Arthur C. Danto’s seminal work, Analytical Philosophy of History, was published in 1965 and aimed to defend historical knowledge against arguments that deemed it impossible because of the lack of direct experience of the past. According to Danto, to fully understand a past event, one must consider it ex post facto. In 1985, Danto released a revised edition that included three additional essays. The purpose was to expand on themes from the first edition and construct a comprehensive knowledge system based on representation. This conception is paralleled in Danto’s writing on art from 1964 to 1981. Danto’s theory suggests that historical knowledge mirrors the nature of the ens representans, paralleling our conscious system, constructively intended. The representations generated by history and art can be interpreted as a cognitive instrument – an “instant epistemology” – highlighting how “storytelling” is a crucial aspect of human beings.
Whether we like it or not, we have emotional reactions to fiction. We may cry when Anna Karenina dies, or feel joy when the characters we root for achieve a happy ending. Yet what do these reactions tell us about ourselves? Are they mere emotional outbursts that are unconnected with who we are, or are they in some sense a source of self-knowledge? In this paper, I argue that emotional engagement with fiction can lead to knowledge of our moral character. I do this by suggesting that emotional reactions to fiction constitute evidence that we have certain desires for the course of the narrative, which in turn serve as evidence for the presence of moral character traits.
Philosophers have considered many different paradoxes concerning our emotional engagement with fiction. In this paper, we outline a new paradox in this area: the paradox of junk recidivism. The puzzle we address is why fiction consumers regularly return to familiar fictions which lacked much literary merit to begin with. This appears to be irrational, as there is no literary or aesthetic value to be gained from continued engagement with such fictions. However, we will argue that these works can be understood as affective scaffolds that people draw on to help regulate their emotions. Once we view these works in this way, then continued reengagement with such fictions is no longer puzzling. People often turn to such works to regulate their emotions because they are trusted affective scaffolds that can be relied upon to bring about the desired feelings.
Much philosophical work has been done, and continues to be done, on whether there is anything distinctive about our emotional reactions to characters and states of affairs as depicted in fiction. Showing this would require showing that such reactions differed from our emotional reactions to characters and states of affairs as depicted in non-fiction. However, extant work is directed as showing that our emotional reactions to characters and states of affairs as depicted in fiction differ from emotional reactions to characters and states of affairs we encounter face to face – a contrast not obviously relevant to the question at issue. This paper argues that once this is realised, there is no reason to think there is anything distinctive about our emotional reactions to characters and states of affairs as depicted in fiction.
Walton (1978, 1990, 1997) has influentially argued that the emotions we have towards fictional people and situations do not motivate behavior, despite having phenomenological, physiological and expressive features in common with the emotions we have towards real-world people and situations. Because emotions about fictional objects have their motivation thwarted, Walton concluded that they are quasi-emotions. This proposal has been widely rejected, and quasi-emotions have been reconceptualized as full-fledged emotions essential for explaining our engagement with fiction. What has largely survived in the post-Walton debate is the view that emotions towards fiction lack motivational force. Critics of Walton’s quasi-emotions support this view, but add that having motivational force is not essential for being an emotion. I disagree on both counts: emotions are, or essentially involve, motivations to act, and emotions about fictional objects are motivationally powerful. The difference between emotions about fictional objects and emotions about the real world is to be found at the level of regulation, not at the level of motivation. Regulation of emotions about fictional objects can lead to various outcomes, ranging from expressing our motivation directly or indirectly to inhibiting such motivation entirely, depending on the emotion and the circumstances.
