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52Pornography and imagining about oneselfIn Hans Maes & Jerrold Levinson (eds.), Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 116-136. 2012.It has seemed to some compelling that construing imagining in relation to fictional events as imagining being aware of those events provides a good explanation of our emotional responses to them. Call this ‘the argument from affective response’. Versions of this argument have been advanced by Kendall Walton and Jerrold Levinson. A more localised version of it, with respect to pornography, is that construing imagining in relation to events represented in pornography as imagining being aware of th…Read more
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Ignoring Differences between Men and Women is the Wrong Way to Address Gender DysphoriaQuillette 2019 (April 11). 2019.The main problem with sex eliminationism is that, in a nutshell, it leaves us with no adequate language to describe a politically important feature of material reality.
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31Imagination and fictionIn Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination, Routledge. pp. 204-216. 2016.What is fiction? It permeates contemporary life: via novels we read, stories we tell, box-sets we watch, and as philosophers, thought experiments we use. Many think it should be characterised in terms of a relation to the imagination. In this essay, I’ll consider prominent expressions of this view, as well as rejections of it. Before this, I’ll introduce two methodological approaches that it’s helpful to distinguish.
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41ObjectificationInternational Encyclopedia of Ethics. 2020.This entry considers the question “What is objectification?” After preliminary remarks about different methodological approaches, several possible answers, or groups of answers, are introduced, separated out in terms of broad themes. Each is situated in relation to historical and more contemporary authors. These themes are: objectification as instrumentalization; objectification as reduction to the body; objectification as negation of subjectivity or agency; objectification as naturalization. Ob…Read more
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7Presence of mindForum for European Philosophy Blog. 2016.Kathleen Stock on what we might mean when we talk about sexual objectification.
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6604I trace a brief history of philosophical discussion of the concept WOMAN and identify two key points at which, I argue, things went badly wrong. The first was where when it was agreed that the concept WOMAN must identify a social not biological kind. The second was where it was decided that the concept WOMAN faced a legitimate challenge of being insufficiently “inclusive”, understood in a certain way. I’ll argue that both of these moves are only intelligible, if at all, in the context of an anti…Read more
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952XIV—Sexual Orientation: What Is It?Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 119 (3): 295-319. 2019.I defend an account of sexual orientation, understood as a reflexive disposition to be sexually attracted to people of a particular biological Sex or Sexes. An orientation is identified in terms of two aspects: the Sex of the subject who has the disposition, and whether that Sex is the same as, or different to, the Sex to which the subject is disposed to be attracted. I explore this account in some detail and defend it from several challenges. In doing so, I provide a theoretical framework that …Read more
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64Knowledge from Fiction and the Challenge from LuckGrazer Philosophische Studien 96 (3): 476-496. 2019.In order for true beliefs acquired from reading fiction to count as knowledge proper, they must survive ‘the challenge from luck’. That is, it must be established that such beliefs are neither luckily true, nor luckily believed by readers. The author considers three kinds of true belief a reader may, she assumes, get from reading fiction: a) those based on testimony about empirical facts; b) those based on ‘true in passing’ sentences; and c) those beliefs about counterfactuals one may get from r…Read more
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86Reply by Kathleen StockBritish Journal of Aesthetics 59 (2): 219-225. 2019.I am extremely grateful to all commentators for such patient, generous, and stimulating contributions. What follows are some thoughts to enrich the conversation, but these are by no means intended to be definitive answers to the worries they have raised.
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21Kathleen Stock on what we might mean when we talk about sexual objectification.
