On one standard view, paraphrasing Kierkegaard requires no special literary talent. It demands no particular flair for the poetic. However, Kierkegaard himself rejects this view. He says we cannot paraphrase in a straightforward fashion some of the ideas he expresses in a literary format. To use the words of Johannes Climacus, these ideas defy direct communication. In this paper, I piece together and defend the justification Kierkegaard offers for this position. I trace its origins to concerns raised by Lessing and (...) Mendelssohn about the relationship between form and content in works of art. I maintain that Kierkegaard follows early German Romantic thinkers in applying these aesthetic concerns to philosophical writing. By way of conclusion, I discuss the implications of Kierkegaard’s position for contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

When we engage with a work of fiction we gain knowledge about what is fictionally true in that work. Our grasp of what is true in a fiction is central to our engagement with representational works of art, and to our assessments of their merits. Of course, it is sometimes difficult to determine what is fictional – it is a good question whether the main character of American Psycho is genuinely psychotic or merely delusional, for instance. (And even in this (...) case, our ignorance itself is crucial to how we engage with the story and assess its qualities.) But in the vast majority of cases, we have no difficulty distinguishing what is fictionally true from what is not. Every attentive reader of Bleak House knows that it is fictional that Esther is Lady Dedlock’s daughter, but not fictional that Ada is the daughter of John Jarndyce. Moreover, we do not think that our judgements about what is fictional are based on guesswork. We have a folk theory of fictional truth, in the sense that we have a relatively stable framework upon which we rely when we engage with fiction, and we face the challenge of characterizing that theory systematically. (shrink)

In many artworks, both aesthetic and ethical values are present, and both can contribute to the overall artistic value of a work. The question explored in this paper is: does the presence of one kind of value affect the degree of the other? For example, does a work that expresses a morally reprehensible attitude diminish the aesthetic value of a work? Let ‘interaction’ name the view that the presence of one kind of value affects the degree of the other. We (...) will argue in favour of the existence of interaction. However, we will argue further that such interaction is a contingent feature of artworks and that the most common argument that has been offered for interaction—the affective -response -argument—fails to identify the main reason why it holds, when it in fact does. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that readers will resist imagining that a character in a story did something morally wrong, even if the story endorses this judgement. This paper argues, first, that readers will not resist if the question of whether that act was wrong is not salient as they read; and, second, that asking a certain question can be part of correctly appreciating a story—even if that question is not in the foreground of the story, and even if the story (...) itself discourages readers from asking it, as is common in some forms of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. (shrink)

Works of literature represent stories, characters, and events: these are the contents of a work. Often, the contents of literary works are fictional; however, it is just as characteristic of works of literature that these contents are narrated in a distinct style of writing, in an author’s distinct literary “voice.” In this paper, I consider whether works of literature might represent something over and above their fictional contents in virtue of their style alone and what consequences this might have for (...) our thinking about aesthetic education. Both of these concerns—with what works of art represent and what kind of knowledge they make available to us—have been central to recent analytic philosophy of art. While I.. (shrink)

What is it for a person to have style? Philosophers working in action theory, ethics, and aesthetics are surprisingly quiet on this question. I begin by considering whether theories of artistic style shed any light on it. Many philosophers, artists, and art historians are attracted to some version of the view that artistic style is the expression of personality. I clarify this view and argue that it is implausible for both artistic style and, suitably modified, personal style. In fact, both (...) theories of style crack along the same line, which suggests that they can indeed be mutually illuminating. I articulate and defend a view of personal style according to which, roughly, having style is a matter of expressing one’s ideals. I show how this illuminates the widely neglected value of personal style and propose a new, analogous theory of individual artistic style: artistic style is the expression of the ideals the artist has for her art. (shrink)

