Search Results

This essay surveys the range of philosophical problems that can be encompassed under the rubric, emotion in response to art. It details five such problems, according most of its attention to the nature of the emotional responses had to art, and the puzzle of emotional responses to fictional entities known to be fictional (what is often labeled ‘the paradox of fiction’). Attention is also given to the puzzle of how people derive satisfaction from art expressive or evocative of negative emotion (what is often labeled ‘the paradox of tragedy’), and to the question of how abstract works of art (such as pieces of instrumental music) manage to express or evoke emotions at all.

The argument of Chapter 4 is defended against a number of objections: that not all novels require emotional involvement (true), that we do not in fact react to novels in a bodily way (false), that I ignore authorial manipulation (I don't ), that some emotional responses are inappropriate (they are), and that according to the so-called ‘paradox of fiction’, it is irrational to respond emotionally to fictional characters when we are perfectly aware that they are fictional. The answer to the paradox of fiction is that we process novels both cognitively and affectively. Our instinctive affective appraisal system is indifferent to whether or not stimulus for emotion exists or not. Persons can get emotionally worked up by imagined and remembered events and people as well as by actual people right in front of them.

The theorists covered in the first chapter are for the most part contemporary, but disgust has a longer history to consider as well, which is the subject of Chapter 2. As aesthetic theory developed into its modern form in the eighteenth century, disgust was considered the single emotion excluded from a role in beautiful art that delivers aesthetic pleasure. Luminaries such as Kant, Lessing, and Mendelssohn concurred with the general consensus that arousal of disgust drives out positive aesthetic assessment. This chapter reviews the traditional critique of disgust as well as certain contemporary scholarship on the subject, specifically that of Menninghaus, setting the stage for the consideration of disgust as a mode of aesthetic apprehension.

Philosophical aesthetics has increasingly turned towards empirical evidence to settle long-standing questions. Yet, surprisingly, given philosophers’ tendencies to cautious critical analysis, the use of such evidence is not always inspected as scrupulously as it could be. In this paper, Stock presents a case study illustrating what she takes to be one instance of the misuse of empirical evidence in a current debate within aesthetics: that of the so-called ‘paradox of fiction’. In some relatively recent literature, there has been a shift towards the citing of sub-personal events as a means of attempting to address this problem. In particular, those neurological or other physiological events that accompany imaginative responses to fictional entities are often cited. Yet, Stock argues, there are often flaws in the way empirical evidence is used to support this sort of account.

This chapter argues that, in as much as the ‘paradox of fiction’ is a problem, it is neither a paradox nor about fiction. Colin Radford’s original formulation of the problem is considered and dismissed, on the grounds that the claim that emotions requires beliefs in the reality of their objects is not even prima facie plausible (and it is not clear that anyone has ever held it to be plausible). Two problems remain. First, Walton has identified a problem, but that it is a problem for representations rather than for fictions. Second, confrontation relations require a different treatment from representation relations. The first problem is solved by denying that people in representations do feel emotions for themselves, and the second problem is merely a special instance of the problem of intentional objects.