Hubert Dreyfus’s philosophical methodology is deeply influenced by Heidegger, emphasizing the importance of interpreting philosophical texts within their historical context and uncovering the phenomena these texts elucidate. Dreyfus excels in engaging philosophical discussions to reveal the contemporary relevance of these texts. His approach is not only to understand their original meanings but also to clarify their contributions to ongoing philosophical dialogues. He contends that philosophical problems are shaped by historical conditions and are situated between faithful interpretation of historical texts and the resolution of abstract issues. Like Heidegger, Dreyfus considers understanding Being essential; however, he expands on this concept by emphasizing the role of background practices. He argues that these practices shape our understanding of Being, further influencing scientific realism, the philosophy of technology, and the nature of art. In aesthetics, artistic creation is viewed as a concrete configuration of the meaning of Being. Dreyfus’s theory centers on background practices, which clarify the ontology and function of artistic practice; however, he should also acknowledge its limits: while Dreyfus may address the transformation of the history of Being and contemporary realities, he cannot guarantee the autonomy of art across broader art forms.
The “paradox of fiction” is derived, roughly, from the apparent incompatibility between our emotional responses to fictional events and our belief that those events are fictional. Kendall Walton famously attempts to resolve the paradox by claiming that fiction only elicits what he calls “quasi-emotion” in us – emotions whose evaluative content essentially belongs within the “make-belief” world of the fiction. I here defend the claim that we respond to fiction with genuine emotion. I do this by highlighting a structural analogy between our emotional responses to fiction and our emotional responses to what I label “anticipatory imaginings”; acts of imagining future events that we don’t believe will (or perhaps even can) occur. Doing so, I argue, allows for the following simple yet convincing claim: since we’ve no reason to doubt that our emotional responses to anticipatory imaginings are genuine, the same is plausibly true of emotions elicited by fiction. This should give us reason to think that our emotional responses to fiction are as genuine as any other.
The paradox of painful art explores the general question: why do we sometimes enjoy art that elicits painful emotions that we tend to avoid in real life? The three dominant types of solutions – control, compensatory, and conversionary theories – tend to be treated as mutually exclusive. I argue that our aesthetic engagement with painful art is a play activity that significantly impacts our willingness to experience painful emotions due to the motivational structure of play. Approaching this paradox from the perspective of play reveals a compatibility between the dominant solutions. Here, I develop the play theory of painful art. To take up this task, I focus on three primary questions: What is play? How is play related to aesthetic engagements? And how is pain related to play? First, I introduce C. Thi Nguyen’s two-tier motivational structure of games, which maintains that we have a motivation to play a game and that, to achieve this purpose, requires us to adopt new, temporary goals during gameplay. I extend this view to include the temporary adoption of the norms of play. Then, I add painful emotions to this framework, highlighting how they are only contingently related to play. The resulting play theory of painful art framework maintains that we must temporarily adopt the norms of play and the negative emotions elicited by an artwork in order to achieve our original purpose of aesthetic engagement with that specific work of painful art. Finally, I integrate each solution’s corresponding motivation into this picture, showing how these motivations can happen simultaneously. Ultimately, our willingness to feel painful emotions in the context of art arises, in part, from a deeper appreciation of the aesthetic experience itself.
Why do we enjoy comedy that makes us cringe in embarrassment? This paper makes the case that cringe comedy is a form of social horror, and many of the theoretical approaches that have been developed to analyze the appeal of horror fictions can be transposed to cringe comedy. These approaches do not tell us what makes such comedy funny, however, nor do they explain what separates comedic social horror from dramatic social horror. To answer these questions, we turn to the theory of humor proposed by Tom Cochrane as well as the distancing-embracing model of the role of negative emotions in art appreciation proposed by Winfried Menninghaus et al. In order for social horror to be funny, this paper argues, it must insulate the norm violations it portrays from relevant cognitive and practical demands and enable the audience to achieve the right kind of distance from their negative emotions.
People can experience emotions towards fictional characters who we know do not exist in the real world. To make sense of this phenomenon, philosophers have proposed various strategies to show that belief is not necessary for feeling genuine and rational emotions. In this paper, I offer a new perspective and argue that we can understand the relevant beliefs in a pragmatist way. According to this view, when engaging with fictions, we pragmatically believe in the existence of fictional objects. The reason for this pragmatist belief is a practical consideration: to enjoy the aesthetic value of the fictional work. This pragmatist belief is more committing and direct than hypothetical attitudes such as pretense, make-believe, supposition, or imagination. It is also more immediate and less deliberative than acceptance. Finally, it recognizes the close connection between emotions towards fictions and emotions in real life, thereby can accommodate both the emotional carry-over effect and the special functions of emotions directed at fictional objects.
