-
15Presupposition and the Delimitation of Semantics.Presuppositions and Non-Truth-Conditional Semantics (review)Philosophical Quarterly 26 (105): 379. 1976.
-
14Review of Malcolm Budd, Values of Art (review)British Journal of Aesthetics 37 (1): 84-86. 1997.
-
11Fictional Narrative and Truth: An Epistemic Analysis (review)Philosophy and Literature 10 (1): 115-117. 1986.
-
11Esquisse d'une théorie nominaliste de la proposition (review)Philosophical Books 14 (1): 16-18. 1973.
-
11Two Introductions: Invitation to Philosophy.What Philosophy Is: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (review)Philosophical Quarterly 36 (145): 540. 1986.
-
10Literary Form and Ethical ContentDisputatio 13 (62): 245-263. 2021.The paper offers a qualified endorsement of Terry Eagleton’s striking claim that “a work’s moral outlook … may be secreted as much in its form as its content”. A number of points are raised in defence of the claim: an argument for the inseparability, under certain conditions, of form and content in a literary work; an idea of moral content, not as derived moral principle, but as inward-facing interpretation grounded in an ethical vocabulary; the possibility of internal and external perspectives …Read more
-
10Poetry and Private LanguageThe Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 1 105-113. 1998.The paper discusses three theses in relation to poetry: the Inadequacy Thesis: language is inadequate to capture, portray, do justice to, the quality and intensity of the inner life; the Empathy Thesis: descriptions of certain kinds of experiences can only be understood by a person who has had similar experiences; the Poetic Thesis, which has two parts: only through poetry can we hope to overcome the problem of the Inadequacy Thesis and the difficulty of poetry is at least partly explained by th…Read more
-
10
-
8
-
8The philosophy of literature : Pleasure restoredIn Peter Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, Blackwell. 2004.This chapter contains sections titled: Background The Way Forward.
-
7Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the BoundariesIn Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Blackwell. pp. 127--39. 2006.
-
7The uselessness of art: essays in the philosophy of art and literatureSussex Academic Press. 2020.Oscar Wilde's famous quip "All art is quite useless" might not be as outrageous or demonstrably false as is often supposed. No-one denies that much art begins life with practical aims in mind: religious, moral, political, propagandistic, or the aggrandising of its subjects. But those works that survive the test of time will move into contexts where for new audiences any initial instrumental values recede and the works come to be valued for their own sake. The book explores this idea and its rami…Read more
-
6Truth, Fiction and Literature: a Philosophical PerspectivePhilosophical Quarterly 47 (187): 241-243. 1997.
-
3The Elusiveness of Poetic MeaningIn Severin Schroeder (ed.), Philosophy of Literature, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV V.
-
3On perceiving conceptual artIn Peter Goldie & Elisabeth Schellekens (eds.), Philosophy and conceptual art, Oxford University Press. 2007.