Philosophy

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 The chapters (two of them previously unpublished essays) are drawn from seven decades of work, from 1949 to 2003.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.

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.

I have tried to do two things in this book: first, to make an analytic study of Francis Hutcheson's Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, and Design, in some detail and completeness; second, to trace the development in Britain of its leading idea, the sense of beauty, to its decline at the close of the eighteenth century.

Pictures are vehicles for seeing-in—they enable us to see scenes in marked surfaces. However, seeing-in takes several forms. In some cases, the scene is seen together with the marked surface, and, in other cases, seeing the scene excludes seeing the marked surface. In every case, evaluating a picture as a picture involves evaluating it as a vehicle for seeing-in. But evaluation, like seeing-in, comes in many flavours. Aesthetic, cognitive, and moral evaluations of pictures are especially prominent in picture criticism. These three types of evaluation of pictures interact, for one may imply another. Moreover, aesthetic, cognitive, and moral evaluations of pictures as

vehicles for seeing-in may also interact. This result overturns the intellectual basis for recent criticism of pictures, such as that found in scepticism about political hotography and in critiques of the male gaze.

What, if anything, has art to do with the rest of our lives, and in particular with those ethical and political issues that matter to us most? This book shifts the focus of inquiry from the usual question of what art is, to the question of what the function of art should be if art is to have a value for us. It examines the role of art in the overall economy of our ethical lives and compares the uses of art with those of history, philosophy, and religion. Instead of the usual focus on either poetry or painting, musical modernity represents the central features and dilemmas of the social and historical situation of art today in a particularly radical, acute, and clear fashion. The range of questions asked is not limited to those traditionally asked by writers on aesthetics, but also includes issues in poetics and hermeneutics, such as diegesis and mimesis, narrative and lyric, and the validity of interpretation. Thus, the two areas of inquiry that all too often ignore one another, the philosophical aesthetics and literary theory, are brought together here.