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4383The Problem of Imaginative ResistanceIn Noël Carroll & John Gibson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature, Routledge. pp. 405-418. 2015.The problem of imaginative resistance holds interest for aestheticians, literary theorists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and epistemologists. We present a somewhat opinionated overview of the philosophical discussion to date. We begin by introducing the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. We then review existing responses to the problem, giving special attention to recent research directions. Finally, we consider the philosophical significance that imaginative resistance has—or, at least, …Read more
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809The Underrepresentation of Women in Prestigious Ethics JournalsHypatia 32 (4): 928-939. 2017.It has been widely reported that women are underrepresented in academic philosophy as faculty and students. This article investigates whether this representation may also occur in the domain of journal article publishing. Our study looked at whether women authors were underrepresented as authors in elite ethics journals — Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, the Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Journal of Moral Philosophy — between 2004-2014, relative to the proportion of women employed …Read more
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1606Moral Persuasion and the Diversity of FictionsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (3): 269-289. 2013.Narrative representations can change our moral actions and thoughts, for better or for worse. In this article, I develop a theory of fictions' capacity for moral education and moral corruption that is fully sensitive to the diversity of fictions. Specifically, I argue that the way a fiction influences our moral actions and thoughts importantly depends on its genre. This theory promises new insights into practical ethical debates over pornography and media violence.
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1683Empirically Investigating Imaginative ResistanceBritish Journal of Aesthetics 54 (3): 339-355. 2014.Imaginative resistance refers to a phenomenon in which people resist engaging in particular prompted imaginative activities. Philosophers have primarily theorized about this phenomenon from the armchair. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of empirical methods for investigating imaginative resistance. We present two studies that help to establish the psychological reality of imaginative resistance, and to uncover one factor that is significant for explaining this phenomenon but low in psyc…Read more
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1506The Cognitive Architecture of Imaginative ResistanceIn Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination, Routledge. pp. 233-246. 2016.Where is imagination in imaginative resistance? We seek to answer this question by connecting two ongoing lines of inquiry in different subfields of philosophy. In philosophy of mind, philosophers have been trying to understand imaginative attitudes’ place in cognitive architecture. In aesthetics, philosophers have been trying to understand the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. By connecting these two lines of inquiry, we hope to find mutual illumination of an attitude (or cluster of attitud…Read more
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1709Aesthetic Adjectives Lack Uniform BehaviorInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (6): 618-631. 2016.The goal of this short paper is to show that esthetic adjectives—exemplified by “beautiful” and “elegant”—do not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling data involves distinguishing two properties of gradable adjectives that have been frequently conflated: whether an adjective’s applicability is sensitive to a comparison class, and whether an adjective’s…Read more
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1712Pretense and ImaginationWiley Interdisciplinary Reviews 2 (1): 79-94. 2011.Issues of pretense and imagination are of central interest to philosophers, psychologists, and researchers in allied fields. In this entry, we provide a roadmap of some of the central themes around which discussion has been focused. We begin with an overview of pretense, imagination, and the relationship between them. We then shift our attention to the four specific topics where the disciplines' research programs have intersected or where additional interactions could prove mutually beneficial: …Read more
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1710Imaginative Resistance, Narrative Engagement, GenreRes Philosophica 93 (2): 461-482. 2016.Imaginative resistance refers to a phenomenon in which people resist engaging in particular prompted imaginative activities. On one influential diagnosis of imaginative resistance, the systematic difficulties are due to these particular propositions’ discordance with real-world norms. This essay argues that this influential diagnosis is too simple. While imagination is indeed by default constrained by real-world norms during narrative engagement, it can be freed with the power of genre conventio…Read more
Tacoma, Washington, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Aesthetics |