•  703
    Narrative and the Literary Imagination
    In Allen Speight (ed.), Narrative, Philosophy & Life, Springer. pp. 135-50. 2014.
    This paper attempts to reconcile two apparently opposed ways of thinking about the imagination and its relationship to literature, one which casts it as essentially concerned with fiction-making and the other with culture-making. The literary imagination’s power to create fictions is what gives it its most obvious claim to “autonomy”, as Kant would have it: its freedom to venture out in often wild and spectacular excess of reality. The argument of this paper is that we can locate the literary im…Read more
  •  37
    The Literary Wittgenstein (edited book)
    with John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer
    Routledge. 2004.
    _The Literary Wittgenstein_ is a stellar collection of articles relating the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to core problems in the theory and philosophy of literature. Amid growing recognition that Wittgenstein's philosophy has important implications for literary studies, this book brings together twenty-one articles by the most prominent figures in the field. Eighteen of the articles are published here for the first time. _The Literary Wittgenstein_ applies the approach of Wittgenstein to c…Read more
  •  1170
    A Puzzle of Poetic Expression
    The Philosophers' Magazine 74 (3): 56-62. 2016.
  •  20
    YABLO, STEPHEN. Aboutness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014, xi + 221 pp., $45.00 cloth (review)
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (2): 206-208. 2016.
  •  4945
    Literature and Knowledge
    In Richard Eldridge (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, Oxford University Press. 2009.
    What is the relation between works of fiction and the acquisition of knowledge?
  •  22
    Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life by izenberg, oren
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (4): 399-401. 2012.
  •  571
  •  459
    Thick Narratives
    In John Gibson & Noel Carroll (eds.), Narrative, Emotion, and Insight, Psup. pp. 69. 2011.
  •  36
    Interpretive reasoning edited by Stern, Laurent (review)
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (4). 2006.
    Book review
  •  2380
    What Makes a Poem Philosophical?
    In Zumhagen-Yekplé Karen & LeMahieu Michael (eds.), Wittgenstein and Modernism, University of Chicago Press. pp. 130-152. 2017.
  •  1164
    Empathy
    In Noël Carroll & John Gibson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature, Routledge. pp. 200-219. 2015.
  •  7
    La Guerra Dei Poveri : A Response to A. J. Nickerson
    Philosophy and Literature 40 (1): 315-316. 2016.
    What the author of this essay-review says about our handling of scholarship on poetry in The Philosophy of Poetry is perhaps true. Literary scholars often accuse us of ignoring their work, just as we at times condemn them for their questionable treatment of philosophical issues. There is a smallness to all this, on both sides, and the effect is almost always to affirm the very disciplinary boundaries we are trying to overcome when telling others that they should read our work.Fortunately, howeve…Read more
  •  1127
    Between truth and triviality
    British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (3): 224-237. 2003.
    A viable theory of literary humanism must do justice to the idea that literature offers cognitive rewards to the careful reader. There are, however, powerful arguments to the effect that literature is at best only capable of offering idle visions of a world already well known. In this essay I argue that there is a form of cognitive awareness left unmentioned in the traditional vocabulary of knowledge acquisition, a form of awareness literature is particularly capable of offering. Thus even if it…Read more
  •  34
    The Philosophy of Literature by lamarque, peter (review)
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (1): 68-70. 2010.
    Book review
  •  197
    Narrative, Emotion, and Insight (edited book)
    Pennsylvania State University Press. 2011.
    While narrative has been one of the liveliest and most productive areas of research in literary theory, discussions of the nature of emotional responses to art and of the cognitive value of art tend to concentrate almost exclusively on the problem of fiction: How can we emote over or learn from fictions? _Narrative, Emotion, and Insight _explores what would happen if aestheticians framed the matter differently, having narratives—rather than fictional characters and events—as the object of emotio…Read more
  •  476
    Selves on Selves: The Philosophical Significance of Autobiography
    Journal of Aesthetic Education 46 (4): 109-119. 2012.
    Philosophers of literature do not take much of an interest in autobiography.1 In one sense this is not surprising. As a certain prejudice has it, autobiography is, along with biography, the preferred reading of people who do not really like to read. The very words can conjure up images of what one finds on bookshelves in Florida retirement communities and in underfunded public libraries, books with titles like Under the Rainbow: The Real Liza Minnelli or Me: Stories of My Life (Katharine Hepburn…Read more
  •  6611
    Cognitivism and the arts
    Philosophy Compass 3 (4): 573-589. 2008.
    Cognitivism in respect to the arts refers to a constellation of positions that share in common the idea that artworks often bear, in addition to aesthetic value, a significant kind of cognitive value. In this paper I concentrate on three things: (i) the challenge of understanding exactly what one must do if one wishes to defend a cognitivist view of the arts; (ii) common anti-cognitivist arguments; and (iii) promising recent attempts to defend cognitivism.
  •  288