Aaron Meskin

Some things are very hard to imagine, and not necessarily because they are complicated or hard to understand. This phenomenon of "imaginative resistance" has been examined by many philosophers in recent years, and we presented an account of its cognitive architecture in an earlier work. This paper explores an interesting aspect of this psychological phenomenon that has thus far garnered little attention: some authors, in the right circumstances, can deploy techniques that render what would typically be unimaginable into the imagined stuff of fiction. In this paper we extend our earlier account of the cognitive architecture of imaginative resistance to accommodate, and offer an empirically-motivated explanation for, the various ways in which authors may circumvent or overcome blocks to the imagination.

We offer a philosophical account of the middlebrow as a theoretical category to do explanatory and critical work in aesthetics. On our account, the middlebrow ought to be understood as aspirational popular art. That is, it is art which aspires both to be popular (in a distinctive sense), and at the same time to be something more than popular. Although, as we will discuss, there are many different sorts of “something more” to which middlebrow art may aspire, and this suggests that there are different kinds of middlebrow art, the aspiration itself provides the category with substantial unity.

The thesis that aesthetic testimony cannot provide aesthetic justification or knowledge is widely accepted–even by realists about aesthetic properties and values. This Kantian position is mistaken. Some testimony about beauty and artistic value can provide a degree of aesthetic justification and, perhaps, even knowledge. That is, there are cases in which one can be justified in making an aesthetic judgment purely on the basis of someone else's testimony. But widespread aesthetic unreliability creates a problem for much aesthetic testimony. Hence, most testimony about art does not have much epistemic value. The situation is somewhat different with respect to aesthetic testimony about nature, proofs, and theories. And yet he realizes clearly that other people's approval in no way provides him with a valid proof by which to judge beauty; even though others may perhaps see and observe for him, and even though what many have seen the same way may serve him, who believes he saw it differently, as a sufficient basis of proof for a theoretical and hence logical judgment, yet the fact that others have liked something can never serve him as a basis for an aesthetic judgment. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment.

_THE ART OF COMICS_ _The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Introduction_ is the first-ever collection of essays published in English devoted to the philosophical questions raised by the art of comics. The volume, which includes a preface by the renowned comics author Warren Ellis, contains ten cutting-edge essays on a range of philosophical topics raised by comics and graphic novels. These include the definition of comics, the nature of comics genres, the relationship between comics and other arts such as film and literature, the way words and pictures combine in comics, comics authorship, the “language” of comics, and the metaphysics of comics. The book also contains an in-depth introduction by the co-editors which provides an overview of both the book and its subject, as well as a brief history of comics and an overview of extant work on the philosophy of comics. In an area of growing philosophical interest, this volume constitutes a great leap forward in the development of this fast expanding field, and makes a major contribution to the philosophy of art.

In Religion as Make-Believe, Neil Van Leeuwen offers a novel and attractive hypothesis for why religious “beliefs” act so differently from paradigm beliefs — namely, that they are a fundamentally different kind of mental attitude. Van Leeuwen argues that these religious attitudes are better understood as akin to the imaginative states associated with make-believe. We argue, contra Van Leeuwen, that religious beliefs really are a species of belief, fundamentally of the same sort as ordinary beliefs; but they are sustained by different, less evidence-sensitive processes than ordinary beliefs.

After nearly being killed off by CDs in the 1980s and 1990s, and despite the rise of streaming services like Spotify, vinyl records have had a major resurgence this century. Although nearly half of all records are purchased from online retailers and big-box stores, roughly half are bought at independent record shops, even though they are typically more expensive there. We believe one major reason for this is that record shops offer us aesthetic rewards that online retailers and megastores do not. In this paper, we will examine the aesthetic value of record shops. Skeptics may think that their value owes largely to the music they sell, the nostalgia they can induce, or the social status they can confer. While we agree that these values play some role in explaining contemporary interest in record shops, we argue that they are valuable for a number of other distinctively aesthetic reasons. First, record shops function as aesthetic institutions that are objects of appreciation in their own right. Second, record shops afford worthwhile participatory experiences of an aesthetic nature. Finally, the experiences that one has at record shops may ultimately enhance one’s appreciation of the music one listens to at home.

