•  32
    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
  •  5
    Interpretive Reasoning
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (4): 481-483. 2006.
  •  8
    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
  •  786
    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
  •  5
    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.
  •  33
    Opposite: Poems, Philosophy & Coffee (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics. forthcoming.
  •  828
    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
  •  234
    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.
  •  5
    The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 120-123, Winter 2020.
  •  7
    Sulla Produzione del Senso
    In Guido Ferraro & Antonio Dante Maria Santangelo (eds.), Narrazione e Realtà: Il Senso degli Eventi, . pp. 97-116. 2017.
  •  307
    Zombie Philosophy
    In Edward P. Comentale & Aaron Jaffe (eds.), The Year's Work at the Zombie Research Center, . pp. 416-436. 2014.
  •  559
    On the Ethical Character of Literature
    In Espen Hammer (ed.), Kafka's The Trial: Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. pp. 85-110. 2018.
  •  22
    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.
  •  11
    Interpreting Words, Interpreting Worlds
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (4): 439-450. 2006.
  •  65
    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
  •  32
    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
  •  26
    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.
  •  17
    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
  •  1166
    Empathy
    In Noël Carroll & John Gibson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature, Routledge. pp. 200-219. 2015.
  •  7
    La Guerra Dei Poveri : A Response to A. J. Nickerson
    Philosophy and Literature 40 (1): 315-316. 2016.
    What the author of this essay-review says about our handling of scholarship on poetry in The Philosophy of Poetry is perhaps true. Literary scholars often accuse us of ignoring their work, just as we at times condemn them for their questionable treatment of philosophical issues. There is a smallness to all this, on both sides, and the effect is almost always to affirm the very disciplinary boundaries we are trying to overcome when telling others that they should read our work.Fortunately, howeve…Read more
  •  1127
    Between truth and triviality
    British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (3): 224-237. 2003.
    A viable theory of literary humanism must do justice to the idea that literature offers cognitive rewards to the careful reader. There are, however, powerful arguments to the effect that literature is at best only capable of offering idle visions of a world already well known. In this essay I argue that there is a form of cognitive awareness left unmentioned in the traditional vocabulary of knowledge acquisition, a form of awareness literature is particularly capable of offering. Thus even if it…Read more