In the contemporary analytic philosophy of literature and especially literary theory, the paradigmatic way of understanding the beliefs and attitudes expressed in works of literary narrative fiction is to attribute them to an implied author, an entity which the literary critic Wayne C. Booth introduced in his influential study The Rhetoric of Fiction. Roughly put, the implied author is an entity between the actual author and the narrator whose beliefs and attitudes cannot be appropriately ascribed to the actual author. Over (...) the decades, this “the author’s second self,” a construct the actual author is seen to create in her act of writing, has gained an established place in literary theory. In the philosophy of literature, in turn, the implied author has evolved into multiple entities; it has been represented and developed as, for instance, “the postulated author” (Alexander Nehamas), “the fictional author” (Gregory Currie) and “the model author” (Umberto Eco). -/- The aim of this paper is to suggest that although the implied author, and its philosophical counterparts, sheds light on certain types of narratives, it is insufficient in approaches which emphasize the truth-claims conveyed by a work. In what follows, I try to show that, first, from an ontological point of view, actual assertions in literary fiction, if any, have to be attributed to the actual author and, second, that the question of truth-claiming in and by literary fiction is an epistemological matter concerning the actual intentions of the author. -/- . (shrink)

In contemporary analytic philosophy of art, the intentionalist debate is about whether the author’s intention is relevant to the interpretation of her work. Various positions have been proposed, and in this paper I defend what I call hypothetical author-hypothetical intentionalism, the position that interpretation is based on the intention attributed to the author constructed from the work. There are three aims to achieve: (1) to give a general account of hypothetical author-hypothetical intentionalism; (2) to present a moderate version of hypothetical (...) author-hypothetical intentionalism; (3) to defend the moderate version of hypothetical author-hypothetical intentionalism against actual intentionalism and actual author-hypothetical intentionalism. Against the current trend that focuses on actual authors, I hope to show that the hypothetical author account is still a sustainable contender in the intentionalist debate. (shrink)

Should we aspire to aesthetic consistency? Two kinds of aesthetic consistency are considered, following Ted Cohen’s discussion of consistency in personal aesthetics: consistency of aesthetic reasons and coherence of aesthetic personality. Neither of these kinds of consistency seems like something to aspire to, possibly because we cannot do so – if we are not typically reasoning at the level of aesthetic response that is envisaged – or because consistent, coherent responsiveness does not seem like a worthwhile aesthetic goal. A third (...) kind of consistency is defended, at the level of reflection on the desirable functions of art. We can try to be consistent about broadly ethical principles, showing our commitments as to the goods that art should provide in a life or to a society. These very broad principles do not make direct or clear aesthetic contact with individual artworks, so we cannot straightforwardly apply them as evaluative principles. But we can be consistent in trying to link the very specific achievements of works with these reflective values. (shrink)

When reading literature, we might have an emotional connection with the author, or at least what appears to be such, even when that literature is a work of fiction. But it is unclear how a work of fictional literature could supply the resources for such an experience. It is, after all, a work of fiction, not a report of the author’s experience, as with memoir or autobiography. The task of this paper is twofold: first, to explain the nature and value (...) of this emotional experience; second, to argue that a fictional literary work can supply the resources for such an experience. (shrink)

I am grateful for Ted Nannicelli’s careful attention to my book. In his comment, Nannicelli makes two quite serious sets of objections to my views. The first set concerns my arguments against perspectivism, the view that the attitudes or perspectives manifested in artworks are morally evaluable. The second set concerns my arguments for meta-normative expressivism, the view that normative judgements are expressions of the attitudes of persons, not beliefs in mind-independent facts. In what follows, I offer responses to each of (...) these sets of objections, which I hope will go some way towards answering them. If my responses fail to fully answer the objections, perhaps they can at least shed further light on the reasons behind our disagreements. For the most part, I stand behind what I wrote, but Nannicelli’s criticisms have helped me to see the ways in which I might have said more to support certain points and in which I might have been clearer. I hope this short response can make clear what I was trying to do in the book and why I was trying to do it. (shrink)

This essay explores the features in virtue of which games are valuable or worthwhile to play. The difficulty view of games holds that the goodness of games lies in their difficulty: by making activities more complex or making them require greater effort, they structure easier activities into more difficult, therefore more worthwhile, activities. I argue that a further source of the value of games is that they provide players with an experience of freedom, which they provide both as paradigmatically unnecessary (...) activities and by offering opportunities for relatively unconstrained choice inside the ‘lusory’ world that players inhabit. (shrink)

