_Serial Killers - Philosophy for Everyone_ investigates our profound intrigue with mass-murderers. Exploring existential, ethical and political questions through an examination of real and fictional serial killers, philosophy comes alive via an exploration of grisly death. Presents new philosophical theories about serial killing, and relates new research in cognitive science to the minds of serial killers Includes a philosophical look at real serial killers such as Ian Brady, Ted Bundy, John Wayne (...) Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and the Zodiac killer, as well as fictional serial killers such as Dexter and Hannibal Lecter Offers a new phenomenological examination of the writings of the Zodiac Killer Contains an account of the disappearance of one of Ted Bundy's victims submitted by the organization Families and Friends of Missing Persons and Violent Crime Victims Integrates the insights of philosophers, academics, crime writers and police officers. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Historical Survey with Interviews Moral Skepticism and the Serial Killer A Brief History of Serial Killers Serial Killers of the Ancient World Serial Killers of the Renaissance Serial Killers of the Nineteenth Century Serial Killers of the Early Twentieth Century The Golden Age of Serial Killers Serial Killers Today: Conversations on Motivation.

This chapter contains sections titled: In Cold Bold: The Moral Psychology of Fictional Serial Killers I Think I'll Eat Your Heart: The Lack‐of‐Empathy Explanation Dexter and the Extreme Lack of Understanding The Hot‐Blooded Reality: Sex, Rage, Fame My Evil Just Happened to Come Out: Empathy Inhibits? Serial Killing Because They Care? “Angels of Death” “I didn't want to hurt them, I only wanted to kill them”: Empathic Dissonance The Serial Killer Next Door?

At least some serial killers are psychopathic serial killers. Psychopathic serial killers raise interesting questions about the nature of evil and moral responsibility. On the one hand, serial killers seem to be obviously evil, if anything is. On the other hand, psychopathy is a diagnosable disorder that, among other things, involves a diminished ability to understand and use basic moral distinctions. This feature of psychopathy suggests that psychopathic serial killers have (...) at least diminished responsibility for what they do. In this chapter I consider whether psychopathic serial killers might be properly said to be both evil and morally responsible for their actions. I argue that psychopathic serial killers are plausibly evil in at least one recognizable sense of the term, but that they are nevertheless not likely to be responsible for many of the evils they perpetuate. (shrink)

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equippedwith a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law (...) with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government,along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. Athird connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in thistroubled domain.The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. Thecumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quitesane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin aconversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature. (shrink)

In ‘Truth, Relativism, and Serial Fiction’, Andrew McGonigal presents new data that a theory of truth in fiction should account for, and argues that the data is best accounted for by his relativist view. I argue against McGonigal’s relativist view and in favour of a more metaphysical view. The key feature of this view is that it is one on which the content of a work of fiction can change over time. Along the way I also argue against Ross (...) Cameron’s contextualist view. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Serial Killers, Real and Imagined Dexter Gacy Are Serial Killers Morally Responsible? Moral Responsibility: Emotions and Cognitive Frames.

To address the tension between demands for more transparent AI systems and the aim to develop and design robots with apparent agency for smooth and intuitive human-robot interaction (HRI), we present in this paper an argument for why explainability in HRI would benefit from being question-centered. First, we review how explainability has been discussed in AI and HRI respectively, to then present the challenge in HRI to accommodate the requirement of transparency while also keeping up the appearance of the (...) robot as a social agent. Based on the conceptualization of questions as information-seeking acts, our proposal for a question-centered approach to explainable HRI (xHRI) implies that to ensure transparency, robots shall provide explanations upon request in the form of questioning. We end this paper by laying out a preliminary taxonomy of xHRI-relevant questions that present the kinds of explanations a robot can or should be able to provide for successful and transparent HRI. (shrink)

Future weapons will make life-or-death decisions without a human in the loop. When such weapons inflict unwarranted harm, no one appears to be responsible. There seems to be a responsibility gap. I first reconstruct the argument for such responsibility gaps to then argue that this argument is not sound. The argument assumes that commanders have no control over whether autonomous weapons inflict harm. I argue against this assumption. Although this investigation concerns a specific case of autonomous weapons systems, I (...) take steps towards vindicating the more general idea that superiors can be morally responsible in virtue of being in command. (shrink)

In this paper, I will first of all claim that once one takes proper names as indexicals of a particular sort, indexinames for short, one may account for some tensions that affect our desiderata regarding the use of such names in sentences directly or indirectly involving fiction. According to my proposal, a proper name “N.N.” is an indexical whose character is roughly expressed by the description “the individual called ‘N.N.’ (in context)”, where this description means “the individual one’s interlocutor’s (...) attention is called to by means of ‘N.N.’ (in context)”. This character is a partial function that maps narrow contexts onto referents. Such contexts are enriched narrow contexts, for they also include an ‘acquisition’ parameter, i.e., a parameter filled by a naming practice constituted by a dubbing, which consists in calling via the name one’s interlocutor’s attention to something (if any), and usually also by a certain transmission chain. I will also claim that such a proposal works independently of one’s ontological stance on fictional entities, that is, independently of whether one believes either that there are or that there are no such entities. Moreover, I will claim that such a proposal is better than similar indexicalist proposals such as the one put forward by Tiedke (2011), Finally, I will try to show how this proposal can deal with some objections one may raise against an indexicalist treatment of proper names. (shrink)

