Noel Carroll

Artworks are attentional engines, or artifacts intentionally designed to direct attention to formal features that are diagnostic for their artistically salient aesthetic, expressive, and semantic content. This is nowhere more true than the movies. Moving pictures are constructed from a suite of formal and narrative devices carefully developed to capture, hold, and direct our attention. These devices are tools for developing content by controlling the way information is presented throughout the duration of our engagement with a movie. In this respect moving pictures are analogous to visual routines used to direct and bias attention in natural behavior - they are artifacts used to deliver information on the fly as it is needed for the development of the narrative. This article reviews some of the fundamental devices movie makers use to discharge this function - such as variable framing and criterial prefocusing – and discusses their relation to our underlying cognitive, affective, and neurological architecture. These formal devices are designed to guide and control salient aspects of viewers behavioral responses to mass market movies. Therefore, we argue that it is no surprise to discover that that they are fine tuned to the architecture of emotion, perception, and cognition.

In this synthetic introduction to the history of the philosophy of art, Noël Carroll elucidates and analyzes selected writings on art by Plato, Aristotle, Hutcheson, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Bell. Carroll’s narrative tracks developments between major positions in philosophy of art, ranging from the idea that art is unavoidably embedded in society to the evolution of the notion that art is autonomous ("art for art’s sake"), thereby setting the stage for continuing debates in the philosophy of art. Presupposing no prior background, and useful on its own or accompanying the reading of primary works, _Classics in Western Philosophy of Art_ is ideal as a text for introductory undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of art and aesthetics, or for anyone interested in learning about the origin of some of our most fundamental conceptions of art in the Western tradition.

There is a long-standing skeptical position among philosophers regarding the cognitive value of literature. In this essay, using Sophocles’s _Oedipus Tyrannus_ as viewed through Aristotle’s _Poetics_, I will attempt to undermine the skeptical case against the cognitive value of literature as advanced in terms of the no-evidence argument, the evidentially tainted argument, the no-argument argument, and the banality argument. By defeating these arguments, with reference to _Oedipus Tyrannus_, I hope to establish the possibility that literature can serve as a vehicle for the communication of general empirical knowledge and philosophical knowledge or, at least, to shift the burden of proof in this debate back to the skeptic.

Fictional characters often serve as labels that are used in classifying real people. Thus, one may say of the person who embarks on a private investigation into her own family’s affairs that she is “playing Sherlock Holmes,” or describe a romantic dreamer as “quixotic” after Cervantes’s Don Quixote, or call a miser “Scrooge” after Dickens’s close-fisted character of the same name. This chapter proceeds to ask whether fictional characters increase our understanding. He consider two skeptical arguments against the idea that people learn from fiction in general and from fictional characters in particular—the no-evidence argument, and the fiction-distortion argument—and both are dismissed. The chapter closes by suggesting that as social circumstances change, new social types emerge, and a need to create novel characters emerges with them. Thus, careerist professor Howard Belsey from Zadie Smith’s _On Beauty_ could not have existed in previous eras.

Discussions of creativity and the arts usually focus on the creative activities of the artist. But as Noël Carroll observes, the audience plays an important role too; in order for the artist to accomplish the effects to which she aspires, the audience must cooperate creatively with what the artist has initiated. Carroll explores how audiences co-create artworks through the play of imagination. Rather than treating the imagination as if it were a single monolithic phenomenon, however, he identifies and analyzes several different imaginative activities that are engaged in response to a variety of artworks, such as reasoning counterfactually, filling in unspecified content, constructing story worlds around fictional objects, mentally simulating characters’ experiences and points of view, and freely devising and playing with different meanings, interpretations, and unifying themes. By means of these activities, Carroll suggests, it is ultimately the audience’s contribution that makes a work of art function.

A rapidly emerging school of psychology, called situationism, challenges the explanatory value of character as such (thereby also raising a question about the reliability of the fictional character construct in the first place—that is, is character just a kind of myth or a projection in life that we then also project onto literature?). This chapter, through an examination of the novel and film _The Big Country_, charts one way in which it remains possible for us as ethically engaged readers to derive valuable social knowledge from fictional characters, despite even the strongest implications of situationism. Literature’s value, on this score—if somewhat surprisingly—remains intact, regardless of the outcome of the real-character debate.

