Derek Matravers

Much philosophical work has been done, and continues to be done, on whether there is anything distinctive about our emotional reactions to characters and states of affairs as depicted in fiction. Showing this would require showing that such reactions differed from our emotional reactions to characters and states of affairs as depicted in non-fiction. However, extant work is directed as showing that our emotional reactions to characters and states of affairs as depicted in fiction differ from emotional reactions to characters and states of affairs we encounter face to face – a contrast not obviously relevant to the question at issue. This paper argues that once this is realised, there is no reason to think there is anything distinctive about our emotional reactions to characters and states of affairs as depicted in fiction.

The Inseparability Thesis holds that protecting heritage is inseparable from protecting people and therefore cannot conflict with protecting people. This chapter argues that we ought to reject this thesis. Conflicts between protecting heritage and protecting people are rife, both within and without war. Most obviously, these conflicts occur in cases of scarce resources. But they also occur when we distribute the risks of war. Protecting heritage can require combatants to impose risks on civilians and to incur risks to themselves. Judging the permissibility of imposing such risks and ordering combatants to incur them demands not only that we recognise conflicts between protecting heritage and protecting people but also that we develop a rubric for comparing the moral significance of harms to each. Implementing the provisions of the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict also demands the use of such a rubric.

This introduction describes the overall aim of the collection and then gives short summaries of each of the papers. The starting point of the collection is a dissatisfaction with ‘the inseparability thesis’: namely, the view that the value of heritage and the value of persons is intertwined to the extent that a comparison between the two values does not (or cannot) arise. Chapters 1 to 7 of the collection directly or indirectly concern comparisons of value of this sort. The remaining four chapters consider consequences of the damage to heritage in war. The nature of such a loss is considered, as well as suitable ways in which to react to its loss.

It is standard in the philosophy of literature to distinguish fiction and non-fiction in terms of the attitude or ‘stance’ of the reader. Peter Goldie and Peter Lamarque make use of this, arguing that certain ‘tendencies’ or ‘principles’ that are characteristic of reading fiction are ‘dangerous’ when they become part of reading non-fiction. This chapter argues that these characteristics are (generally) not characteristics of fiction in particular, but narrative in general. Hence, they cannot be used to mark a distinction between reading fiction and reading non-fiction. The arguments apply to the attitude or ‘stance’ of the reader; it is no part of the argument that fiction and non-fiction do not differ in terms of ontology or (although to a lesser extent than standardly realized) appropriate principles of criticism.

This paper is divided into four parts. The first describes the ‘narrow’ sense of empathy: a method, consciously employed, of discovering what another person is feeling. The second expresses some scepticism as to whether empathy is reliable. It considers whether we are able to obtain the right beliefs to run ‘off‐line’; whether we can reliable generate the right affective states; whether there will be causally relevant properties that apply to the agent in their situation that are not replicable; and whether, even if empathy can enable us to know, it can enable us to know that we know. The third part considers whether empathy can teach us about affective states that we have not previously experienced. The fourth part discusses the role empathy has in explaining the cognitive power of literature.

In 1797 Friedrich Schlegel wrote philosophy of art usually lacks one of two things: either the philosophy, or the art. This collection of essays contains both the philosophy and the art. It brings together an international team of leading philosophers to address diverse philosophical issues raised by recent works of art. Each essay engages with a specific artwork and explores the connection between the image and the philosophical content and how philosophy can aid interpretation of the artwork. The discussion ranges over political, ethical and religious concepts, such as apathy and irony, to standard problems in the philosophy of art, such as expression, style and depiction, as well as major movements in art history, such as Dadaism. Many of the contributors are distinguished in areas of philosophy other than aesthetics and are writing about art for the first time. All show how productive the engagement can be between philosophy, more generally, and art.

