Philosophy

This book examines the complex and varied ways in which fictions relate to the real world, and offers a precise account of how imaginative works of literature can use fictional content to explore matters of universal human interest. While rejecting the traditional view that literature is important for the truths that it imparts, the authors also reject attempts to cut off literature altogether from real human concerns. Their detailed account of fictionality, mimesis, and cognitive value helps restore to literature its distinctive status among cultural practices. The authors also explore the limits of fictionality, particularly in relation to metaphysical and sceptical views, prevalent in modern thought, according to which the world itself is a kind of fiction, and truth no more than a cultural construct. They identify different conceptions of fiction in science, logic, epistemology, and make-believe, and thereby challenge the idea that discourse per se is fictional and that different modes of discourse are, at root, indistinguishable. They offer analyses of the roles of narrative, imagination, metaphor, and ‘making’ in human thought processes. Both in their methods and in their conclusions, the authors aim to bring rigour and clarity to debates about the values of literature, and to provide philosophically sound foundations for a genuine change of direction in literary theorizing.

There are many ways to picture the world—Australian x-ray pictures, cubist collages, Amerindian split-style figures, and pictures in two-point perspective each draw attention to different features of what they represent. The premise of this book is that this diversity is the central fact with which a theory of figurative pictures must reckon. The author argues that identifying pictures’ subjects is akin to recognizing objects whose appearances have changed over time. He develops a schema for categorizing the different ways pictures represent—the different kinds of meaning they have—and he contends that depiction’s epistemic value lies in its representational diversity. He also offers a novel account of the phenomenology of pictorial experience, comparing pictures to visual prostheses like mirrors and binoculars. The book concludes with a discussion of works of art which have made pictorial meaning their theme, demonstrating the importance of the issues this book raises for understanding the aesthetics of pictures.

This book explores certain fundamental metaphysical aspects of works of art, giving focus to a distinction between works and the materials that underlie or constitute them. This constitutive material might be physical or abstract. For each work there is an ‘object’ (i.e., the materials of its composition) associated with it and a central claim in the book is that the work is never simply identical with the ‘object’ that constitutes it. Issues about the creation of works, their distinct kinds of properties (including aesthetic properties), their amenability to interpretation, their style, the conditions under which they can go out of existence, and their relation to perceptually indistinguishable doubles (including forgeries and parodies) are raised and debated. A core theme is that works like paintings, music, literature, sculpture, architecture, films, photographs, multimedia installations, and many more besides, have fundamental features in common, as cultural artefacts, in spite of enormous surface differences. It is their nature as distinct kinds of things, grounded in distinct ontological categories, that is the subject of this enquiry. Although much of the discussion is abstract, based in analytical metaphysics, there are many specific applications, including a study of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel La Nausée and recent conceptual art. Some surprising conclusions are derived about the identity and survival conditions of works, and about the difference, often, between what a work seems to be and what it really is.

This book gives a sustained defence of the simple view of the ontological nature of works of pure, instrumental music. The simple view is the conjunction of two theses: the type/token theory and sonicism. The type/token theory claims that musical works are types whose tokens are sound-sequence-events, whilst sonicism tells us that such works are identical just in case they sound exactly alike. Even though the simple view is favoured by very few writers in the philosophy of music, this book maintains that it is the default position given our ordinary intuitions about musical works; that it can answer the sorts of objections that have led other philosophers to dismiss it; and that it is, on reflection, the most promising ontology of music on offer. Specifically, the book argues that the type/token theory offers the best explanation of the repeatability of works of music: the fact that such works admit of multiple occurrence. Furthermore, it goes on to claim that the theory's most striking consequence — namely, that musical works are eternal existents — is minimally disruptive of our intuitions concerning the nature of composition and our appreciation of works of music. In defending sonicism, the book argues both that its way of individuating works of music is prima facie correct, and that the putative counter-examples it faces can be harmlessly explained away.