_Philosophy of Art_ is a textbook for undergraduate students interested in the topic of philosophical aesthetics. It introduces the techniques of analytic philosophy as well as key topics such as the representational theory of art, formalism, neo-formalism, aesthetic theories of art, neo-Wittgensteinism, the Institutional Theory of Art. as well as historical approaches to the nature of art. Throughout, abstract philosophical theories are illustrated by examples of both traditional and contemporary art including frequent reference to the avant-garde in this way enriching the readers understanding of art theory as well as the appreciation of art. Unique features of the textbook are: * chapter summaries * summaries of major theories of art and suggested analyses of the important categories used when talking and thinking of art * annotated suggested readings at the ends of chapters. Also available in this series: _Epistemology_ Pb: 0-415-13043-3: £12.99 _Ethics_ Pb: 0-415-15625-4: £11.99 _Metaphysics_ Pb: 0-415-14034-X: £12.99 _Philosophy of Mind_ Pb: 0-415-13060-3: £11.99 _Philosophy of Religion_ Pb: 0-415-13214-2: £12.99.

Designed for classroom use, this authoritative anthology presentskey selections from the best contemporary work in philosophy offilm. The featured essays have been specially chosen for theirclarity, philosophical depth, and consonance with the current movetowards cognitive film theory Eight sections with introductions cover topics such as thenature of film, film as art, documentary cinema, narration andemotion in film, film criticism, and film's relation to knowledgeand morality Issues addressed include the objectivity of documentary films,fear of movie monsters, and moral questions surrounding the viewingof pornography Replete with examples and discussion of moving picturesthroughout.

Regarded for decades as a fallacy, intentionalist interpretation is beginning to attract a following among philosophers of art. Intentionalism is the doctrine that the actual intentions of artists are relevant to the interpretation of the artworks they create – just as actual intentions are relevant to the interpretation of the everyday words and deeds of other people. Although there are several forms of actual intentionalism, I defend the form known as modest actual intentionalism, which holds that the correct interpretation of an artwork is compatible with the author's actual intention, which itself must be supported by the artwork. Looking at literary works specifically, I consider criticisms of actual intentionalism – for example, the contention that such a stance substitutes paraphrase for a reading of the text. In particular, I argue against hypothetical intentionalism, which maintains that the correct interpretation of an artwork is constrained by the best hypotheses of the artist's intentions. As I show, the methodology of this position is in fact designed to track the author's actual intentions, and furthermore, hypothetical intentionalism does not accurately depict existing interpretive practices.

Noel Carroll, film scholar and philosopher, offers the first serious look at the aesthetics of horror. In this book he discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. A fan and serious student of the horror genre, Carroll brings to bear his comprehensive knowledge of obscure and forgotten works, as well as of the horror masterpieces. Working from a philosophical perspective, he tries to account for how people can find pleasure in having their wits scared out of them. What, after all, are those "paradoxes of the heart" that make us want to be horrified?

_Philosophy of Art_ is a textbook for undergraduate students interested in the topic of philosophical aesthetics. It introduces the techniques of analytic philosophy as well as key topics such as the representational theory of art, formalism, neo-formalism, aesthetic theories of art, neo-Wittgensteinism, the Institutional Theory of Art. as well as historical approaches to the nature of art. Throughout, abstract philosophical theories are illustrated by examples of both traditional and contemporary art including frequent reference to the avant-garde in this way enriching the readers understanding of art theory as well as the appreciation of art. Unique features of the textbook are: * chapter summaries * summaries of major theories of art and suggested analyses of the important categories used when talking and thinking of art * annotated suggested readings at the ends of chapters. Also available in this series: _Epistemology_ Pb: 0-415-13043-3: £12.99 _Ethics_ Pb: 0-415-15625-4: £11.99 _Metaphysics_ Pb: 0-415-14034-X: £12.99 _Philosophy of Mind_ Pb: 0-415-13060-3: £11.99 _Philosophy of Religion_ Pb: 0-415-13214-2: £12.99.