How can we understand another person's feelings, thoughts, words or behaviour? Through empathy, it is hoped, we might use our imaginations to shift our perspective into another person's, thereby grasping their thoughts and emotions. In this insightful new book, Derek Matravers negotiates the evolution of this fascinating concept. He explores the roots of the term in the work of David Hume and Adam Smith, its re-emergence in a new form in nineteenth-century German philosophy, and its resurgence as something different again in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. In doing so, he explores the important role empathy, in all its forms, has played in the study of the mind, the emotions and aesthetics, and in ethics. Empathy is an ideal introduction to one of the most absorbing contemporary philosophical debates.

This textbook reflects the buoyant state of contemporary political philosophy, and the development of the subject in the past two decades. It includes seminal papers on fundamental philosophical issues such as: the nature of social explanation distributive justice liberalism and communitarianism citizenship and multiculturalism nationalism democracy criminal justice. A range of views is represented, demonstrating the richness of the philosophical contribution to some of the most contested areas of public policy and political decision making. Each section has an introduction by the editors that situates the papers in the ongoing debate. Further Reading sections feature at the end of each chapter. Readings from the following thinkers are included: Steven Lukes, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Bhikhu Parekh, Antony Duff, G.A. Cohen, Derek Parfit, Roger Scruton, Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntrye. _Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy_ will be a valuable resource for upper-level students interested in current thinking in this area.

This clear and thorough introduction provides students with the skills necessary to understand the main thinkers, texts and arguments of political philosophy and thought. Each chapter comprises a brief overview of a major political thinker, followed by an introduction to one or more of their most influential works and an introduction to key secondary readings. Key features include: * exercises * reading notes * guides for further reading The book introduces and assesses: Machiavelli's _Prince_; Hobbes' _Leviathan_; Locke's _Second Treatise on Government_; Rousseau's _Social Contract_; Marx and Engels' _German Ideology_ (Part 1); Mill's _On Liberty and The Subjection of Women_. _Reading Political Philosophy_ requires no previous knowledge of philosophy or politics and is ideal for newcomers to political philosophy and political thought.

Derek Matravers examines how emotions form a bridge between our experience of art and of life. We often find that a particular poem, painting, or piece of music carries an emotional charge; and we may experience emotions towards, or on behalf of, a particular fictional character. Matravers shows that what these experiences have in common, and what links them to the expression of emotion in non-artistic cases, is the role played by feeling. He carries out a critical survey of various accounts of the nature of fiction, attacks contemporary cognitivist accounts of expression, and offers an uncompromising defence of a controversial view about musical expression: that music expresses the emotions it causes its listeners to feel.

The relation between art and morality is one of the vexed issues of aesthetics; it has a history at least from Plato and has been written about, or commented on, by most if not all the luminaries in aesthetics—it is not coincidence that one of the most influential papers on these debates is also one of the most cited papers of this journal. Also, the (im)pertinence of moral concerns for the assessment of artworks is arguably one of the most discussed philosophical issues in the public opinion (albeit not always informed by philosophical insights). The prompt for this Special Issue was the publication, over a short space of time, of four books in the area: James Harold’s Dangerous Art: On Moral Criticisms of Artwork (2020), Erich Hatala Matthes’s Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to Movies (2022), Ted Nannicelli’s Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism (2020), and Mary Beth Willard’s Why It’s OK to Enjoy the Art of Immoral Artists (2021). In this issue, each of these authors provides a précis of their own book, a criticism of one of the other books, and then a defence of their own work against this criticism. Although each book is, obviously, very different, there are some overlapping concerns that make for an especially productive interaction. In particular, one thread that runs through is the current vexed issue of what attitude an audience should take on a work of art in the light of facts about the moral character of its creator. With the wars over ‘cancel culture’ raging in the popular discourse, it is important to subject this issue to detailed philosophical examination.

