Noel Carroll

Philosophical discussions about humour go back to ancient aesthetics, to laughing Democritus and the aporia of Socratic self-irony, to Diogenes the Dog performing tricks on the streets of Athens, and to the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics. Dramatized in texts and the arts, the comic emerges not only in popular literature and public events, like Dionysia and Saturnalia, but also in the lives of eminent philosophers in antiquity, the Renaissance, and today. Recently, humour has seen a resurgence in aesthetics, in part owing to the titanic efforts of Noël Carroll. Desiring to learn first-hand about the risky aspects of philosophical wit, Valery Vino invited Noël to engage with a series of remarks and anecdotes borrowed from dead authors, led by Michel de Montaigne, about the nexus between humour and cruelty. In what follows, we consider why humans laugh (sometimes at themselves), what social function cruel humour plays, why a callous sense of humour may be of benefit in the face of life’s horrors, and whether we can hold each other morally culpable for vicious jokes.

While narrative has been one of the liveliest and most productive areas of research in literary theory, discussions of the nature of emotional responses to art and of the cognitive value of art tend to concentrate almost exclusively on the problem of fiction: How can we emote over or learn from fictions? _Narrative, Emotion, and Insight _explores what would happen if aestheticians framed the matter differently, having narratives—rather than fictional characters and events—as the object of emotional and cognitive attention. The book thus opens up new possibilities for approaching questions about the ethical, educative, and cultural value of art. The nine essays in this volume introduce the study of narrative to contemporary aesthetics.

_The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature_ is an in-depth examination of literature through a philosophical lens, written by distinguished figures across the major divisions of philosophy. Its 40 newly-commissioned essays are divided into six sections: historical foundations what is literature? aesthetics & appreciation meaning & interpretation metaphysics & epistemology ethics & political theory _The Companion_ opens with a comprehensive historical overview of the philosophy of literature, including chapters on the study’s ancient origins up to the 18 th -20 th centuries. The second part defines literature and its different categories. The third part covers the aesthetics of literature. The fourth and fifth sections discuss the meaning and consequences of philosophical interpretation of literature, as well as epistemological and metaphysical issues such as literary cognitivism and imaginative resistance. The sixth section contextualizes the place of philosophy of literature in the "real world" with essays on topics such as morality, politics, race and gender. Fully indexed, with helpful further reading sections at the end of each chapter, this Companion is an ideal starting point for those coming to philosophy of literature for the first time as well as a valuable reference for readers more familiar with the subject.

This article applies recent research in cognitive neuroscience to the relationship between music and dance. In particular, we claim that certain kinds of dance can be thought of as choreo-performative interpretations of the accompanying music. This sort of dance exploits the feelings of movement available in the music, and makes those feelings visibly manifest to the audience through the dancers’ movements. We argue that the audience, in turn, detects those feelings of movement through a mirroring response. That is, the dance serves to clarify for the spectator the feelings of movement she intimates in the music. This relationship of clarification has its roots in Collingwood’s expression theory, which we support here only in limited fashion. Empirical evidence for the mirroring response helps lend support to the idea that the aesthetic experience of choreo-performative interpretations of music involves a transmission of feeling from artist to audience.

In this chapter, we treat Larry David’s television series, Curb Your Enthusiasm as, in large measure, a philosophical exercise. We argue that it presents a critique of our norms, practices, and conventions of social behavior, notably those that pertain primarily to civility rather than to morality. This critique identifies certain essential features of such behavior including: the typical unspoken-ness of its governing norms, and their non-necessity, despite appearances to the contrary, due to our intense emotional investment in them. In Curb Your Enthusiasm, the ostensible justification that “This is just how we do things” comes in for merciless, satirical interrogation, most often by Larry David but sometimes by others, at Larry David’s expense. This chapter relies heavily on Mary Douglas’s discussion of jokes, but parts company with it in crucial respects. The chapter will also situate Larry David’s brand of humor in the context of the philosophy of comic amusement in terms of the notion of incongruity. Special emphasis will be played on the importance Larry David assigns to emotions in the maintenance of the relevant social norms.

Arthur Danto's The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art is Danto's most recent, through-written monograph on the philosophy of art. An obvious question occasioned by its publication is: what is it intended to add to Danto's previous treatises on the philosophy of art, such as The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and After the End of Art? The simple answer, of course, is beauty. But, why, one asks, does Danto need to address beauty?...Danto, it seems to me, needs to come to terms with beauty as a matter of theoretical damage control. beauty, narrowly conceived, has the potential to threaten the generality of Danto's theory of art. Therefore, Danto needs, so to speak, to contain it.

In this essay, I am concerned with the representation of groups in popular culture. My interest has to do with the politics of representing people. The couplet beauty/nonbeauty (or, more specifically, beauty/ugliness) frequently figures importantly in the representation of groups, including most notably, for my purposes, ethnic and racial minorities. This couplet can be politically significant because beauty is often associated in our culture with moral goodness.... Thus, beauty and non beauty can serve as a basis for political rhetoric.... If one concept of human beauty (which is connected to ideas of goodness) sees beauty as the instantiation or near approximation of the concept human being, then the related idea of human ugliness (which is connected with ideas of moral degradation) is rooted in problematic exemplifications of the concept of the human. These "problematic exemplifications" can take many forms. The two that will preoccupy me in this essay are the imperfect exemplifications of the human found in the popular genres of horror and humor.

Feminism is the most visible movement in film criticism today, and the most dominant trend in that movement is psychoanalytically informed. Psychoanalytic feminism came to this position in film studies at the very latest by the early to mid-1980s. Before the consolidation and ascendancy of this particular variety of feminism, earlier approaches to the study of women and film included the search for a suppressed canon of women filmmakers--a feminist version of the auteur theory--and the study of the image of women in films, primarily the image of women in films by men. Neither of these approaches mandated a reliance on psychoanalysis, though, of course, one could pursue these research programs while also embracing psychoanalysis. My particular interest in this essay is to defend the study of the image of women in film, regarding that project as logically independent from the resort to psychoanalysis. In speaking of this approach to feminist film criticism, I have in mind writing on cinema from the early [nineteen-] seventies like Molly Haskell's From Reverence to rape which paralleled research in literary studies such as Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. Work of this sort called to our attention the ways the imagery of women in our culture recurrently portrayed them through a limited, constraining, and ultimately oppressive repertory of characterizations.

For Arthur Danto, historical thought is essentially a matter of retrospection insofar as the historian comments on the events, actions, and thoughts of agents in the past from a future that in turn becomes the historian–s gaze into the past. Danto–s argument against the very possibility of constructing a substantive philosophy of history begins by pointing out that what its philosophers aspire to is the construction of a narrative of the whole of history. Danto–s demonstration of the limitations of the substantive philosophy of history not only clarifies his notion of historical retrospection but also dismisses the substantive philosophy of history as an acceptable philosophical approach to history. Danto refutes the eyewitness view of history by means of a thought experiment that reveals, as Oscar Wilde might say, that one should be careful what one wishes for.

This essay aims to explore the ways in which a philosophical account of humor can contribute to the explanation of the application of humor in the course of everyday day life. After providing a conceptual analysis of comic amusement ‐‐ the psychological state that takes humor as it's object ‐‐ and defending the thesis that it is an emotion, I will go on to show how this emotion functions productively in various situations in terms of the non‐exhaustive and non‐exclusive categories of bonding, coping, and perspectival modification (or frame changing). I will not, however, discuss the frequent claims that humor contributes to health because the evidence for this claim is highly contested.