Advancing a claim about the quality of a work of art is critical thinking applied in a particular arena and applies the same rules that advancing a claim about anything follows. Described this way, advancing an art evaluative claim is no different from advancing any claim. On the other hand, advancing claims in differing arenas frequently follow different methodologies. Art criticism, thought of in this way—as a species of critical thinking focused on advancing claims about the quality of works of (...) art—has its own methodology. This paper describes two versions of that methodology, one that is object-focused (or event-focused) and one that is subject-focused. (shrink)

At least within the last century, artists have produced works that seem to have something missing. Salvatore Garau’s sculpture Sono is (apparently) composed of empty space; the original drawing at the heart of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing is essentially gone; Rauschenberg’s White Paintings are primarily just white canvases. In this paper, I examine this ‘something missing’ – which I call an ‘aesthetic absence’. These absences are aesthetically relevant to the identities, meaning, and value of the works of art (...) where audiences find such absences, but such relevance can only fully be ascertained and assessed once the absence is resolved, and this resolution comes through an act of interpretation. (shrink)

The utterance model is a popular basis for theories of interpretation in the contemporary analytic philosophy of literature. This model suggests that interpretation should be constrained by a work's identity‐relevant factors in its context of production because a work, like an utterance, acquires its identity and content in part from its relations with that context. From a descriptive point of view, I argue that the implied author account of interpretation best describes critical practice following the current positions based on the (...) utterance model. That is, people who interpret in accordance with these positions end up interpreting an implied author. (shrink)

Many of us have experienced a peculiar feeling of freedom, of the world being open before us. This is the feeling that is captured by phrases like “the freedom of the open road” and “free spirits,” and, to quote Phillip Larkin, “free bloody birds” going “down the long slide / To happiness, endlessly.” This feeling is associated with the ideas that my life could go in many different directions and that there is a vast range of things that I could (...) become. It arises in concert with a wide range of human experiences, including experiences of artistic creation, play, fun, and resistance to authority. This freedom of openness and spontaneity, which I call spontaneous freedom, is central to our ordinary talk about freedom. Yet it is a phenomenon largely ignored in discussions of freedom in contemporary moral philosophy. This is because moral philosophers are primarily concerned to identify the sort of freedom that is a prerequisite for moral responsibility, and so focus on deliberate, voluntary action rooted in rational choice. When moral philosophers do discuss spontaneous freedom, it is often to disparage it as, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, the freedom of “the wanton” whose liberty is merely that of “anarchic impulsive behavior.” My dissertation develops a theory of spontaneous freedom and of the role it does and should play in our lives, including our moral and political lives. I argue that, to do full justice to the human aspiration for freedom, moral and political theory must recognize the value of spontaneity. Through a study of characters from stories and films by Virginia Woolf, Saki, Akira Kurosawa, and Aman Sethi, I develop a phenomenological account of the nature of spontaneous freedom. I argue that we experience spontaneous freedom when we experience our actions as arising out of ourselves but not fixed in advance either by the decisions of other agents or by our own preexisting commitments or plans. I further argue that spontaneous freedom is valuable because it allows for the distinctive pleasure of feeling that one’s life is unforetold and that one is among the sources of novelty in the world, a feeling that is central to artistic creativity. It also affords solace from the anxiety associated with the inevitability of death. As with many experiences, like falling in love or seeing an alpine lake, experiences of spontaneous freedom are most valuable when they are veridical. But even the subjective experience of spontaneous freedom, I suggest, activates our awareness of and openness to possibility. Achieving this awareness, at least on occasion, is valuable because it provides us with a sense of our own psychological potential and sharpens a skill that contributes to practical deliberation. My claim that spontaneous freedom is valuable conflicts with a popular account of the self. According to that account—endorsed by a number of moral philosophers but most famously associated with Christine Korsgaard—the ideal self is one that is well-ordered, actively constituted through rational deliberation. Such integrity theories of the self are attractive because they provide an account of agency according to which ideal moral agents invariably endorse their own actions and beliefs. Integrity theories view freedom as involving rational, deliberative control of one’s actions. But I argue that integrity theories forbid well-constituted moral agents to seek out experiences of spontaneous freedom: such agents must act in a manner that they antecedently and reflectively endorse, while spontaneous freedom requires acting in a manner not antecedently fixed by one’s own decisions. Insofar as spontaneous freedom is a kind of freedom that we do and should value, my account exerts pressure on this standard view of agency and the self. My account of spontaneous freedom also has important political implications. One version of liberal theory holds that the only sort of political freedom worth having is the freedom of each individual to effectively exercise choice compatibly with every other individual doing likewise. On this picture, I have all of the freedom that I could want if I am able to choose autonomously and act in accordance with my choices. But I argue that a community that secures this liberal variety of freedom does not yet provide its members with all the freedom for which people rightly yearn. When public and private institutions arrange our circumstances in ways that make the courses of our lives predictable, our own choices about how to act may be largely settled by the plans and decisions of other agents. This in turn makes it difficult for us to regard our futures as open in the way that is characteristic of experiences of spontaneous freedom. States should promote spontaneous freedom by providing the material and social preconditions for us to feel that our lives could head in radically different and unanticipated directions. (shrink)

