Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind
  • Fictional Worlds and the Political Imagination (edited book)
    Palgrave MacMillan. forthcoming.
    There has been a steady stream of articles written on the relations between political thought and the interpretation of literature, but there remains a need for a book that both introduces and significantly contributes to the field - particularly one that shows in detail how we can think more freely and creatively about political possibilities by reading and reflecting on politically significant literature. This volume offers analytically acute and culturally rich ways of understanding how it is…Read more
  •  4
    Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood pursues three main questions: What role does literature play in the constitution of a human being? What is the connection between the language we see at work in imaginative fiction and the language we develop to describe ourselves? And is something more powerful than just description at work -- that is, does self-descriptive or autobiographical language itself play an active role in shaping and solidifying ou…Read more
  •  2
    Engaging Henry James
    In Jonathan Gilmore & Lydia Goehr (eds.), A Companion to Arthur C. Danto, Wiley. 2022.
    The fact that Arthur Danto is so well known for his vibrant writing on the visual arts should not blind us to his deep interest in literature and writing, his vision of its role in the living of a human life, and the special way he interweaves his literary interests with his writing on the visual arts. In Danto's life and work, the writings of Henry James proved particularly powerful in this regard. Between life and literature, Danto found parallels that were metaphorical both in perspective and…Read more
  • Introduction
    In Garry L. Hagberg & Walter Jost (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, Wiley-blackwell. 2010.
  • Wittgenstein Re-Reading
    In Sascha Bru, Wolfgang Huemer & Daniel Steuer (eds.), Wittgenstein Reading, De Gruyter. pp. 243-262. 2013.
  •  1
    20 Wittgenstein and the Question of True Self-Interpretation
    In Michael Krausz (ed.), Is There a Single Right Interpretation?, Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 381-406. 2002.
  •  4
    Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (3): 295-297. 1996.
  •  2
    The Medium Itself: Modernism in Art and Philosophy’s Linguistic Self-Analysis
    In Ana Falcato & Antonio Cardiello (eds.), Philosophy in the Condition of Modernism, Springer Verlag. pp. 101-126. 2018.
    Multiple definitions of Modernism have been put forward, often focusing on the character or features of the works of art and literature produced within this cultural movement. Here I want to focus, instead, on the sensibility of Modernism as this has manifested itself to be especially concerned not with the content of representation, but with the materials out of which a representation is made. Through an analysis of eighteenth-century English portraiture, nineteenth-century French political pai…Read more
  •  8
    Fiction and Emotion: A Study in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Mind
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (3): 246-248. 1990.
  •  82
    A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature (edited book)
    Wiley-Blackwell. 2007.
    This monumental collection of new and recent essays from an international team of eminent scholars represents the best contemporary critical thinking relating to both literary and philosophical studies of literature. Helpfully groups essays into the field's main sub-categories, among them ‘Relations Between Philosophy and Literature’, ‘Emotional Engagement and the Experience of Reading’, ‘Literature and the Moral Life’, and ‘Literary Language’ Offers a combination of analytical precision and lit…Read more
  •  10
    The paper examines an important theme in Cora Diamond’s work, as this appears particularly in her reply to Martha Nussbaum, namely the theme of moral attention—being sensitive to the complexity of facts as opposed to obtuseness, and the role that improvisation plays for moral attention. To further elucidate what improvisation is I consider its role in music and literature as mimetic portrayals of the complexity of moral life. I use the examples of Coltrane’s jazz music and of James’s rewriting o…Read more
  •  27
    Kivy’s Mystery: Absolute Music and What the Formalist Can (or Could) Hear
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. forthcoming.
    Peter Kivy has said that the power of purely instrumental music remains an unexplained wonder. With this larger question in mind, I will consider: the issues in musical aesthetics that led to what Kivy termed his enhanced formalism, his conception of expressive properties in music and how a distinction between having and understanding an emotion can help clarify this issues here, and, most importantly for Kivy’s larger mystery, the way that counterpoint, in an often unrecognized way, can present…Read more
  • Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (2): 254-254. 1994.
  •  15
    The Interpretation of Music: Philosophical Essays
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (2): 201-204. 1996.
  •  19
    Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination (edited book)
    Palgrave-Macmillan. 2021.
