Cain Todd

This paper examines two phenomena that are usually treated separately but which resemble each other insofar as they both raise questions concerning the difference, if there is one, between so-called ‘real’ and ‘as if’ emotions: affective memory and imagined emotion. The existence of both states has been explicitly denied, and there are very few positive accounts of either. I will argue that there are no good grounds for scepticism about the existence of ‘as if’ emotions, but also that the existing positive accounts of them are all explanatorily inadequate. Comparing the two phenomena directly, I contend, allows us to defend the existence of both by showing how they essentially involve the same ‘affective bodily imagery’. The final part of the paper offers an original, empirically informed account of the nature of this imagery, the role it plays in ‘as if’ emotions, and how it may help illuminate some important connections between memory, imagination, and emotion.

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] largely upon a series of previously published papers, this book tackles a diverse range of topics – including the nature of practical reasons, impartiality, personhood, the phenomenal content of moral experience, and the notions of glory and beauty in ethics – that are unified by an overarching commitment to an anti-systematic approach to normative ethics. The presiding influences here are Bernard Williams and Wittgenstein, and, in certain respects, Kant, and the overall view is a kind of realist virtue ethics. Chappell’s method is frequently broad and illustrative, rather than detailed and argumentative, and rich in theological and literary allusions. The price to be paid for the considerable insight and breadth is a lack of neatness and clarity in some of the discussion, but Chappell’s main...

Philosophers have long been interested in the various similarities and differences between perception and imagination. One of the most interesting purported differences is the relationship that attention bears to each. Colin McGinn (2004), especially, has provided a comprehensive discussion of these relations, pointing out that imagery, unlike perceptual experiences (percepts), essentially requires attention, presents no equivalent of the visual field for attention to explore, lacks saturation, and cannot provide new information about what is imagined. Moreover, McGinn and others have also maintained that images, like percepts, are transparent. In this paper I will examine all of these claims, arguing first that there are few good reasons to accept the differences between imagery and perceptual experiences in respect of the role that attention is supposed to play in each, and secondly, that in any case the transparency claim is in tension with the other claims made about imagery. I conclude that the most salient difference between imagination and perception consists in the non-attributive phenomenology of the former. Finally, I turn briefly to some implications of this characteristic of imagining for the nature of pictorial depiction, arguing against the plausibility of accounts that attempt to explain it by appealing to the imagination.

Philosophers have long been interested in the various similarities and differences between perception and imagination. One of the most interesting purported differences is the relationship that attention bears to each. Colin McGinn (2004), especially, has provided a comprehensive discussion of these relations, pointing out that imagery, unlike perceptual experiences (percepts), essentially requires attention, presents no equivalent of the visual field for attention to explore, lacks saturation, and cannot provide new information about what is imagined. Moreover, McGinn and others have also maintained that images, like percepts, are transparent. In this paper I will examine all of these claims, arguing first that there are few good reasons to accept the differences between imagery and perceptual experiences in respect of the role that attention is supposed to play in each, and secondly, that in any case the transparency claim is in tension with the other claims made about imagery. I conclude that the most salient difference between imagination and perception consists in the non-attributive phenomenology of the former. Finally, I turn briefly to some implications of this characteristic of imagining for the nature of pictorial depiction, arguing against the plausibility of accounts that attempt to explain it by appealing to the imagination.

This paper addresses two recent debates in aesthetics: the ‘moralist debate’, concerning the relationship between the ethical and aesthetic evaluations of artworks, and the ‘cognitivist debate’, concerning the relationship between the cognitive and aesthetic evaluations of artworks. Although the two debates appear to concern quite different issues, I argue that the various positions in each are marked by the same types of confusions and ambiguities. In particular, they demonstrate a persistent and unjustified conflation of aesthetic and artistic value, which in turn is based on a more general failure to explicitly tackle the demarcation of aesthetic value. As such, the claims of each side are rendered ambiguous in respect of the relation that is supposed to hold between all these types of value and artistic value. These issues are discussed in light of a recent argument proposed by Matthew Kieran, to undermine, to some extent, the conceptual distinction between aesthetic, cognitive-ethical, and artistic values in our appraisal of art works. In rejecting his argument, I defend the conceptual distinction and a pluralistic conception of artistic value that allows for cognitive and ethical values to count as artistic, but not aesthetic, values