Through much of the twentieth century, philosophical thinking about works of art, design, and other aesthetic products has emphasized intuitive and reflective methods, often tied to the idea that philosophy’s business is primarily to analyse concepts. This ‘philosophy from the armchair’ approach contrasts with methods used by psychologists, sociologists, evolutionary thinkers, and others who study the making and reception of the arts empirically. How far should philosophers be sensitive to the results of these studies? Is their own largely a priori method basically flawed and their views on aesthetic value, interpretation, imagination, and the emotions of art to be rethought in the light of best science? The essays in this volume seek answers to these questions, many through detailed studies of problems traditionally regarded as philosophical but where empirical inquiry seems to be shedding interesting light. No common view is looked for or found in this volume: a number of authors argue that the current enthusiasm for scientific approaches to aesthetics is based on a misunderstanding of the philosophical enterprise and sometimes on misinterpretation of the science; others suggest various ways that philosophy can and should accommodate and sometimes yield to the empirical approach. The authors provide a substantial introduction which sets the scene historically and conceptually before summarizing the claims and arguments of the essays.

_THE ART OF COMICS_ _The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Introduction_ is the first-ever collection of essays published in English devoted to the philosophical questions raised by the art of comics. The volume, which includes a preface by the renowned comics author Warren Ellis, contains ten cutting-edge essays on a range of philosophical topics raised by comics and graphic novels. These include the definition of comics, the nature of comics genres, the relationship between comics and other arts such as film and literature, the way words and pictures combine in comics, comics authorship, the “language” of comics, and the metaphysics of comics. The book also contains an in-depth introduction by the co-editors which provides an overview of both the book and its subject, as well as a brief history of comics and an overview of extant work on the philosophy of comics. In an area of growing philosophical interest, this volume constitutes a great leap forward in the development of this fast expanding field, and makes a major contribution to the philosophy of art.

In his presidential address, at the fiftieth anniversary of the American Society of Aesthetics in 1992, Peter Kivy suggested that "progress in the philosophy of art in the immediate future is to be made not by theorizing in the grand manner, but by careful and imaginative philosophical scrutiny of the individual arts and their individual problems." The study of the individual arts, and the differences between them, has, in the ensuing decades, provided a useful corrective to aesthetic theorizing in the grand manner. In this essay, I urge philosophers of art, art educators, and art theorists to consider a different option—the rigorous and creative investigation of art clusters: that is, various collections of artworks and art kinds, unified by significant similarities and cutting across the recognized artforms and genres.

To what extent are factors that are extrinsic to the artwork relevant to judgments of artistic value? One might approach this question using traditional philosophical methods, but one can also approach it using empirical methods; that is, by doing experimental philosophical aesthetics. This paper provides an example of the latter approach. We report two empirical studies that examine the significance of three sorts of extrinsic factors for judgments of artistic value: the causal-historical factor of contagion, the ontological factor of uniqueness, and the contextual factor of appreciative environment. We explore the context of appreciation by performing studies in a museum as well as the lab. We found that contagion made a difference to judgments of artistic value in both settings. These results are congruent with previous empirical research as well as recent philosophical work that defends the artistic significance of authenticity. However, uniqueness only made a difference in the lab setting, but not in the museum. This suggests that the context of appreciation may make a difference to judgments of artistic value. Of broader significance, these studies show the value of experimental philosophical aesthetics and the value of doing in situ empirical research on art.

Musical listening, looking at paintings and literary creation are activities that involve perceptual and cognitive activity and so are of interest to psychologists and other scientists of the mind. What sorts of interest should philosophers of the arts take in scientific approaches to such issues? Opinion currently ranges across a spectrum, with 'take no notice' at one end and 'abandon traditional philosophical methods' at the other. This collection of essays, originating in a Royal Institute of Philosophy conference at the Leeds Art Gallery in 2012, represents many of the most interesting positions along that spectrum. Contributions address issues concerning aesthetic testimony, the processing and appreciation of poetry, the aesthetics of disgust, imagination, genre, evolutionary constraints on art appreciation, creativity, musical cognition and the limitations or productiveness of empirical enquiry for philosophical aesthetics.

