•  9
    [Book review article, no abstract is available]
  •  51
    The Philosophy of Art
    British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (4): 431-433. 2006.
    Book review of The Philosophy of Art. By STEPHEN DAVIES.. Blackwell. 2006
  •  3
    Intention in Art
    In Jerrold Levinson (ed.), The Oxford handbook of aesthetics, Oxford University Press. 2003.
  •  73
    Utile et dulce: A response to noël Carroll
    British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (3): 274-281. 2006.
    l Carroll's criticisms of my essay on C. I. Lewis's conception of aesthetic experience, I discuss reasons given in support of axiological accounts of aesthetic experience, including Lewis's contentions about the intrinsic valence of all experiences and his emphasis on the interests motivating philosophical classifications of experience. I also respond to Carroll's remarks about a possible explanatory requirement on a conception of aesthetic experience and the idea that artists have aesthetic exp…Read more
  •  73
    C. I. Lewis and the outlines of aesthetic experience
    British Journal of Aesthetics 44 (4): 378-392. 2004.
    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 e…Read more
  •  58
    This chapter contains sections titled: “Solid Objects” and Its Interpretations Towards an Alternative Interpretation “Solid Objects” as a reductio ad absurdum of One Kind of Aesthetic Theory Rapture does not Suffice.
  •  39
    Bernard Bolzano: On the Concept of the Beautiful - A Philosophical Essay
    Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 52 (2): 203-266. 2015.
    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 the…Read more
  •  121
    History of the Ontology of Art
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011.
    First critical survey devoted to the history of philosophical contributions to this topic. Brings to light neglected contributions prior to the second half of the 20th century including works in Danish, German, and French. Provides a division of issues and clarifies key ambiguities related to modality
  •  150
    On an apparent truism in aesthetics
    British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (3): 260-278. 2003.
    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’, asserti…Read more
  •  581
    Artwork completion: a response to Gover
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73 (4): 460-462. 2015.
    Response to Gover (2015) on Trogdon and Livingston (2015) on artwork completion.
  •  14
    L'ontologie et la valeur artistique
    Philosophiques 32 (1): 224-229. 2005.
  •  40
    What's the Story?
    Substance 22 (2/3): 98. 1993.
    People often ask each other “what happens” in a novel or film, and they are inclined to think that some answers are better than others. Some claims about what happens in a story are deemed inaccurate or false, while others are the object of a fairly widespread consensus. The fact that a statement about a narrative discourse is deemed accurate does not mean that it will or should be accepted as an adequate statement about the story told in the discourse. If someone asks me what just happened in a…Read more
  •  40
    Evaluating Emotional Responses to Fiction
    In Mette Hjort & Sue Laver (eds.), Emotion and the Arts, Oup Usa. 1997.
    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 rational…Read more
  •  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
  •  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.
  •  155
    On Authorship and Collaboration
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (2): 221-225. 2011.
    [Discussion article]
  •  357
    The complete work
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72 (3): 225-233. 2014.
    Defense of a psychological account of what it is for an artwork to be complete.
  •  47
    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…Read more
  •  30
    Intentions and Interpretations
    MLN 107 (5): 931-949. 1992.
    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,…Read more
  •  20
    From work to work
    Philosophy and Literature 20 (2): 436-454. 1996.
    Is it legitimate to interpret and evaluate works in terms of their place within the writer's Oeuvres complètes? Is the notion of the life-work, and of relations between works and the life-work to which they belong, theoretically uninteresting, or worse, unjustifiable? The publication of a beautiful, five-volume edition of Roland Barthes's Oeuvres complètes is a good thing, but if we were to rely on this theorist's meta-hermeneutical dicta alone, it would be hard to say why. Barthes and other adv…Read more