Empathy is a form of emotionally charged imaginative perspective‐taking. It is also the unique source of a particular form of understanding, which I will call humane understanding. Humane understanding consists in the direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions. This apprehension is an epistemic good whose ethical significance is multifarious. In this paper, I focus on elaborating the sense in which humane understanding of others is non‐instrumentally valuable to its recipients. People have a complex but profound need to be (...) humanely understood. Because we respond to others’ very real need when we pursue this sort of understanding of their emotions, empathy is best understood as itself a way of caring, rather than just a means to promote other caring behavior. (shrink)

This article will introduce readers to current debates in the philosophy of poetry. This includes discussion of the need for a philosophy of poetry as distinct from a philosophy of literature, the (in)compatibility of poetry and philosophy, poetic meaning and interpretation, and poetry in relation to affect, emotion and expressiveness, which opens up discussion of wider forms of poetry from spoken word to signlanguage poetry. The article ends with suggestions for future directions of research in the philosophy of poetry. I (...) argue that as the philosophy of poetry is gaining interest, the previous debates that presuppose an understanding of poetry as taking form on the page and as having fixed aboutness ought to be abandoned in favour of an understanding of a poem in the affective space, with issues of reception, interpretation, distribution, and performance in play. (shrink)

This paper is about non-fictional objects in fictions and their role as narrators. Two central claims are advanced. In part 1 it is argued that non-fictional objects such as you and me can be part of fictions. This commonsensical idea is elaborated and defended against objections. Building on it, it is argued in part 2 that non-fictional objects can be characters and narrators in fictional narratives. As a consequence, three fundamental and popular claims concerning narrators are rejected. In particular, it (...) is shown that some fictional narratives have non-fictional internal narrators, some have no internal fictional narrator, and, most controversially, that the author of a fictional narrative can be identical to its internal narrator. (shrink)

In this study we offer a new way of applying Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe to musical experiences in terms of psychologically inhibited games of make-believe, which Walton attributes chiefly to ornamental representations. Reading Walton’s theory somewhat against the grain, and supplementing our discussion with a set of instructive examples, we argue that there is clear theoretical gain in explaining certain important aspects of composition and performance in terms of psychologically inhibited games of make-believe consisting of two interlaced game-worlds. Such (...) complex games can accommodate a continuous rich spectrum of congruent modes of listening, which broaches both the formalist-type and the narrativist-type. We conclude that this sort of oblique reading of Walton’s original theory actually complements and completes Walton’s recent theoretic angle concerning thoughtwriting in music by way of affording it with a suitable conception for a mechanism of appropriation for music. (shrink)

This is a book symposium on Why It’s OK to Be a Sports Fan, by Alfred Archer and Jake Wojtowicz, with contributions from Adam Kadlac, Joe Slater, Nathaniel Baron-Schmitt, and Nina Windgätter. The discussion covers a range of topics, including the form of love involved in fandom, the epistemic status of fans, fictionalism, and the role of communities in fandom.

In ‘Listening to Other Minds’, Enrico Terrone provides an account of the mental activity in which we ought to engage to appreciate pop music. He argues that we should ‘play a game of make-believe’ in which we imagine that we can ‘hear … the mind’ of a fictional character. We should use this ability to grasp the thoughts and feelings that the mind contains, and thus undertake ‘exploration’ of the character’s ‘inner life’. This article argues, first, that only a simplified (...) version of the account is plausible; second, that its plausibility as a general account of pop music depends on a dubious conception of the ‘paradigm cases’ ; third, that its desirability as an account of a narrower range of cases is questionable; and, fourth, that it is motivated by unsuitable assumptions about representation in pop. (shrink)

This paper argues that certain literary works can only be fully appreciated if the reader is able to experience through empathy the character’s values. I call it "the axiological account" because it makes the grasping of aesthetic values dependent on the experience of other values embodied in the work. I develop my argument in three stages. First, I argue that in empathy we not only apprehend but also experience something similar to what the target is going through. Next, I show (...) how this experience is necessary to extract the aesthetic values of certain works. The final section addresses two challenges to the proposed account. (shrink)

Why do sports fans sometimes (often?) go crazy at sporting events and then afterwards proceed with their day as if nothing much happened? If something of genuine significance happened, something that warranted the emotional ups and downs the fan experienced during the game, why don’t its effects linger? These questions pose a version of the puzzle of sports fandom. Others have applied Kendall Walton’s theory of fiction to solve the puzzle, but Walton’s account of sports fandom fiction is unacceptably thin. (...) Recent attempts by Nathan Wildman and Joseph Moore to address this thinness problem fail. We answer the thinness objection by explaining how sports fandom is a collaboratively authored fiction, constructed by fans, sponsors, players, teams, media commentators, and more. The stories of sports fandom fiction are passed to new generations of fans in a way more reminiscent of The Iliad or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Sports fandom fiction is more like folklore, and less like a novel. (shrink)

A philosophical exploration of aesthetic experience during bereavement. In Aesthetics of Grief and Mourning, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins reflects on the ways that aesthetics aids people experiencing loss. Some practices related to bereavement, such as funerals, are scripted, but many others are recursive, improvisational, mundane—telling stories, listening to music, and reflecting on art or literature. Higgins shows how these grounding, aesthetic practices can ease the disorienting effects of loss, shedding new light on the importance of aesthetics for personal and communal (...) flourishing. (shrink)

Social robots serve people as tutors, caretakers, receptionists, companions, and other social agents. People know that the robots are mechanical artifacts, yet they interact with them as if they were actual agents. How is this possible? The proposal here is that people construe social robots not as social agentsper se, but asdepictionsof social agents. They interpret them much as they interpret ventriloquist dummies, hand puppets, virtual assistants, and other interactive depictions of people and animals. Depictions as a class consist of (...) three physical scenes with part-by-part mappings between them: (a) a base scene (the raw physical artifact), (b) the depiction proper (the artifact construed as a depiction), and (c) the scene depicted (the scene people are to imagine). With social robots, evidence shows people form the same three scenes plus mappings: They perceive the raw machinery of a robot, construe it as a depiction of a character, and, using the depiction as a guide, engage in the pretense that they are interacting with the character depicted. With social robots, people also recognize three classes of agents – the characters depicted, the intended recipients of the depictions (those who view or interact with the robots), and the authorities responsible for the robots (the designers, makers, and owners). Construing social robots as depictions, we argue, accounts for many phenomena not covered by alternative models. (shrink)