Paisley Livingston

This paper takes up a series of basic philosophical questions about the nature and existence of fictional characters. We begin with realist approaches that hinge on the thesis that at least some claims about fictional characters can be right or wrong because they refer to something that exists, such as abstract objects. Irrealist approaches deny such realist postulations and hold instead that fictional characters are a figment of the human imagination. A third family of approaches, based on work by Alexius Meinong, seeks an alternative to the realist/irrealist dilemma. Neo-Meinongian theories rely upon a distinction between being and existence, the key contention being that unlike human beings, fictional characters have only the former. Having surveyed relevant work by contemporary metaphysicians and philosophers of language, this paper discusses issues related to the distinction between characters and other aspects of the content of fictions, including the relation between personality theory and literary conceptions of character

It is quite common to draw a distinction between complete and unfinished works of art. For example, it is uncontroversial to think that Vermeer had actually completed View of Delft before inept restorers added layers of coloured varnish to give the picture an antique quality, and there is very good evidence to support the related claim that the artist had not finished the work before he effected several pentimenti, including the painting over of a figure in the foreground on the right. Such beliefs oriented a costly and elaborate restoration that was begun in 1994 and terminated two years later

Did Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, or other "poststructuralist" theorists writing in the wake of May '68 come up with any good ideas about authorship and related topics in the philosophy of literature? The three volumes under review have a common point of departure in that broad question, but offer a number of contrasting responses to it. In what follows I describe and assess some of the various perspectives on offer in these 700 or so pages. The short answer to my initial question comes at the end. Carla Benedetti's book was first published in 1999 in Milan as L'ombra lunga dell'autore: Indagine su una figura cancellata. Professor of Italian and Theory of Literature at the University of Pisa, and Recurrent Visiting Professor at NYU, she clearly shares some of Foucault's basic assumptions about authorship: "It is the reader or viewer who transforms the artist's selections, which in themselves may even be random or compelled, into subjective choices endowed with intentionality: that intentionality that is capable of providing meaning and artistic value to what we are viewing or reading" (p. 12). Benedetti contends that such attributions are a necessary part of the literary and artistic discursive formation of modernity, and she persuasively demonstrates that the author has not "disappeared," in spite of what Barthes and others may have thought or wished. According to Benedetti, authorialism, or the thesis that artistic value can only derive from original authorship, is the product of a modern ideology. She contends that a self-reflexive, late modernist train of thought generates a highly problematic relation to authorship and such related notions as genius, novelty, and creativity. More specifically, Benedetti finds a Batesonian double bind or paradoxical injunction in modernity's incessant demand for an extreme form of novelty. As soon as something innovative has been done, yet another innovation is desired. Not only does it become harder and harder to make a radically new move in the game, but the entire pursuit appears to be hopeless. Although Benedetti does not say so, the key thought was neatly captured by Oscar Wilde when he quipped: "Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly." To be old-fashioned is abhorrent, yet to try to obey the injunction to be "absolutely modern" is to risk becoming old-fashioned in a hurry, so failure seems inevitable. One of the constitutive myths of late modernity has it, then, that artistic activity must be recognized as authorless because it is impossible to create some sort of fundamentally novel work of lasting value. For those in the grip of this unsound thought, it seems necessary to conclude that the writer-no-longer-author must be recognized as an essentially uncreative epigone. Benedetti comments rather sweepingly, "All that poststructuralist thought speaks of, in its multifarious elaborations, is merely our supposed irreversible impossibility to create" (p. 202). She links Derrida's rejection of the possibility of decisive epistemological "ruptures" to the same late modernist mythology. Benedetti concludes her book by saying that the late modernist mythology conflates one kind of novelty with the new in general. This distinction sounds promising, but is not developed any further, and this reader was left wondering how the putative crippling error of a vast artistic dispensation could be revealed by means of a distinction between two kinds of newness. I also wonder whether her diagnosis probes deeply enough into the sources and nature of the modish sensibility that leads perversely to the Last Year in Marienbad syndrome. Not everyone is equally interested in trying to be dazzlingly innovative and fashionable; some who do have this inclination manage to produce excellent works of art; and many artists active in the period in question have not worked with the assumptions Benedetti criticizes. Whatever one thinks about Benedetti's Foucauldian premises about authorship, her book is highly informative, engaging, and replete with astute comments on a wide range of European literary and artistic movements and critical trends. With a keen eye for significant detail, she writes elegantly and discusses many fascinating examples, including interesting, lesser-known Italian ones. A variety of perspectives on authorship are presented..