    This edited collection investigates the kinds of moral reflection we can undertake within the imaginative worlds of literature. In philosophical contexts of ethical inquiry we can too easily forget that literary experience can play an important role in the cultivation of our ethical sensibilities. Because our ethical lives are conducted in the real world, fictional representations of this world can appear removed from ethical contemplation. However, as this stimulating volume shows, the dichotom…Read more
  •  5
    This chapter investigates the content of the concept of adaptation, as it is seen on analogy to linguistic translation and as it is seen as itself a representation of the process of human self-definition and self-composition. Word-to-word translation is uncovered as a misleading analogy, but larger frames of translation are shown to be illuminating. Quine’s work on the indeterminacy of translation is intertwined with Charlie Kaufman’s script for his film Adaptation, and the simple notion of the …Read more
  •  11
    The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (1): 85-88. 2000.
  •  8
    How to Read Wittgenstein
    Philosophical Quarterly 57 (228): 491-494. 2007.
  •  3
    There has been a vast wave of work on narrative in the last decade: this work includes numerous volumes on the philosophy of narrative and its definition, on the place of narrative in literary analysis, on the sense-making power of narrative construction, on narrative in its evolutionary aspects, and on the relation between narrative and the constitution of personhood. However, one sees less work specifically on the relations between literary narrative and self-understanding. Self-knowledge and …Read more
  •  3
    This chapter explores the significance that Wittgenstein’s work in the philosophy of mind holds for self-understanding, looking into issues of the dualist-introspectionist model of the mind, its antithesis in behaviorism, and the role of language as what Wittgenstein called “the vehicle of thought”, where these considerations are all brought together as a way of investigating how we think of the contents of consciousness. It then takes these Wittgensteinian reflections into a discussion of the w…Read more
  •  4
    2. A Person’s Words: Literary Characters and Autobiographical Understanding
    In Christopher Cowley (ed.), The Philosophy of Autobiography, University of Chicago Press. pp. 39-71. 2015.
  •  18
    Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding (edited book)
    Springer Verlag. 2018.
    This book investigates the scope and significance of Stanley Cavell’s lifelong and lasting contribution to aesthetic understanding. Focusing on various strands of the rich body of Cavell’s philosophical work, the authors explore connections between his wide-ranging writings on literature, music, film, opera, autobiography, Wittgenstein, and Austin to contemporary currents in aesthetic thinking. Most centrally, the writings brought together here from an international team of senior, mid-career, a…Read more
  •  15
    Art as Language systematically considers the implications of the pervasive belief that art is a language or functions like...
  •  7
    Wittgenstein, Verbal Creativity and the Expansion of Artistic Style
    In Sebastian Sunday Grève & Jakub Mácha (eds.), Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 141-176. 2016.
    Of the famous passage from Augustine’s Confessions1 that opens Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes, These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the words in language name objects — sentences are combinations of such names. — In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands. (PI, 2009, §1) This …Read more
  •  29
    Narrative and Self-Understanding (edited book)
    Palgrave. 2019.
    This exciting new edited collection bridges the gap between narrative and self-understanding. The problem of self-knowledge is of universal interest; the nature or character of its achievement has been one continuing thread in our philosophical tradition for millennia. Likewise the nature of storytelling, the assembly of individual parts of a potential story into a coherent narrative structure, has been central to the study of literature. But how do we gain knowledge from an artform that is by d…Read more
  •  74
    The voluminous writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein contain some of the most profound reflections of recent times on the nature of the human subject and self-understanding - the human condition, philosophically speaking. Describing Ourselves mines those extensive writings for a conception of the self that stands in striking contrast to its predecessors as well as its more recent alternatives. More specifically, the book offers a detailed discussion of Wittgenstein's later writings on language and min…Read more
  •  17
    This article undertakes a comparison between Wittgenstein's philosophy of the early and late periods with the musical theories of Wittgenstein's contemporary, Heinrich Schenker, an influential Viennese theorist of tonality, as well as those of their contemporary Arnold Schoenberg. Schenker's reductive analytical procedure was designed to unveil fundamental and uniform ways in which all works of music function, unfolding a deep structure constituting their essence. Schoenberg deplored this line o…Read more
  •  2
    Aesthetic Legacies (review)
    Journal of Aesthetic Education 30 (1): 115. 1996.