• The Art of Comics (edited book)
    with Roy T. Cook
    Wiley‐Blackwell. 2012-01-27.
  •  16
    An Aesthetics of (Popular) Music Radio
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 81 (3): 330-340. 2023.
  •  1
    The Ontology of Comics
    In Dominic McIver Lopes, Berys Gaut, Aaron Meskin & Roy T. Cook (eds.), The Art of Comics, Wiley‐blackwell. 2012.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Multiplicity How Are Instances of Comics Created? Autographic and Allographic Conclusion Notes References.
  •  35
    Why Do Philosophers Neglect the Short Story?
    Philosophy and Literature 46 (1): 100-119. 2022.
    Philosophers of literature have neglected the short story. I argue that this neglect is unwarranted. The short story raises interesting philosophical questions that deserve attention. If philosophers only ever focused on one form of narrative prose—the novel—they would end up with a distorted picture of literature.
  •  19
    Art Clusters: The Importance of Similarities in Aesthetic Research and Education
    Journal of Aesthetic Education 55 (4): 40-50. 2021.
    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…Read more
  •  2
    Introduction: The Peter Kivy Prize Symposium
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. forthcoming.
  •  26
    Nguyen, C. THI. Games: Agency as Art
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. forthcoming.
  •  353
    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 facto…Read more
  •  64
    Food, Art and Philosophy
    Critica 53 (157). 2021.
    Food, Art and Philosophy
  •  5
    Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2014.
    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…Read more
  •  30
    The Moving Image
    In Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa & Shawn Loht (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, Springer. pp. 49-69. 2019.
    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…Read more
  •  32
    Videogames and Film
    with Jon Robson
    In Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa & Shawn Loht (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, Springer. pp. 971-994. 2019.
    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 natu…Read more
  •  285
    Aesthetics And Popular Art: An Interview With Aaron Meskin
    Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 7 (2): 1-9. 2010.
    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…Read more
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    Dual Character Art Concepts
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (1): 102-128. 2020.
    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 broa…Read more
  •  8
    Once Upon a Time: Essays in the Philosophy of Literature (edited book)
    with Peter Kivy
    Rowman & Littlefield International. 2019.
    Peter Kivy, world-renowned philosopher of art, completed work on this book shortly before his untimely death in 2017. In it he addresses the novel, making an invaluable contribution to the field of philosophy of literature and raising questions of a philosophical nature about the novel that will be of interest both to the professional philosopher and to the general reader.
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    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 imagin…Read more
  •  60
    Counterfactuals, probabilities, and information: Response to critics
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (4). 2008.
    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 r…Read more
  •  169
    An objective counterfactual theory of information
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (3). 2006.
    We offer a novel theory of information that differs from traditional accounts in two respects: (i) it explains information in terms of counterfactuals rather than conditional probabilities, and (ii) it does not make essential reference to doxastic states of subjects, and consequently allows for the sort of objective, reductive explanations of various notions in epistemology and philosophy of mind that many have wanted from an account of information
  •  283
    On the epistemic value of photographs
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2). 2004.
    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…Read more
  •  443
    Photography and Its Epistemic Values: Reply to Cavedon-Taylor
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2): 235-237. 2009.
  • 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…Read more
  •  185
    Photographs furnish evidence. This is true in both formal and informal contexts. The use of photographs as legal evidence goes back to the very earliest days of photography, and they have been used in American trials since around the time of the Civil War. Photographs may also serve as historical evidence (for example, about the Civil War). And they serve in informal contexts as evidence about all sorts of things, such as what we and our loved ones looked like in the past.
  •  154
    Comics as literature?
    British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (3): 219-239. 2009.
    Not all comics are art. What about the comics that are art? What sort of art are they? In particular, are comics a form of literature? For a variety of reasons it is tempting to think that at least some comics are literature. Nevertheless, many theorists reject the ‘comics as literature’ view. And although some reasons for resisting that view are misguided, I shall argue that there are other good reasons for being hesitant about treating comics as a form of literature. This leaves us at an impas…Read more
  •  909
    Experimental Philosophical Aesthetics as Public Philosophy
    In Réhault Sébastien & Cova Florian (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics, Bloomsbury. pp. 309-326. 2018.
    Experimental philosophy offers an alternative mode of engagement for public philosophy, in which the public can play a participatory role. We organized two public events on the aesthetics of coffee that explored this alternative mode of engagement. The first event focuses on issues surrounding the communication of taste. The second event focuses on issues concerning ethical influences on taste. In this paper, we report back on these two events which explored the possibility of doing experimental…Read more
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    Still Self-Involved: A Reply to Patridge
    with Jon Robson
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (2): 184-187. 2017.
  •  282
    Errors in ‘The History of an Error’
    with Simon Fokt
    British Journal of Aesthetics 56 (2): 179-185. 2016.
    In a recent article in this journal, Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley argue that relational theories of art are rooted in a misunderstanding of what it would take to falsify the family resemblance theories they are meant to supplant, and are incapable of meeting all the requirements a successful theory of art must meet. Hence, they are doomed to failure. We show that the arguments Neill and Ridley offer are rooted in misunderstandings about relational theories and the requirements for a successful th…Read more
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    Defining Comics
    In Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook & Aaron Meskin (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Comics, Routledge. pp. 221-229. 2016.