•  37
    Wittgenstein’s Artillery: Philosophy as Poetry
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 81 (3): 425-428. 2023.
    Here’s a question that a great many playwrights, poets, and novelists have thought about: how can an author make present in their writing those features of the
  •  171
    Ordinary Returns in Le notti di Cabiria
    In Craig Fox & Britt Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 99-113. 2023.
  •  5
    Interpretive Reasoning
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (4): 481-483. 2006.
  •  9
    Wittgenstein and Literary Studies (edited book)
    with Robert Chodat
    Cambridge University Press. 2022.
    Wittgenstein is often regarded as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and in recent decades, his work has begun to play a prominent role in literary studies, particularly in debates over language, interpretation, and critical judgment. Wittgenstein and Literary Studies solidifies this critical movement, assembling recent critics and philosophers who understand Wittgenstein as a counterweight to longstanding tendencies in both literary studies and philosophical aesthetics. Th…Read more
  •  858
    Philosophers ask just whose expression, if anyone’s, we hear in lyric poetry. Walton provides a novel possibility: it’s the reader who “uses” the poem (just as a speech giver uses a speech) who makes the language expressive. But worries arise once we consider poems in particular social or political settings, those which require a strong self-other distinction, or those with expressions that should not be disassociated from the subjects whose experience they draw from. One way to meet this challe…Read more
  •  7
    Narrative, Emotion, and Insight (edited book)
    Penn State University Press. 2011.
    A collection of essays, written for this volume by leaders in the field, that study the emotional and cognitive significance of narrative and its implications for aesthetics and the philosophy of art
  • Literature and Knowledge
    In Richard Eldridge (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, Oxford University Press Usa. 2009.
  •  34
    Opposite: Poems, Philosophy & Coffee (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics. forthcoming.
  •  869
    Really Boring Art
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (30): 190-218. 2022.
    There is little question as to whether there is good boring art, though its existence raises a number of questions for both the philosophy of art and the philosophy of emotions. How can boredom ever be a desideratum of art? How can our standing commitments concerning the nature of aesthetic experience and artistic value accommodate the existence of boring art? How can being bored constitute an appropriate mode of engagement with a work of art as a work of art? More broadly, how can there be work…Read more
  •  246
    An Aesthetics of Insight
    In Wolfgang Huemer & Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (eds.), Beauty: New Essays in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Philosophia. pp. 277-306. 2019.
  •  7
    The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 120-123, Winter 2020.
  •  8
    Sulla Produzione del Senso
    In Guido Ferraro & Antonio Dante Maria Santangelo (eds.), Narrazione e Realtà: Il Senso degli Eventi, . pp. 97-116. 2017.
  •  320
    Zombie Philosophy
    In Edward P. Comentale & Aaron Jaffe (eds.), The Year's Work at the Zombie Research Center, . pp. 416-436. 2014.
  •  580
    On the Ethical Character of Literature
    In Espen Hammer (ed.), Kafka's The Trial: Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. pp. 85-110. 2018.
  •  25
    The New Propositionalism
    with Bernard Harrison
    Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 2 (15): 263-289. 2017.
  • Kritischer Pluralismus und Erkenntniszuwachs. Translated in German by Gabrielle Boller
    In Alex Burri & Wolfgang Huemer (eds.), Kunst Denken, Mentis. pp. 105--116. 2007.
  •  13
    Reading For Life
    In John Gibson Wolfgang Huemer (ed.), The Literary Wittgenstein, Routledge. 2004.
  •  12
    Interpreting Words, Interpreting Worlds
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (4): 439-450. 2006.
  •  73
    Fiction and the Weave of Life
    Oxford University Press UK. 2007.
    Literary fiction is of crucial importance in human life. It is a source of understanding and insight into the nature of the human condition, yet ever since Plato, philosophers have struggled to provide a plausible explanation of how this can be the case. For surely the fictionality - the sheer invented character - of the literary text means that fiction presents not our world, but other worlds? In Fiction and the Weave of Life, John Gibson offers a novel and intriguing account of the relationshi…Read more
  •  38
    The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature (edited book)
    with Noël Carroll
    Routledge. 2015.
    _The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature_ is an in-depth examination of literature through a philosophical lens, written by distinguished figures across the major divisions of philosophy. Its 40 newly-commissioned essays are divided into six sections: historical foundations what is literature? aesthetics & appreciation meaning & interpretation metaphysics & epistemology ethics & political theory _The Companion_ opens with a comprehensive historical overview of the philosophy of liter…Read more
  •  27
    The Philosophy of Poetry (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2015.
    The Philosophy of Poetry brings together philosophers of art, language, and mind to expose and address the array of problems poetry raises for philosophy. This volume offers a powerful demonstration of how central poetry should be to philosophy, and sets out the various puzzles and paradoxes that future work in the field will have to address.
  • Scepticism and Humanism in the Philosophy of Literature
    Dissertation, University of Toronto (Canada). 2001.
  •  18
    文人维特根斯坦 (edited book)
    with Wolfgang Huemer
    Sanhui. 2008.
    Translation of _The Literary Wittgenstein_ (ed. by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer, London: Routledge, 2004). Simplified Chinese. ISBN 978-7-80762-896-5
  •  860
    Interpreting words, interpreting worlds
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (4). 2006.
    It is often assumed that literary meaning is essentially linguistic in nature and that literary interpretation is therefore a purely linguistic affair. This essay identifies a variety of literary meaning that cannot be reduced to linguistic meaning. Meaning of this sort is generated not by a communicative act so much as through a creative one: the construction of a fictional world. The way in which a fictional world can bear meaning turns out to be strikingly unlike the way a sentence can, and t…Read more
  •  72
    A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge (edited book)
    with Wolfgang Huemer and Luca Pocci
    Routledge. 2007.
    A team of leading contributors from both philosophical and literary backgrounds have been brought together in this impressive book to examine how works of literary fiction can be a source of knowledge. Together, they analyze the important trends in this current popular debate. The innovative feature of this volume is that it mixes work by literary theorists and scholars with work of analytic philosophers that combined together provide a comprehensive statement of the variety of ways in which wor…Read more