It has often been claimed that adequate aesthetic judgements must be grounded in the appreciator's first-hand experience of the item judged. Yet this apparent truism is misleading if adequate aesthetic judgements can instead be based on descriptions of the item or on acquaintance with some surrogate for it. In a survey of responses to such challenges to the apparent truism, I identify several contentions presented in its favour, including stipulative definitions of ‘aesthetic judgement’, assertions about conceptual gaps between determinate aesthetic properties and even the most perfect descriptions, and claims about the holistic and sensibility-relative character of aesthetic qualities and values. With reference to considerations advanced by Frank Sibley, Alan H. Goldman, and particularists and anti-particularists in meta-ethics, I contend that strong versions of the apparent truism lack sufficient warrant. Two successors are proposed, however. One reframes the thesis in terms of our contingently limited descriptive and theoretical capacities with regard to a subset of the aesthetic qualities of extraordinary works; the second involves a shift from epistemic to axiological matters: what even the most perfect descriptions cannot provide, and in some cases spoil, is our gauging of an item's inherent, experiential value.

Cet article propose une reconstruction de la théorie de la rationalité dynamique esquissée par Michael Bratman dans Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Evaluer la rationalité de l'agent, dit Bratman, ce n'est pas simplement évaluer les raisons d'agir qu'avait l'agent au moment de sa décision. Il faut se demander non seulement si l'agent était rationnel lorsqu'il a formé son intention d'agir, mais aussi s'il l'était encore en gardant ou en abandonnant cette même intention. Il s'agit d'une perspective interne dans la mesure où elle prend en compte les rapports entre l'action, l'intention qui la guide et le processus de délibération qui est en amont de celle-ci. Mais la perspective que nous adoptons lorsque nous évaluons la rationalité de l'agent est aussi externe, car elle fait référence à des conditions dont l'agent n'a pas la maîtrise, comme les dispositions et les habitudes qui lui sont propres et qui se manifestent dans ses comportements non intentionnels. Dans un premier temps, je décris le dilemme que la théorie de Bratman cherche à résoudre ; dans un second temps, je présente les principes que Bratman développe; finalement, j'en évalue les résultats en identifiant certains des problèmes qui restent à résoudre ; je propose de réviser l'un des principes de Bratman en substituant une approche contrefactuelle à l'approche conséquentialiste qu'il propose.This paper reconstructs the theory of dynamic rationality sketched by Michael Bratman in Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Evaluating agent's rationality is not just a matter of evaluating the agent's reasons for acting at the moment of a decision. We must ask not only whether it was rational of the agent to form a future-directed intention, but also whether it is rational of the agent to revise or retain that intention when the moment of action arrives. Such judgements are internal to the framework of the agent's ongoing plans, intentions, and the deliberative processes upstream of every decision. Yet they are also external because they refer to unintentional behavior and conditions beyond the agent's purposive control, such as habits and dispositions. I describe the dilemma Bratmans theory attempts to resolve, present Bratmans normative principles, and identify some outstanding problems. I propose a revision of one of Bratmans principles, arguing for a counterfactual evaluation of non-intentional factors as opposed to his consequentialist approach based on the long-term benefits of the agent's habits.

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.

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.

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.

An intorduction to an English translation of Bernad Bolzano´s On the Concept of the Beautiful. A neglected gem in the history of aesthetics, Bolzano’s essay on beauty is best understood when read alongside his other writings and philosophical sources. This introduction is designed to contribute to such a reading. In Part I, I identify and discuss three salient ways in which Bolzano’s account can be misunderstood. As a lack of familiarity with Bolzano’s background assumptions is one source of these misunderstandings, in Part II, I elucidate some of his ideas about the psychological processes involved in the contemplation and enjoyment of beauty. In Part III, I situate Bolzano’s discussion of beauty within the more general framework of his ideas about the nature of philosophy, the relation between philosophy and aesthetics, and the place of the concept of beauty within the latter. Part IV is devoted to Bolzano’s discussion of some of his philosophical antecedents, including Kant. In Part V, I raise some objections to Bolzano’s account and indicate how his advocates might respond to them

Philosophical discussion of emotional responses to fiction has been dominated by work on the paradox of fiction, which is often construed as asking whether and how we can experience genuine emotions in reaction to fiction. One may also ask more generally how we ought to respond to fictional works, a question that has to do both with what we should do when reacting to fiction and with what we should and should not let happen to us. It is possible to delineate any principles regarding the rationality, and more generally, the appropriateness of emotional responses to fiction?

Although the cinematic medium can be used in philosophically valuable ways, bold contentions about how films 'do philosophy' in an independent, innovative and exclusively cinematic manner are highly problematic. Philosophers' interpretations of the stories conveyed in cinematic fictions do not actually support such bold claims about film's independent philosophical value; nor do they offer adequate appreciations of the films' artistic value. Different kinds of interpretations having different goals and conditions of success should be kept in view if we are to take a sufficiently critical perspective on contributions in this area. In particular, 'as if' interpretations in which a philosophical problematic is freely applied to elements of a movie's story are contrasted to interpretations that target a film author's actual philosophizing.