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14Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2007.Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work presents significant new contributions to central issues in the philosophy of music, written by leading philosophers working in the analytic tradition. The issues tackled include: the question of what sort of thing a work of music is; the nature of the relation between a musical work and versions of it; the nature of musical expression and its contribution to musical experience; the relation of music to metaphor; the nature of musical irony; t…Read more
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27Some objections to Stecker's historical functionalismBritish Journal of Aesthetics 40 (4): 479-491. 2000.The claim that the functions of art liable to change over time appears to suggest that any attempt to define art in terms of a limited set of functions will fail. Robert Stecker has offered a functionalist definition which seeks to accommodate this criticism by making the functions which are relevant to an artwork's status those which are 'standard or correctly recognized' for some art form. I argue that Stecker does not offer a clear enough distinction between the 'standard or correctly recogni…Read more
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85I—Kathleen Stock: Fictive Utterance and ImaginingAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 (1): 145-161. 2011.A popular approach to defining fictive utterance says that, necessarily, it is intended to produce imagining. I shall argue that this is not falsified by the fact that some fictive utterances are intended to be believed, or are non-accidentally true. That this is so becomes apparent given a proper understanding of the relation of what one imagines to one's belief set. In light of this understanding, I shall then argue that being intended to produce imagining is sufficient for fictive utterance a…Read more
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147Sexual objectification, objectifying images, and 'mind-insensitive seeing-as'In Anna Bergqvist & Robert Cowan (eds.), Evaluative Perception, Oxford University Press. 2018.This chapter defends a theory of objectification, conceiving of it as a species of what aestheticians have called ‘seeing‐as’, and more specifically, a kind of seeing‐as which to some degree is insensitive to the mind or mental aspects. An advantage of this view is that it covers both sexual and racial objectification, and can also explain how photographic images can objectify their subjects: namely, by encouraging the viewer to view in a way insensitive to the mind or mental aspects of the subj…Read more
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59This chapter considers the phenomenon of free indirect style, and what imaginative response it calls for from the reader who encounters it in a fiction. Two ‘single voice’ theories of free indirect style are discussed: one which argues that we should hear FIS only as implying the voice of a character whose experience is being evoked, and another which argues that we should hear FIS only as implying the voice of a narrator describing the experience of a character. This chapter argues instead that…Read more
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71Learning from fiction and theories of fictional contentTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 35 (3): 69-83. 2016.
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165Sexual ObjectificationAnalysis 75 (2): 191-195. 2015.Sexual objectification, in the broadest terms, involves treating people as things. Philosophers have offered different accounts of what, more precisely, this involves. According to the conjoint view of Catherine Mackinnon and Sally Haslanger, sexual objectification is necessarily morally objectionable. According to Martha Nussbaum, it is not: there can be benign instances of it, in the course of a healthy sexual relationship, for instance. This is taken to be a serious disagreement, both by Nuss…Read more
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112Only imagine: fiction, interpretation and imaginationOxford University Press. 2017.In the first half of this book, I offer a theory of fictional content or, as it is sometimes known, ‘fictional truth’.The theory of fictional content I argue for is ‘extreme intentionalism’. The basic idea – very roughly, in ways which are made precise in the book - is that the fictional content of a particular text is equivalent to exactly what the author of the text intended the reader to imagine. The second half of the book is concerned with showing how extreme intentionalism and the lessons …Read more
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79Some Reflections on Seeing-as, Metaphor-Grasping and ImaginingAisthesis: Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi Dell’Estetico 6 (1): 201-213. 2013.In this paper I examine the frequently made claim that grasping a metaphor is a kind of ‘seeing-as’. I describe several ways in which it might be thought that metaphor-grasping is importantly similar to seeing-as, such that an extension of the latter category is though justified to include the former. For some of these similarities, I suggest they are illusory; for others, I argue that they are shared in virtue of the membership of both seeing-as and metaphor-grasping in some much broader catego…Read more
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5Historical Definitions of ArtIn Stephen Davies & Ananta Charana Sukla (eds.), Art and essence, Praeger. pp. 159--76. 2003.
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46The Role of Imagining in Seeing-InJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (4): 365-380. 2008.
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174Fantasy, imagination, and filmBritish Journal of Aesthetics 49 (4): 357-369. 2009.In his article ‘ Fantasy, Imagination and the Screen ’ , Roger Scruton offers an account of fantasy, arguing that it is directed away from reality in some important sense, and that cinema is its natural representational medium. I address certain problems with Scruton’s basic account, thereby producing a signifi cantly amended version, though one that owes a great debt to his. I explain why, as he says, much fantasy is signifi cantly directed away from reality; and conclude with some brief remark…Read more
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159New waves in aesthetics (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2008.Leading young scholars present a collection of wide-ranging essays covering central problems in meta-aesthetics and aesthetic issues in the philosophy of mind, as well as offering analyses of key aesthetic concepts, new perspectives on the history of aesthetics, and specialized treatment of individual art forms.
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