Robert Hopkins

This is a book about literature—about the pleasures and benefits of reading it, the philosophical puzzles it throws up, the nature of literary criticism, and the confusions, as Peter Lamarque sees matters, of much contemporary theorizing about the literary. It is, in essence, a collection of essays on these various topics, twelve in all, of which all but three have been published elsewhere, over a period of some twenty years. Such collections can suffer from being fragmentary or insufficiently explicit about the broader philosophical position lying behind the discussions of particular issues. Those faults are a little in evidence here, but Lamarque has worked hard to cure them. There is very little repetition, despite the frequent reappearance of some themes; there is also copious cross-referencing, and a first and a last chapter that aim, in different ways, to integrate the rest.

Reid’s discussion of Molyneux’s question has been neglected. The Inquiry discusses the question twice, offering opposing answers. The first discussion treats the underlying issue as concerning common perceptibles of touch and vision, and in particular whether in vision we originally perceive depth. Although it is tempting to treat the second discussion as doing the same, this would render pointless various novel features Reid introduces in reformulating Molyneux’s question. Rather, the issue now is whether the blind can form a reasonable conception of visual appearances, a conception that would allow them to perform Molyneux’s task. In explaining why Reid thought they can, I draw on his account of primary quality concepts as independent of sensation; of concept possession as ability, not acquaintance with sensation; and of visual appearance itself as in key part a matter of the perception of a primary quality, visible figure. Thus the issue does not concern cross-modality, what vision has in common with touch; but how even what is central in vision is amodal, able to be grasped independently of any sensory mode. Reid’s second Molyneux discussion thereby forms a focus for the Inquiry’s central claims, and the rejection of the Ideal Theory they entail.

One strategy for working out how to individuate the senses is to pursue that task in tandem with that of individuating the sensory imaginings. We can tackle both, at least for the spatial senses of sight and touch, if we appeal to the idea that, while both modes represent their objects perspectivally, different forms of perspective are involved in each. This cannot, however, exhaust the differences between tactual and visual. Tactual experience is tied to bodily awareness as visual is not. I explore these connections in the context of the more sophisticated forms tactual experience can take. This raises questions the account in terms of differing perspectives has yet to answer. Although these include whether touch really is perspectival after all, neither the qualifications required nor the questions raised undermine the fundamental appeal of distinguishing both the senses and the sensory imaginings by appeal to the structures within which they represent their objects.

Two themes run through Wollheim’s work: the importance of history to the practice and appreciation of the arts, and the centrality of experience in appreciation. Prima facie, these are in tension. Reconciling them requires two steps. First, we should follow Wollheim in adopting a notion of experience on which features can be experienced even if we must have experience-independent access to the fact that the work exhibits them. Second, we need to state what makes a particular experience appropriate to the work. What does so? An obvious answer is that the experience reflects the work’s nature. Wollheim toyed with a more ambitious line, one linking the appropriate experience to our abilities to discriminate instances of the property appreciated. He allowed that having the right experience might require knowledge of the work, and thus that that experience need not be born of the ability to discriminate the property appreciated. But he seems to have held that the appropriate experience must engender that ability, at least against the background of those actual items that might be confused with instances of the property. I argue that Wollheim’s answer is less appealing than the obvious one.