•  8
    In an essay first published in 1959, Roland Barthes declared that modern literature had become “a mask pointing to itself ”.1 Barthes described this self-reflexivity as an anxious, even tragic condition, a tortured process in which literature divides itself into the two logically distinct, yet inter-related levels of object-language and meta-language. Asking itself continually the single, self-absorbing question of its own identity, literature becomes a meta-language and thereby ceases to be an …Read more
  •  60
    Intentionalism in aesthetics is, quite generally, the thesis that the artist's or artists' intentions have a decisive role in the creation of a work of art, and that knowledge of such intentions is a necessary component of at least some adequate interpretive and evaluative claims. In this paper I develop and defend this thesis. I begin with a discussion of some anti-intentionalist arguments. Surveying a range of intentionalist responses to them, I briefly introduce and criticize a fictionalist v…Read more
  •  33
    Paisley Livingston on Stanislaw Lem and the history and philosophy of Virtual Reality. The technologies and speculations associated with “virtual reality” and cognate terms have recently made it possible for scores of journalists and academics to develop variations on a favorite theme - the newness of the new, and more specifically, the newness of that new and wildly different world-historical epoch, era, or Zeitgeist into which we are supposedly entering with the creation of powerful new machin…Read more
  •  11
    [Book review article, no abstracts available]
  •  12
    When Comedy, Music and Ballet step forward at the end of L'Amour medecin, the audience learns that in Moliere's theater the farcical passage from sickness to health is much more than a theme. Claiming to have a real therapeutic value, the three arts ask to be recognized as the grands medecins, and present themselves as an alternative to a dubious and rather mercenary medical profession.
  •  11
    Cinematic fictions often depict characters who face a remarkable variety of natural and otherworldly dangers, such as attacks by aliens, dinosaurs, zombies, killer puppets, and swarms of insects. The risk of physical injury and death is the staple of the horror, crime, war, and action genres, while in art films, the focus tends to be on psychological and moral perils. Risk is such a pervasive subject in fi lm that one is tempted to conjecture that this is the main attraction of that seemingly lo…Read more
  •  21
    Paisley Livingston asks questions about the arguments Philosopher George M. Wilson offers in order to establish that the Mediated Version of his Imagined Seeing Thesis is superior to other options.
  • Contribution to a book forum on Athenes kammer
    SATS 2 (1): 166-168. 2001.
  •  19
    Discussion: On Authorship and Collaboration
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (2): 217-220. 2011.
  •  155
    The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (edited book)
    with Carl R. Plantinga
    Routledge. 2008.
    _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, ge…Read more
  •  92
    Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise by boden, margaret a
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (4): 423-425. 2011.
    [Book review article for Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise by Boden, Margaret A, no abstract is available.]
  •  26
    Rationality and emotion
    SATS 3 (2): 7-24. 2002.
  •  27
    Authorial intention and the varieties of intentionalism
    In Garry Hagberg & Walter Jost (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, Wiley-blackwell. 2007.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Intention Authorial Intention Varieties of Intentionalism The Utterance Model Hypothetical Intentionalism Hypothetical Intentionalism and Actualist Intentionalism Compared Success Conditions and the Dilemma Argument.
  •  1
    Narrative
    In Berys Nigel Gaut & Dominic Lopes (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, Routledge. 2000.
  •  261
    Philosophical Perspectives on Fictional Characters
    New Literary History 42 (2): 337-360. 2011.
    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…Read more
  • Literature
    In Jerrold Levinson (ed.), The Oxford handbook of aesthetics, Oxford University Press. 2003.
  •  21
    When a Work Is Finished: A Response to Darren Hudson Hick
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (4): 393-395. 2008.
  •  97
    The increasingly popular idea that cinematic fictions can "do" philosophy raises some difficult questions. Who is actually doing the philosophizing? Is it the philosophical commentator who reads general arguments or theories into the stories conveyed by a film? Could it be the film-maker, or a group of collaborating film-makers, who raise and try to answer philosophical questions with a film? Is there something about the experience of films that is especially suited to the stimulation of worthwh…Read more
  •  43
    Bolzano on Art
    British Journal of Aesthetics 56 (4): 333-345. 2016.
    In his little-known essay published posthumously in 1849, Über die Eintheilung der schönen Künste, Bernard Bolzano proposes an explication of the concept of beautiful art as well as a classification of these arts. Bolzano’s divisions allowed him not only to provide a principled and comprehensive classification of actual, well-established arts, but also to anticipate kinds of beautiful art that would not exist or be widely recognized until decades after his death, such as moving pictures, abstrac…Read more
  •  155
    On Authorship and Collaboration
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (2): 221-225. 2011.
    [Discussion article]
  •  31
    What is authorship? How are answers to that question related to ideas aboutthe understanding, interpretation, or appreciation of literary works? In what follows I provide a selective survey of the voluminous literature on thesedivisive questions, offer criticisms of some influential theories, and present an alternative.