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This is the first collection of essays focused on the many-faceted work of Kendall L. Walton. Walton has shaped debate about the arts for the last 50 years. He provides a comprehensive framework for understanding arts in terms of the human capacity of make-believe that shows how different arts - visual, photographic, musical, literary, or poetic - can be explained in terms of complex structures of pretense, perception, imagining, empathy, and emotion. His groundbreaking work has been taken beyond aesthetics to address foundational issues concerning linguistic and scientific representations - for example, about the nature of scientific modelling or to explain how much of what we say is quite different from the literal meanings of our words. Contributions from a diverse group of philosophers probe Walton's detailed proposals and the themes for research they open. The essays provide an overview of important debates that have Walton's work at their core. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working on aesthetics across the humanities, as well as those interested in the topic of representation and its intersection with perception, language, science, and metaphysics.
List of contents
1. Introduction: The Reach of Make-Believe
Sonia Sedivy
Part I: Fiction and the Verbal Arts
2. Fictionality in Imagined Worlds
Stacie Friend
3. Walton and Fictional Characters
Eileen John
4. Walton on 'the Paradox of Fiction': Confusions and Misunderstandings
Derek Matravers
5. Fear and Loathing in Fictional Worlds: Quasi-Emotion, Nonexistence, and the Slime Paradigm
Eva Dadlez
6. Lyric Self-Expression
John Gibson and Hanna H. Kim
7. Reading (with) Others
Wolfgang Huemer
8. The Puzzle of Fictional Morality
Stuart Brock
Part II: Visual Art, Photography and Music
9. The Puzzle of Make-Believe About Pictures: Can One Imagine a Perception to Be Different?
Sonia Sedivy
10. Holey Images and the Roles of Realism
John V. Kulvicki
11. Photography as a Category of Art
Diarmuid Costello
12. Transparency and Egocentrism
Nils-Hennes Stear
13. Photographs and Memories
Christopher C. Williams
14. Fiction, Fictionality, and Pictures
Paloma Atencia-Linares
15. Understanding Humour, Understanding People, and Understanding Music
Julian Dodd
Part III: Themes in Aesthetics: Agency, Appearances and Norms
16. Style and the Agency in Art
Gregory Currie
17. Veridical Appearances of Production and Marxist Aesthetics
Bryan Parkhurst
18. Playing with the Rules of the Game: Imagination, Normativity, and Address in Aesthetics
Monique Roelofs
Part IV: Beyond Aesthetics: Meaning, Metaphysics and Science
19. 'Existence as Metaphor' Revisited
Frederick Kroon
20. Say Holmes Exists; Then What?
Stephen Yablo
21. Scientific Modelling and Make-Believe
Roman Frigg
22. The Story of the Ghost in the Machine
Adam Toon
Part V: Walton in Conversation
23. Walton in Conversation
Kendall L. Walton
About the author
Sonia Sedivy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research focuses on perception, aesthetics, and the later work of Wittgenstein. Beauty and the End of Art: Wittgenstein, Plurality and Perception (2016) offers a new approach to the diversity of art and beauty by bringing aesthetics together with the philosophy of perception and the later work of Wittgenstein. “Aesthetic Properties, History and Perception” shows how philosophy of perception and aesthetics inform one another in Art, History, Perception, a Special Issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics that she guest edited. She is currently writing a book on perception that draws on aesthetics.
Summary
This is the first collection of essays focused on the many faceted work of Kendall Walton. Walton provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the arts in terms of the human capacity of make-believe that shows how different arts can be explained in terms of complex structures of pretense, perception, imagining, empathy and emotion.
