Fiction and Emotion

My five commentators inhabit the roles (most of them more than one) of critic of the visual arts, metaphysician, literary critic, cognitive scientist, historian of philosophy, philosopher of mind, philosopher of art, and poet, and I am grateful to them all for their challenges, criticisms, amplifications and departures. They address the two main problems discussed in the paper: the attitudes and emotions that are caused by, and directed at, the fictional states and doings of fictional characters; and the disproportionate place occupied by presentations of sorrow and suffering in the arts, and especially in poetry and song. I cannot do justice to all the good points they raise in the short space allowed me, but a good place to begin might be with Christopher Ricks’ tendency to agree that literature of all sorts—poetry, prose, drama—is greatly concerned with sorrow and suffering, but to doubt at the same time whether ‘aesthetics [that is, philosophy of art] can attend illuminatingly upon works of art’ (93). He cites the poet T. S. Eliot, whose disdain for philosophy in later life (despite his extensive philosophical education) is evident, and Ricks suggests that little or nothing would be lost if philosophers stayed away from discussions of the emotional experiences induced by works of art

Aesthetics · Art · Drama · Epistemology · Literature · Metaphysics · Nothing · Poetry · Realism · Sorrow · The arts · Visual arts · Cognitive Science and Education Research · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art · Philosophy

• Disjunctivism and the Paradox of Tragedy

  Open Access•Richard Gaskins, Richard Gaskin•The Philosophical Quarterly•2023

  Add to list