and the theses these imply, often moral and hence philosophical theses, which are therefore part of the novels’ literary value. Interpretation explains elements of works so as to allow readers maximum appreciation, so as to maximize the literary value of the texts as written. Once more this view contrasts with narrower views of literary interpretation, especially that which limits it to uncovering what authors intended. One implication of the broader view is the possibility of incompatible but equally acceptable interpretations, which is illustrated by rival interpretations of The Sun Also Rises. The theory of value is tested by explaining the immense appeal of good mystery novels in its terms. Part 2, Philosophy in Novels, explores themes relating to moral agency—moral development, motivation, and disintegration—in Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn, The Cider House Rules, and Nostromo. By narrating the course of characters’ lives, including their inner lives, over extended periods, these novels allow us to vicariously experience the characters’ moral progressions, positive and negative, to learn in a more focused way moral truths, as we do from real life experiences.

This book takes as its starting point Max Weber's contention that contemporary Western culture is marked by a ‘disenchantment of the world’ — the loss of spiritual value in the wake of religion's decline and the triumph of the physical and biological sciences. Relating themes in Hegel, Nietzsche, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, and Gadamer to topics in contemporary philosophy of the arts, it explores the idea that Art, now freed from its previous service to religion, has the potential to re-enchant the world. The book develops an argument that draws on the strengths of both ‘analytical’ and ‘continental’ traditions of philosophical reflection. The opening chapter examines ways in which human lives can be made meaningful, and the second chapter critically assesses debates about secularization and secularism. Subsequent chapters are devoted to painting, literature, music, architecture, and festivals. The book concludes that only religion properly so called can ‘enchant the world’, and that modern art's ambition to do so fails.

This book develops a philosophical theory of imagination that draws upon recent theories and results in psychology. Ideas about how we read the minds of others have put the concept of imagination firmly back on the agenda for philosophy and psychology. The authors present a theory of what they call imaginative projection; they show how it fits into a philosophically-motivated picture of the mind and of mental states, and how it illuminates and is illuminated by recent developments in cognitive psychology. They argue that we need to recognize a category of desire-in-imagination, and that supposition and fantasy should be classed as forms of imagination. They accommodate some of the peculiarities of perceptual forms of imagining such as visual and motor imagery, and suggest that they are important for mind-reading. They argue for a novel view about the relations between imagination and pretence, and suggest that imagining can be, but need not be, the cause of pretending. They show how the theory accommodates but goes beyond the idea of mental simulation, and argue that the contrast between simulation and theory is neither exclusive nor exhaustive. They argue that we can understand certain developmental and psychiatric disorders as arising from faulty imagination. Throughout, they link their discussion to the uses of imagination in our encounters with art, and they conclude with a chapter on responses to tragedy. The final chapter also offers a theory of emotions that suggests that these states have much in common with perceptual states.

In works of literary fiction, it is fictional in the work that the words of the text are being recounted by some work‐internal ‘voice’—the literary narrator. One can ask similarly whether in movies it is fictional that the story is told in sights and sounds by a work‐internal subjectivity that orchestrates them—a cinematic narrator. In this book, it is argued that movies do involve a fictional recounting (an audio‐visual narration) in terms of the movie’s sound‐ and image‐track. Standardly, viewers are prompted to imagine_seeing the items and events in the movie’s fictional world and to imagine hearing the associated fictional sounds. However, it is also argued that it is much less clear that the cinematic narration must be imagined as the product of some kind of ‘narrator’—of a work‐internal agent of the narration. There is a further question about whether viewers imagine seeing the fictional world face‐to‐face or whether they imagine seeing it through some kind of work‐internal mediation. It is a key contention of this volume that only the second of these alternatives allows one to give a coherent account of what we do and do not imagine about what we are seeing on the screen. Having provided a partial account of the foundation of film narration, the final chapters explore the ways in which certain complex strategies of narration in film are executed in three exemplary films: David Fincher’s Fight Club, von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress, and the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There.