Twenty years after cultivating a new orientation for aesthetics via the concept of non-photography, François Laruelle returns, having further developed his notion of a non-standard aesthetics. Published for the first time in a bilingual edition, _Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics_ expounds on Laruelle’s current explorations into a photographic thinking as an alternative to the worn-out notions of aesthetics based on an assumed domination of philosophy over art. He proposes a new philosophical photo-fictional apparatus, or philo-fiction, that strives for a (...) discursive mimesis of the photographic apparatus and the flash of the Real entailed in its process of image making. “A bit like if an artisan, to use a Socratic example, instead of making a camera based off of diagrams found in manuals, on the contrary had as his or her project the designing of a completely new apparatus of philo-fiction, thus capable of producing not simply photos, but photo-fictions.” One must enter into a space for seeing the vectorial and the imaginary number. Laruelle’s philo-fictions become not art installations, but “theoretical installations” calling for the consideration of the possibility of a non-standard aesthetics being of an equal or superior power to art and philosophy, an aesthetics in-the-last-instance that is itself an inventive and creative act of the most contemporary kind. (shrink)

Conceiving of fictional characters as types allows us to reconcile intuitions of sameness and difference about characters such as Batman that appear in different fictional worlds. Sameness occurs at the type level while difference occurs at the token level. Yet, the claim that fictional characters are types raises three main issues. Firstly, types seem to be eternal forms whereas fictional characters seem to be the outcome of a process of creation. Secondly, the tokens of a type (...) are concrete particulars in the actual world whereas the alleged tokens of a fictional character are concrete particulars in a fictional world. Thirdly, many fictional characters, unlike Batman, only appear in one work of fiction, and therefore one can wonder whether it does make sense to treat them as types. The main aim of this paper is to address these issues in order to defend a creationist account of fictional characters as types. (shrink)

The structure of traditional fiction is essentially linear or serial. No matter how complex a given work may be, it presents information to its reader successively, one element at a time, in a sequence determined by its author. By contrast, interactive fiction is parallel in structure or, more accurately, dendritic or tree-shaped. Not one, but several possible courses of action are open to the reader. Further, which one actually happens depends largely, though not exclusively, upon the reader’s own choices. (...) To be sure, the author is still in overall control, since it is she who has set up the particular nexus of events, but the route up the narrative tree, the actual sequence of events, is generally affected, if not completely determined, by the reader’s responses to that particular reader’s specific situation. In an adventure, the sequence of action frequently depends upon the reader’s decision to go in one geographical direction rather than another. In the eliza sample, the content of the “story” depends on such particulars as whether this reader has a brother or not, whether she fears her father, and why she has consulted the terminal. In general, the text presented to the eliza-reader depends on what that reader has already said and how the computer has interpreted and stored it, and this is generally true of interactive fiction.Further, interactive fiction is, in principle , open-ended—infinite. A conversation with eliza could go on for as long as one with Woody Allen’s psychoanalyst—in principle, forever. It has no necessary terminus. The program will go one writing texts and answers on the screen as long as the reader or player chooses to supply responses. Further, the computer can act as a metafictional narrator like John Barth or Thomas Pynchon who can create a story within a story or a story that generates another story within itself which generates another story within itself and so on, fictions dizzying and dazzling. One senses one’s essential humanity wobbling in the midst of the infinite paradoxes of existence and meaning. Anthony J. Niesz, assistant professor of German at Yale University, is the author of Dramaturgy in German Drama: From Gryphius to Goethe . He is interested in the phenomenon of the meta-theater, especially in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German drama, as well as in the literature and cultural policies of the German Democratic Republic. Norman N. Holland is Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida. He is the author of Laughing and The I. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI propose a different account of fictional objects from the ones already present in the literature. According to my account, fictional objects are culturally created abstract objects dependent for their existence on the pretence attitude adopted by a group of people towards a single fictional content. My work is divided into three parts: in the first one, I present how fictional objects come into existence according to my proposal; in the second part, I illustrate how (...) the existence of fictional objects so conceived may be ontically indeterminate; in the last part, I consider what happens when vague existence and indeterminate identity are claimed within fictional texts. (shrink)

