How do our engagements with fictions and other products of the imagination compare to our experiences of the real world? Are the feelings we have about a novel's characters modelled on our thoughts about actual people? If it is wrong to feel pleasure over certain situations in real life, can it nonetheless be right to take pleasure in analogous scenarios represented in a fantasy or film? Should the desires we have for what goes on in a make-believe story cohere with what we want to happen in the actual world? Such queries have animated philosophical and psychological theorizing about art and life from Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Poetics to contemporary debates over freedom of expression, ethics and aesthetics, the cognitive value of thought experiments, and the effects on audiences of exposure to violent entertainment. In Apt Imaginings, Jonathan Gilmore develops a new framework to pursue these questions, marshalling a wide range of research in aesthetics, the science of the emotions, moral philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and film and literary theory. Gilmore argues that, while there is a substantial empirical continuity in our feelings across art and life, the norms that govern the appropriateness of those responses across the divide are discontinuous. In this view, the evaluative criteria that determine the fit, correctness, or rationality of our emotions and desires for what is internal to a fiction can be contrary to those that govern our affective attitudes toward analogous things in the real world. In short, it can be right to embrace within a story what one would condemn in real life. The theory Gilmore defends in this volume helps to explain our complex and sometimes conflicted attitudes toward works of the imagination; challenges the popular view that fictions serve to refine our moral sensibilities; and exposes a kind of autonomy of the imagination that can render our responses to art immune to standard real-world epistemic, practical, and affective kinds of criticism.

Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and Other Creatures of the Mind (Thinking Art)

Politics & Social Sciences

Gilmore, Jonathan

Philosophy

Oxford University Press

What does it mean to say that a form of art is exhausted, that an artist has brought his or her work as far as it can go, that modernism began with Edouard Manet, or that cubism reached a natural ending in 1914 (even if members of that movement continued to paint in a cubist style)? Contemporary theories of art history tend to treat such issues as matters of narrative form, of the manner in which history is represented - with beginnings, turning points and ending belonging to the narrative itself and not constrained by historical fact. In this book, Jonathan Gilmore claims that such narrative developments inhere in the history of art itself.

The Life of a Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Cornell University Press

This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of a new work by Sarah Sze (born 1969) at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Sze's immense and intricate site-specific works are akin to drawings in space, manipulating architectural spaces to profoundly affect the way they are viewed. This work was installed on three floors of the museum, virally traversing the exhibition spaces and creating a narrative that unfolds as viewers navigate the galleries and experience Sze's reflections on time, exploration of movement and investigation of materials. Each gallery floor presents a singular experience, yet viewing all three spaces is cumulative, akin to experiencing separate acts in a theatrical production. The catalogue illustrates multiple views of each gallery floor. Along with essays by Jonathan Gilmore and Jeffery Kastner, this volume includes a 2011 essay on Sze by the late philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto.

Sarah Sze at The Fabric Workshop and Museum

Danto, Arthur

Kastner, Jeffrey

Individual Artists

The Fabric Workshop and Museum

What role should national militaries play in an increasingly globalised and interdependent world? This book examines the often difficult transition they have made toward missions aimed at protecting civilians and promoting human security, and asks whether we might expect the emergence of armed forces that exist to serve the wider human community.

The Cosmopolitan Military: Armed Forces and Human Security in the 21st Century (New Security Challenges)

Reference

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

Comprising 45 chapters, written especially for this volume by an international team of leading experts, The Routledge Companion to the Philosophies of Painting and Sculpture is the first handbook of its kind. The editors have organized the chapters across eight broader sections: Artforms History Questions of form, style, and address Art and science Comparisons among the arts Questions of value Philosophers of art Institutional questions 
Individual topics include art and cognitive science, evolutionary origins of art, art and perception, pictorial realism, artistic taste, style, issues of race and gender, art and religion, art and philosophy, and the end of art. The work of selected philosophers is also discussed, including Diderot, Hegel, Ruskin, Gombrich, Goodman, Wollheim, and Danto. With an introduction from the editors and comprehensively indexed, The Routledge Companion to the Philosophies of Painting and Sculpture serves as a point of entry to the subject for a broad range of students as well as an up-to-date reference for scholars in the field.

The Routledge Companion to the Philosophies of Painting and Sculpture (Routledge Philosophy Companions)

Carroll, Noël

Routledge

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