Classic expression theory identified the emotional content of works of art with the feelings of the artists and the recipients. This content thus appeared to be external to the work itself. Consequently, formalism declared it to be irrelevant to a work’s value. A way out of this predicament – one which the Polish aesthetician Henryk Elzenberg (1887–1967) was among the first to propose – was suggested by the idea that physical, sensory objects can themselves possess emotional qualities. Thanks to Bouwsma (...) and Beardsley, this concept – of expressiveness as a quality – became common in Anglo-American aesthetics from the 1950s onwards. At the same time, these authors demanded that the term ‘expression’ be expunged from the language of aesthetics. But the widespread tendency to conceptualize the emotional content of art in terms of the expression of a certain subject (most often the artist) still requires some explanation – interpretation, rather than negation. One interpretation construes the expressiveness of works of art in terms of the expression of a fictitious subject, the ‘work’s persona’, conceived by Elzenberg in the 1950s and 1960s. This article discusses his concept and explains some of its more complex aspects, before addressing the emergence of a very similar concept within Anglo-American aesthetics. This concept was gradually elaborated in the 1970s and 1980s, but only in the 1990s did it become more fully developed and widely discussed. (shrink)

Klasyczne teorie ekspresji, identyfikując treści uczuciowe dzieła sztuki z przeżyciami twórcy czy też odbiorcy, zdawały się wyprowadzać je poza dzieło. W konsekwencji formalizm treści takie – jako wobec dzieła zewnętrzne – uznawał za obojętne dla jego wartości i istoty. Sposobem wyjścia z dylematu okazało się dostrzeżenie i uznanie istnienia jakości psychicznych w samych zmysłowo postrzegalnych przedmiotach, a jednym z prekursorów tej idei był Henryk Elzenberg (1937). Koncepcja taka – ekspresywności jako własności – stała się, począwszy od lat pięćdziesiątych, za sprawą (...) Bouwsmy i Beardsleya, szeroko akceptowana w estetyce amerykańskiej. Jednocześnie autorzy ci postulowali całkowite usunięcie terminu „ekspresja” z języka estetyki. Jednak powszechna skłonność do wiązania sztuki z ekspresją domaga się interpretacji. Dostarcza jej koncepcja ekspresywności jako ekspresji fikcyjnego podmiotu, opracowana znowu przez Elzenberga (1950/1960). Później podobne ujęcie wykształciło się w estetyce anglosaskiej, ale dopiero w latach dziewięćdziesiątych doczekało się satysfakcjonującej wersji, stając się koncepcją szeroko dyskutowaną. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Jenefer Robinson’s personalist account of pictorial expression. [1] According to personalism, a picture possesses the expressive properties we attribute to it because we take it that someone expresses E in the work. Robinson’s particular strategy exploits the concept of an implied persona who ‘unifies’ and ‘specifies’ what is expressed. [2] Dominic Lopes challenges this view by attacking what he takes to be a flawed assumption motivating the personalist account: the priority of figure expression. [3] Once (...) we acknowledge this flaw, he argues, there is no good reason to prefer personalism to an impersonalist theory. I will argue that Robinson qua personalist can pre-empt this strike by clarifying the relation between (a) what a picture expresses and (b) what is depicted as expressing in the picture. Rather than leading with the idea that personalism unifies or determines the meaning, I argue that impersonalism diminishes it and that, should it be accepted, we would be left with an impoverished view of what specific art pieces can mean. (shrink)