The destruction of cultural heritage in war is currently attracting considerable attention. ISIS’s campaign of deliberate destruction across the Middle East was met with widespread horror and calls for some kind of international response. The United States attracted criticism for both its accidental damaging of Ancient Babylon in 2015 and its failure to protect the Mosul Museum from looters in 2003. In 2016, the International Criminal Court prosecuted its first case of the destruction of heritage as a war crime. While the destruction of heritage is widely condemned, there has also been condemnation of calls to mobilize our resources for the sake of heritage protection when human beings face threats to life and limb. Such issues are both philosophically rich and personally significant to a wide range of people. And yet they have been largely neglected by academic philosophers. This book makes a substantial contribution to developing this new philosophical territory. The contributors are a mixture of internationally recognized authorities in their fields and early-career researchers working in this area. Their eleven original essays investigate a variety of philosophical and ethical issues arising from the phenomenon of heritage destruction in war, including conflicts between protecting heritage and protecting people, how we ought to respond to heritage that is damaged in war, the nature of the harm caused by such damage, and the morally appropriate treatment of sites of war and conflict that have themselves become heritage sites.

The standard discussion of the relation between aesthetics and ethics tends to avoid the fundamental question: how are those two values ranked against each other in terms of importance. This paper looks at two arguments, the ‘resource allocation argument’ and the ‘relative weight argument’. It puts forward the view that any theory of aesthetic value should characterise aesthetic value in a way that allows for the existence of these arguments. It argues that hedonism does that successfully, but the more recent approaches to aesthetic value—in particular Dominic McIver Lopes’s ‘Network Theory’ have more of a struggle.

This paper starts from the fact that the study of narrative in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy is almost exclusively the study of fictional narrative. It returns to an earlier debate in which Hayden White argued that “historiography is a form of fiction-making.” Although White’s claims are hyperbolical, the paper argues that he was correct to stress the importance of the claim that fiction and non-fiction use “the same techniques and strategies.” A distinction is drawn between properties of narratives that are simply properties of narratives and properties of narratives that play a role in forming readers’ beliefs about the world. Using this distinction, it is shown that it is an important feature of non-fictions that they are narratives; it is salutary to recognise non-fictions as being more like fictions than they are like the events they represent.

In the third issue of the J. Paul Getty Trust Occasional Papers in Cultural Heritage Policy series, authors Helen Frowe and Derek Matravers pivot from the earlier tone of the series in discussing the appropriate response to attacks on cultural heritage with their paper, “Conflict and Cultural Heritage: A Moral Analysis of the Challenges of Heritage Protection.” While Frowe and Matravers acknowledge the importance of cultural heritage, they assert that we must more carefully consider the complex moral dimensions—the inevitable serious consequences to human beings—before formulating policy to forcefully protect it. A number of writers and thinkers working on the problem of preserving the world’s most treasured monuments, sites, and objects today cite what Frowe and Matravers call extrinsic and intrinsic justifications for the protection of cultural heritage. These are arguments that maintain that protecting heritage will be a key means to achieve other important goals, like the prevention of genocide, or arguments that heritage deserves to be forcefully protected for its own sake. Frowe and Matravers deconstruct both types of justifications, demonstrating a lack of clear evidence for a causal relationship between the destruction of cultural heritage and atrocities like genocide and arguing that the defense of heritage must not be treated with the same weight or urgency, or according to the same international policies, as the defense of human lives. By calling for expanded theory and empirical data and the consideration of morality in the crafting of international policy vis-à-vis cultural heritage protection, Frowe and Matravers present a thoughtful critique that enriches this important series and adds to the ongoing dialogue in the field.

To write Narrative Justice, one would need to be expert in the philosophy of fiction, in criminology, in crime, and in military history. Hence, possibly only someone with exactly Rafe McGregor's background could have done it. Aside from the truly interdisciplinary nature of the book, several other virtues stand out. I will mention in particular the rigorous argumentation and the clarity of the writing. McGregor does not shelter behind obfuscation; everything is there in plain sight. Indeed, his occasional glosses of some of the rather more self-indulgent writing of his interlocutors are most welcome.There is much in the book that is...