Paisley Livingston

Even if everything is up for grabs in philosophy, some things are very difficult to doubt. It is hard to believe, for example, that no one ever acts intentionally. Even the most powerful arguments for the unreality of intentional action could do no more, we believe, than place one in roughly the position in which pre-Aristotelian Greeks found themselves when presented with one of Zeno's arguments that nothing can move from any given point A to any other point B. One argument has it, for example, that in order to move from one point to another, a thing must first move to the half-way point; to do that, it must move half way to that point; and so on forever: so nothing ever moves at all. The argument undoubtedly stopped some auditors in their tracks; but eventually they moved on, most of them fully confident that they were doing precisely that

What is now generally known as the paradox of art and negative affect was identified as a paradox by the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos in 1719. In his attempt to explain how people can admire and enjoy representational works that ‘afflict’ them, Du Bos claims that such representations give rise to ‘artificial’ emotions, provide a pleasurable relief from boredom, and offer us epistemic, artistic, and moral rewards. The paper delineates Du Bos’ proposal, considers the question of Du Bos’ originality, and discusses Hume’s brief comments on Du Bos and Fontenelle

_The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film_ is the first comprehensive volume to explore the main themes, topics, thinkers and issues in philosophy and film. The _Companion_ features sixty specially commissioned chapters from international scholars and is divided into four clear parts: • issues and concepts • authors and trends • genres • film as philosophy. Part one is a comprehensive section examining key concepts, including chapters on acting, censorship, character, depiction, ethics, genre, interpretation, narrative, reception and spectatorship and style. Part two covers authors and scholars of film and significant theories Part three examines genres such as documentary, experimental cinema, horror, comedy and tragedy. Part four includes chapters on key directors such as Tarkovsky, Bergman and Terrence Malick and on particular films including _Memento_. Each chapter includes a section of annotated further reading and is cross-referenced to related entries. _The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film_ is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy of film, aesthetics and film and cinema studies.

We present an analysis of work completion couched in terms of an effective completion decision identified by its characteristic contents and functions. In our proposal, the artist's completion decision can take a number of distinct forms, including a procedural variety referred to as an ‘extended completion decision’. In the second part of this essay, we address ourselves to the question of whether collaborative art-making projects stand as counterexamples to the proposed analysis of work completion

Paisley Livingston here addresses contemporary controversies over the role of "theory" within the humanistic disciplines. In the process, he suggests ways in which significant modern texts in the philosophy of science relate to the study of literature. Livingston first surveys prevalent views of theory, and then proposes an alternative: theory, an indispensable element in the study of literature, should be understood as a Cogently argued and informed in its judgments, this book points the way to a fuller understanding of the special contribution that literary knowledge may make within the human sciences.

The current essay describes aspects of C. I. Lewis’s rarely cited contributions to aesthetics, focusing primarily on the conception of aesthetic experience developed in An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. Lewis characterized aesthetic value as a proper subset of inherent value, which he understood as the power to occasion intrinsically valued experiences. He distinguished aesthetic experiences from experiences more generally in terms of eight conditions. Roughly, he proposed that aesthetic experiences have a highly positive, preponderantly intrinsic value realized through contemplation, where the experience is indicative of the object’s reliable and characteristic inherent value. Objections to this account motivate a revised, neo-Lewisian proposal.

This essay provides a conceptual analysis and reconstruction of the notion of mimetic desire, first proposed in Girard (1961). The basic idea behind the idea of mimetic desire is that imitation can play a key role in human motivational processes. Yet mimetic desire is distinguished from related notions such as social modelling and imitation. In episodes of mimetic desire, the process in which the imitative agent's desires are formed is oriented by a particular species of belief about the model or mediator whose desire is copied. These 'tutelary beliefs' essential to mimetic desire are distinguished from the 'thin' and purely instrumental beliefs about the model central to Bandura's (1986) social cognitive theory and similar models of observational learning. The problem of the identity of the objects of desire in episodes of social modelling motivates a distinction between internal and external forms of interpersonal mediation. Girard's claims about cognitive constraints associated with mimetic desire are examined, and scenarios of reciprocal mimetic modelling are analysed.