Peter Goldie

The aim of this chapter is to challenge the idea that it is ethically a good thing to seek to empathise with other people, where ‘empathy’ means _empathetic perspective-shifting_: consciously and intentionally shifting your perspective in order to imagine being the other person, and thereby sharing in his or her thoughts, feelings, decisions and other aspects of their psychology. I am not against what I call _in-his-shoes perspective-shifting_: consciously and intentionally shifting your perspective in order to imagine what thoughts, feelings, decisions and so on you would arrive at if you were in the other’s circumstances. I will show how different these two kinds of higher-level empathy are, and what is especially and deeply problematic about empathetic perspective-shifting: that it usurps the agent’s own first-personal, deliberative or practical stance towards what he is thinking.

Sometimes, not only in our youth, we know on good evidence that a particular work of art, or a particular kind of art, is good. And yet we don’t like it: we can’t properly appreciate what’s good about it. The strategy that this paper recommends in such not unfamiliar circumstances is aesthetic bootstrapping. In this chapter, I will begin by outlining three elements which are involved in the strategy of bootstrapping, starting with an example to do with food and drink—gustatory bootstrapping—and then turning to the aesthetic case. Then I seek to provide a justification of the strategy on the grounds, roughly, that the aim of the strategy, namely appreciation of what is aesthetically good, is a reasonable aim, and that the strategy is often the most effective way of achieving that aim. Lastly, I turn to a number of criticisms and problems that are faced by the idea of aesthetic bootstrapping: that the strategy is irrational because it involves self-deception; that the strategy is not to be trusted because it begins with the testimony of others, and thus is not to be relied on; that aesthetic bootstrapping is pretentious, or that it can easily be allied to a certain kind of snobbery; and, finally, that it is often difficult, or even sometime impossible, to know whether one is yet a full appreciator of an aesthetic object, or whether one is still, at least in part, an aesthetic bootstrapper.

I argue that _La Grande Illusion_ is not just an anti-war film—although it certainly is that. It is also a film about class: it shows how class separates people of a nation from each other; and it shows how it unites people of the same class across nations. Secondly, it is a film which shows that certain capacities or characteristics of human nature can be universal or pan-cultural, but disuniting rather than uniting: the capacity for language; the capacity for group conflict; and the sheer capacity for aggression. I close with a discussion of the relation between _La Grande Illusion_, philosophy, and art. I suggest that this great film is best thought of as a work of art, which is simply _showing_ us, in wonderfully fine detail, a small fragment of human life which illustrates certain aspects of human nature. That _La Grande Illusion_ is art, and not philosophical argument, in no way detracts from its having this value.

Empathy has for a long time, since at least the seminal work of David Hume and Adam Smith, been seen as centrally important in relation to our capacity to gain a grasp of the content of other people’s minds, and to predict and explain what they will think, feel, and do, and in relation to our capacity to respond to others ethically. In addition, empathy is now reinstated as being centrally important in aesthetics, in relation to our engagement with works of art and with fictional characters. This collection draws together nineteen original chapters on empathy in each of these areas, written by leading researchers across a wide range of disciplines, together with an extensive Introduction by the editors. The individual chapters reveal how important it is, in a wide range of fields of enquiry, to bring to bear an understanding of the role of empathy in its various guises. This volume will make a helpful and lasting contribution to the continuing debate, in philosophy, in psychology, and elsewhere.

As part of the debate between theory‐theorists and simulation‐theorists in the philosophy of mind, there is the question of how we think about the emotions of other people. It is the aim of this paper to distinguish and clarify some of the ways in which we do this. In particular five notions are discussed: understanding and explaining others’ emotions, emotional contagion, empathy, in‐his‐shoes imagining, and sympathy. I argue that understanding and explanation cannot be achieved by any of the other four notions. So far as concerns prediction of other people’s emotional responses, I argue that simulationists have tended to concentrate on empathy and in‐his‐ shoes imagining to explain how this is done, and that more prominence should be given to other means of prediction through imagination which do not involve imagining events from the other’s point of view; roughly, imagining how she would feel need not involve imagining feeling how she would feel. But prediction in these other ways, like understanding and explanation, are achieved without losing sight of the fact that the other person has a point of view, and in this respect I argue that this approach is essentially distinct from the approach of the theory‐theorist of a functionalist persuasion.

In sections I-VII of this chapter I outline the theoretical background for a research programme considering whether the expressiveness of a culture’s music can be recognised by people from different musical cultures, that is, by people whose music is syntactically and structurally distinct from that of the target culture. In sections VIII-IX, I examine and assess the cross-cultural studies that have been undertaken by psychologists. Most of these studies are compromised by methodological inadequacies.

What is conceptual art? Is it really a kind of art in its own right? Is it clever – or too clever? Of all the different art forms it is perhaps conceptual art which at once fascinates and infuriates the most. In this much-needed book Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens demystify conceptual art using the sharp tools of philosophy. They explain how conceptual art is driven by ideas rather than the manipulation of paint and physical materials; how it challenges the very basis of what we can know about art, as well as our received ideas of beauty; and why conceptual art requires us to rethink concepts fundamental to art and aesthetics, such as artistic interpretation and appreciation. Including helpful illustrations of the work of celebrated conceptual artists from Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Kosuth and Piero Manzoni to Dan Perjovschi and Martin Creed, Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art? is a superb starting point for anyone intrigued but perplexed by conceptual art - and by art in general. It will be particularly helpful to students of philosophy, art and visual studies seeking an introduction not only to conceptual art but fundamental topics in art and aesthetics.

Some works of conceptual art require deception for their appreciation—deception of the viewer of the work. Some experiments in social psychology equally require deception— deception of the participants in the experiment. There are a number of close parallels between the two kinds of deception. And yet, in spite of these parallels, the art world, artists, and philosophers of art, do not seem to be troubled about the deception involved, whereas deception is a constant source of worry for social psychologists. Intuitively, each of these responses might seem appropriate for its sphere, but it is not easy to see what grounds these intuitions.

Given the premise that joint action plays some role in explaining how humans come to understand minds, what could joint action be? Not what a leading account, Michael Bratman's, says it is. For on that account engaging in joint action involves sharing intentions and sharing intentions requires much of the understanding of minds whose development is supposed to be explained by appeal to joint action. This paper therefore offers an account of a different kind of joint action, an account compatible with the premise about development. The new account is no replacement for the leading account; rather the accounts characterise two kinds of joint action. Where the kind of joint characterised by the leading account involves shared intentions, the new account characterises a kind of joint action involving shared goals.