This chapter explores a range of significant similarities and differences between videogames and films. It also examines the relationship between the philosophies of each. We begin by addressing the definition of videogames and the question of whether they count as a subcategory of some other artistic kind, namely, film or the moving image. We then turn to the debate about the art status of videogames and compare this to the debate concerning the art status of films. We go on to explore the nature of interactivity in videogames and ask whether videogame interactivity differs from the kind of interactivity that one can find in other artistic domains. We conclude by exploring various ethical issues relating to videogames and, again, compare these to related issues which arise with respect to film.

Films typically provide an experience that is very much like the experience of ordinary motion. It is for this reason that they are commonly known as moving pictures or, slightly more broadly, moving images. Our focus in this chapter is on making sense of that experience. We begin our chapter by exploring the centrality of the experience of movement to film. We turn then to various explanations of that experience. Perhaps film images are transparent and allow us to indirectly see the movement of the objects they depict. Or perhaps certain theories of depiction can make sense of the experience of motion in cinema. In the final section, we address a range of ontological issues raised by the question of cinematic movement. Is the motion of images real movement or merely illusory? What is a cinematic image?

As is usually the case with what I work on, I read some stuff I liked. I 1 read an article on comics by Greg Hayman and Henry Pratt and some work on 2 videogames,GrantTavinor’sreallyexcellentworkonthattopic. Ifoundthematerial interesting and I thought I had something to say about it. That’s what usually motivates me and that’s what did in these cases. With comics, my interest in the medium played a big role. I was a child collector of Marvel. I got turned on to independent and alternative comics about ten years ago by a good friend who’s a successful comics artist and that played a role in my writing about comics.

Our goal in this paper is to articulate a novel account of the ordinary concept ART. At the core of our account is the idea that a puzzle surrounding our thought and talk about art is best understood as just one instance of a far broader phenomenon. In particular, we claim that one can make progress on this puzzle by drawing on research from cognitive science on dual character concepts. Thus, we suggest that the very same sort of phenomenon that is associated with ART can also be found in a broad class of other dual character concepts, including SCIENTIST, CHRISTIAN, GANGSTER, and many others. Instead of focusing narrowly on the case of ART, we try to offer a more general account of these concepts and the puzzles to which they give rise. Then, drawing on the general theory, we introduce a series of hypotheses about art concepts, and put those hypotheses to the test in three experimental studies.

It is intuitively plausible that art and imagination are intimately connected. This chapter explores attempts to explain that connection. We focus on three areas in which art and imagination might be linked: production, ontology, and appreciation. We examine views which treat imagination as a fundamental human faculty, and aim for comprehensive accounts of art and artistic practice: for example, those of Kant and Collingwood. We also discuss philosophers who argue that a specific kind of imagining may explain some particular element of the artistic domain: for example, Walton's ideas about representational art, and Kivy’s about reading.

In earlier work we proposed an account of information grounded in counterfactual conditionals rather than probabilities, and argued that it might serve philosophical needs that more familiar probabilistic alternatives do not. Demir [2008] and Scarantino [2008] criticize the counterfactual approach by contending that its alleged advantages are illusory and that it fails to secure attractive desiderata. In this paper we defend the counterfactual account from these criticisms, and suggest that it remains a useful account of information.

Many have held that photographs give us a firmer epistemic connection to the world than do other depictive representations. To take just one example, Bazin famously claimed that “The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making” ([Bazin, 1967], 14). Unfortunately, while the intuition in question is widely shared, it has remained poorly understood. In this paper we propose to explain the special epistemic status of photographs. We take as our starting place (in §1) Kendall Walton’s startling proposal that photographs are special because they are “transparent” [Walton, 1984] — that is, that they are special because, unlike other depictive representations, they enable us literally to see their depicta.1 Walton’s proposal has not convinced many; however, it has proven surprisingly difficult to say just what is wrong about the transparency thesis. In §§2–4 we’ll rise to this challenge and show why photographs are not transparent in Walton’s sense. Finally, in §§5–7 we’ll propose and defend a novel diagnosis of what is epistemically special about photographs.