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate why Otomo Yoshihide – one of the most controversial postmodern Japanese musicians – could be considered a “Wittgensteinian innovator.” I will first outline Wittgenstein’s views on music, emphasizing his later thoughts on music as a practice embedded in a form of life. The focus will then shift to the ways in which we are able to understand music, the key musical characteristics that cannot be subverted to continue composing, and, ultimately, why Wittgenstein considers the modern musical approach to be decadent and unsuccessful. Subsequently, after a brief presentation of Otomo Yoshihide, I will underline how he challenges the conventional conception of music through his works and ideas, proposing a new way of organizing sound that may ultimately be impossible to define as music, yet stands in direct opposition to what Wittgenstein deemed the cause of the progressive decline of art as a whole. In fact, by the end of this study, I argue that Otomo’s work could also be described as “anti-Mahlerian,” considering that Mahler was defined by Wittgenstein as a great musical talent with the wrong artistic approach. Otomo’s proposal, on the other hand, offers a completely new and bold perspective on making music, capable of bringing the art back into a shared space accessible to everyone, just as Wittgenstein would have desired, though in some respects placing talent in a secondary role.
This paper investigates the normative asymmetry between recalcitrant emotions – emotions that conflict with our judgments – and emotional responses to fiction. While the former generate normative tension, the latter do not, but given their structural similarities, this asymmetry is surprising. We argue that the difference arises from the compartmentalization of emotion within imaginative contexts. Drawing on the concept of a cancellation context, we propose that the norm of emotional correctness is suspended when emotions remain compartmentalized. This framework accounts for both the permissibility of fiction-directed emotions (as compared to recalcitrant emotions) and their occasional spillover into real-world normativity.
Suppose you are happy when Breaking Bad’s Walter White outwits law enforcement or embarrassed for Harry Burns when Sally Albright fakes an orgasm at the diner in When Harry Met Sally… What sort of epistemological role, if any, do these emotions for fictional entities play? This paper focuses on how they impact on our epistemic standing vis-à-vis the thick values (the happy, the embarrassing) that are at stake in these fictional situations and to which the emotions of being happy and embarrassed respond. It has often been claimed that engagement with fictional entities is key to the development of our affective sensitivities, but the reasons why this is the case have not been thoroughly investigated. I shall argue that emotions for fictional entities have epistemic merits because they rest on an aesthetic or appreciative attitude. Given that this attitude can silence many concerns that bear on our real-life engagements and that the relevant fictions subvert our normal patterns of attention, the emotions that are elicited during aesthetic engagement can attune us to evaluative aspects of our environments that we would otherwise have missed and feed into our thick value concepts.
This paper aims at investigating ageing as a multifaceted experience in which a redefinition of one's habitualities of experience, which often comes with a reduction of previous possibilities and a stronger sense of one's finitude and vulnerability, can still coexist with moments of personal flourishing. I will particularly examine the bodily dimension of ageing, analyzing how one's body feels in old age and what valences the new experiences of one's body have for the older person. I will then argue that, despite the fact that the older person's body often undergoes a physical decline, one's possible personal flourishing in old age does not exclude the bodily dimension, but can reverberate positively in it, giving room to bright new experiences of one's embodied personal life.
