Art, Representation, and Make-Believe
Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton
Routledge Research in Aesthetics Series

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.

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

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.