Do the artists intentions have anything to do with the making and appreciation of works of art? In Art and Intention, Paisley Livingston develops a broad and balanced perspective on perennial disputes between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists in philosophical aesthetics and critical theory. He surveys and assesses a wide range of rival assumptions about the nature of intentions and the status of intentionalist psychology. With detailed reference to examples from diverse media, art forms, and traditions, he demonstrates that insights into the multiple functions of intentions have important implications for our understand- ing of artistic creation and authorship, the ontology of art, conceptions of texts, works, and versions, basic issues pertaining to the nature of fiction and fictional truth, and the theory of art interpretation and appreciation. Livingston argues that neither the inspirationist nor rationalistic con- ceptions can capture the blending of deliberate and intentional, sponta- neous, and unintentional processes in the creation of art. Texts, works, and artistic structures and performances cannot be adequately individ- uated in the absence of a recognition of the relevant makers intentions. The distinction between complete and incomplete works receives an action-theoretic analysis that makes possible an elucidation of several different senses of fragment in critical discourse. Livingston develops an account of authorship, contending that the recognition of intentions is in fact crucial to our understanding of diverse forms of collective art-making. An artists short-term intentions and long-term plans and policies interact in complex ways in the emergence of an artistic oeuvre, and our uptake of such attitudes makes an important difference to our appreciation of the relations between items belonging to a single life-work. The intentionalism Livingston advocates is, however, a partial one, and accommodates a number of important anti-intentionalist contentions. Intentions are fallible, and works of art, like other artefacts, can be put to a bewildering diversity of uses. Yet some important aspects of arts meaning and value are linked to the artists aims and activities

ABSTRACT: Amongst inanimate objects, it is generally accepted that at least some art forms, such as music and painting, are capable of being genuinely expressive of emotion, even though it is difficult to understand exactly how. In contrast, although expressive properties can be attributed to non-artworks, such as natural objects or wine, it has often been claimed that such objects cannot be genuinely expressive. Focussing on wine, I argue that once we understand properly the nature of expressiveness, if we allow that music can be expressive there is no good reason to withold the ability to be genuinely expressive from wine.

The cognitivist/non-cognitivist debate about the nature and value of literary fiction has witnessed a lot of spilled ink amongst philosophers over the past decade. Gibson characterizes this debate as a conflict between two apparently incompatible intuitions: the ‘humanist’ intuition that works of literary fiction have some sort of cognitive value in telling us about the world, and the ‘sceptical’ anti-humanist intuition that such works, and their proper appreciation, are not essentially concerned with the notions of truth and knowledge. The vast majority of recent writers on this issue have defended various versions of cognitivism, but the novelty of Gibson's cognitivist – or as he calls it ‘humanist’ – position consists in attempting to reconcile the two sides of the debate.Gibson thus takes seriously various sceptical arguments, primarily semantic and epistemological, to the effect that works of fiction qua fiction do not or cannot make reference to or represent the ‘real’ world and insofar as they do refer to it, they provide no evidence in themselves for forming justified beliefs about their claims. These arguments, Gibson holds, place a necessary ‘textual constraint’ on any plausible humanism, …

This paper provides an account of the nature of our appreciation of wine, and a defence of the aesthetic value of tastes and smells. Focusing primarily on Roger Scruton’s recent claims, I argue against him that our appreciation of wine meets his own constraints on aesthetic interest and, moreover, that the cultural significance he grants to wine is in large part grounded in its aesthetic value. I show that Scruton’s claims are thus in tension with each other, not because he has misunderstood the nature of aesthetic interest, but because he fails to appreciate the aesthetic capabilities of wine. Appealing to a well-known argument of Kendall Walton’s, I defend the aesthetic interest and value of tastes and smells by demonstrating that our judgements of wine can be correct or incorrect relative to the categories that govern its production and proper appreciation and understanding. I thereby show that tastes and smells can attain aesthetic significance in virtue of the types of objects they constitute. In particular, I hold that this significance, in the case of wine, rests in large part on its ability to be expressive and to embody certain kinds of meaning.

This volume brings together new work by leading philosophers on the topics of emotion and value, and explores issues at their intersection. Recent work in philosophy and psychology has had important implications for topics such as the role that emotions play in practical rationality and moral psychology, the connection between imagination and emotion in the appreciation of fiction, and more generally with the ability of emotions to discern axiological saliences and to ground the objectivity of ethical or aesthetic value judgements. This volume makes a unique contribution to scholarship on emotion and value by bringing together top authors from these lines of research. In addition, it explores various links between the emotions and self-understanding, touching on a range of themes that include depression, empathy, agency, guilt, and self-trust. All of these issues are approached from a number of different perspectives in order to present the reader with a wide view of this extremely rich terrain and to demonstrate how the latest thinking in a number of currently intensive areas of research is deeply interconnected.