Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts

Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts is the first comprehensive collection of papers by philosophers examining the nature of imagination and its role in understanding and making art. Imagination is a central concept in aesthetics with close ties to issues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, yet it has not received the kind of sustained, critical attention it deserves. This collection of seventeen brand new essays critically examines just how and in what form the notion of imagination illuminates fundamental problems in the philosophy of art.

Matthew Kieran is Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at University of Leeds, UK. He is the author Revealing Art (2004), and editor of Media Ethics (1998), both published by Routledge. Dominic McIver Lopes is Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Distinguished University Scholar and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the editor (with Berys Gaut) of The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics.

Part 1: Imagination, Narrative, and Emotion 1. Reasons, Emotions, and Fiction, Berys Gaut 2. How I Really Feel About JFK, Stacie Friend 3. Imagination and Emotion in Fiction, Peter Goldie 4. In Search of a Narrative, Matthew Kieran Part 2: Truth in Imagination 5. Fictional Assent and the (So-Called) Problem of Imaginative Resistance, Derek Matravers 6. The Owl, the Pussycat, and Other Impossible Tales, Kathleen Stock 7. Quarantining and Contagion, Fertility and Unproductivity, Tamar Szabo Gendler 8. Literature, Thought Experiments and the Value of Detail, Eileen John 9. The Aesthetic and ethical Value of Literature, Roman Bonzon 10. Imagining the Truth: An Account of Tragic Pleasure, James Shelley Part 3: Sensory Imagination 11. Seeing Things Twice Over, Christopher Williams 12. Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Dominic McIver Lopes 13. The Imaged, the Imagined, and the Imaginary, David Davies 14. Film and the Transcendental Imagination: Kant and Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, Melissa Zinkin 15. The Funerary Sadness of Mahler's Music, Saam Trivedi 16. Sculpture and Space, Robert Hopkins Part 4: Afterthoughts 17. The Capacities that Enable Us to Produce and Consume Art, Gregory Currie. Index