In what follows, I will focus on the opposite of the top-down, "transcendent" politics of surprise, institutional and instituted, in short, remote-controlled. I'm more interested in the immanent dynamic of the "we" (first person plural) that "makes" the political surprise, and how the social forces of the human collective, of the political community in the deepest sense of civil, civic and citizen society, not only produce and construct, but also feed off such a dynamic. I will first draw on Gilles Deleuze's approach and show how political surprise can be understood as a process characterized by intensification, with the reaching of a critical threshold, followed by a period of saturation (my three phases in the model of surprise). The presentation of this first model will lead me to explore its limits, particularly in view of the quantified, objectifying negative vision of surprise that it illustrates. I will then propose another alternative model, characterized by its dynamic of openness and the creation of new possibilities. This dynamic, as we shall see, places the individual at the service of the collective intersubjective interactions, without absorbing them, as long as the individual keeps the ability for a renewed examination of his or her assumed mode of alignment with collective creation. The creation of a new collective results then the creation of a "we" co-acted by and within each individual.
The contribution offers a critical interpretation of the notion of the "sovereign individual" - which Nietzsche presents in the second paragraph of the second dissertation of The Genealogy of Morals-based on its interconnection with aesthetic concepts and issues. In the first part, it argues for the compatibility between a positive reading of this figure and a parodic one by highlighting Nietzsche's ironic use of Kantian terminology in opposition to Edward von Hartmann. In doing so, the article also clarifies Nietzsche's critique of Kant's notion of autonomy. It then shows how an interpretation through aesthetic categories opens up new hermeneutic perspectives that, on the one hand, connect moral, political, and aesthetic issues in Nietzsche's philosophical work, and, on the other, underscore Nietzsche's historical-philosophical relevance within modernity.In particular, the author demonstrates how the idea of "individual law," implied by Nietzsche's reference to the sovereign individual, is analogous to reflective aesthetic judgments, whose "principle of determination can only be subjective." Finally, the contribution explores the implications of Nietzsche's aesthetic understanding of moral autonomy for the modern notion of sovereignty.
The Augmented Human is the latest representation of a technologically augmented human condition. The focus is on implantable or wearable information technology that enhances our bodily subjectivity. This paper examines a fundamental conceptualization of technological augmentation, namely, the supplementation of the bodily subject through technology. This is achieved through the lens of the nascent discipline of synthetic phenomenology, which highlights the role of technology in enabling the emergence of novel forms of subjective sensemaking. The paper is organized into three sections. First, it presents a reconstruction of the conceptual background of the augmented bodily subject within the broader context of related paradigms of information research and innovation. The reconstruction presents a contrast between two conceptualizations: supplementation and replacement. Secondly, the paper introduces and contextualizes synthetic phenomenology within the broader landscape of contemporary philosophical contributions to the field of the Augmented Human. Subsequently, a case study of sensory supplementation is presented, namely biomimetic prosthetic vision. The case study was selected based on two considerations: the central role played by visual perception in the formation and codification of synthetic phenomenology as an autonomous discipline, and the increasing expansion of biomimetic prosthetics as a domain of technology-supplemented bodily subjectivity.
Nietzsche's theory in The Birth of Tragedy is traditionally considered as opposed to Aristotle's Poetics. The essay aims to show that there are some genuinely Aristotelian elements underlying Nietzsche's account oftragedy. I will first argue that Nietzsche's own criticism of Aristotle is directed at an unattractive reading of the concept of katharsis. After providing an updated interpretation of Aristotle's account, I will argue that two of its pivotal elements are also at the core of Nietzsche's view: 1) the explanation of the sympathetic identification with the tragic hero; 2) the account of the effects of the tragedy on the attendants. I maintain that both the accounts underline the importance of the undeserveness of the hero's sufferings, in order to pity them; and that, for both Aristotle and Nietzsche, tragedy allows us to grasp some universally painful traits of human existence, while teaching us to confront them with joy.
The present paper wants to address Edith Stein's early ontology of persons in light of the doctrines of two neglected figures of late 19(th) and early 20(th) century philosophy: Eduard von Hartmann and Friedrich Gundolf. The goal is to understand the implications of Stein's account of a person's qualitative individuality as something ontologically new with respect to her general and genus essence. To this end, the paper will focus on how such ontologically individual novelty is understood by Stein with the aid of two concepts: that of "individual idea" and the Gestalt.