Pierre Olivier distinguishes between two radically different concep-tions of legal fictions: on the one hand, the conception of legal fiction developed by the commentators of the Middle Ages, which culminates in Bartolus’s defini-tion; on the other hand, the conception developed by the 19th Century German scholar Gustav Demelius, who was followed, among others, by Joseph Esser. The main difference between the two approaches is individuated by Olivier in the fact that, while the former consider legal fictions as essentially implying an (...) actual fic-tional element, the latter deny this. In other words, according to Demelius and those who follow him, the term “legal fiction” is a misnomer. In this article, I first provide an example of a legal fiction. In the second and third section, I rely on this example to analyze and assess the two competing accounts. Finally, in the fourth part, I advance a syncretistic account of legal fictions, which should thus point to a possible middle ground between the two competing positions. As it is often the case, there is probably some truth to both accounts; the problem – I will argue – is that both theories tell only a part and not the whole of the story. More precisely, it will be argued that legal fictions essentially involve the structure of “as if”-statements, and that the one-sidedness of the two competing accounts derives from the fact that one focuses too much on the “if”-component (the assumption), whereas the other focuses too much on the “as”-component (the comparison). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Peter van Inwagen FICTION AND METAPHYSICS Many works of fiction address themselves directly to metaphysiced issues. One thinks of the stories of Olaf Stapledon, Charles Williams, or Jorge Luis Borges. Other fiction is more subtly and indirectly related to metaphysics — A la recherche du temps perdu, for exeimple, or, in a radier different way, some science fiction. The relations that various novels and stories bear to the questions (...) ofmetaphysics would be an interesting topic, but it is not the topic of the present article, which is the relevance to metaphysics not of this or that work, but ramer of the very existence of such a thing as fiction. We shall see mat philosophical reflection on fiction can lead one to certain remarkable metaphysical conclusions. Not surprisingly, the area of metaphysics to which these conclusions pertain is ontology. The word, though not the study it represents, is a new one — it is probably a seventeenth-century coinage. In the present century, the word "ontology" is associated mainly with the names of Heidegger and Quine. I shall be using the word in Quine's sense: as a name for the study that attempts to answer the question, What is there? Quine's contributions to this study are of central importance for the thesis of this article. These contributions may be divided into two parts: those that belong to ontology proper and those that belong to what we may call meta-ontology. By Quine's "ontology proper," I mean his actual attempt to answer the question, What is there? This attempt is of great intrinsic interest, but it is not relevetnt to my topic. By Quine's meta-ontology, I mean his feunous discussion of what it is to ask what there is emd his famous dieses about how to approach mis question.1 These theses are the product of a really remarkable effort to think clearly about questions almost no one had thought cleeirly about, and a proper appreciation of them will liberate one from some very old and very strong illusions about being emd existence. Or so many philosophers, including the present author, would say. And yet Quine's meta-ontology, when it is combined with what seem to be some very simple emd obvious facts about fiction, yields a result mat seems just obviously wrong: that names drawn from works of fiction ("Mr. Pickwick" emd "Tom Sawyer," for example, as well as proper names of odier sorts, such as "Dotheboys Hall" and "Barchester") denote existent objects. The thesis of this 67 68PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE article is mat this consequence of Quine's meta-ontology does not constitute a reductio ad absurdum; radier, Quine's meta-ontology should be retained and mis consequence accepted. I shall first examine Quine's meta-ontology in the abstract, and then in application to fiction. In the abstract, Quine's meta-ontology may be viewed as comprising four propositions. (1)Being is die seune as existence. That is, to say mat things of a certain sort exist emd to say mat there être things of diat sort is to say pretty much the same diing. For example, to say diat horses exist is to say mere are horses, and to say mat diere was such a person as Homer is to say that Homer existed. This might seem obvious, but on reflection it can seem less obvious. Suppose I am discussing someone's delusions and I say, "There are a lot of diings he believes in that do not exist." On die face of it, I appear to be saying diat diere are diings — the poison in his drink, his uncle's medice, emd so on — that do not exist. To tedce a radier more metaphysical example, I have read a letter to the editor of a newspaper, the audior of which argues diat contraception is a sin since it prevents people who would omerwise exist from doing so. This may be a bad argument on meiny grounds that have nothing to do with metaphysics, but it is certainly clear diat its propounder believes diat diere are unconceived people, people who might have existed but who, owing to certain acts of contraception, do not exist... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sanford Freedman CHARACTER IN A COHERENT FICTION: ON PUTTING KING LEAR BACK TOGETHER AGAIN Criticism has never been able to talk about fictionality very long without talking about an "inside" and an "outside," a fictional world's relation to a non-fictional world. And always there lies an immediate tension in this relation posed by the concept of coherence. That is, does a fictional world cohere because it (...) corresponds to meanings "outside" die text or does a fictional world cohere because its "inside" parts stand in meaningful relation to each other? Northrop Frye, in explicating his dieory of symbols, distinguishes between "inside" and "outside" critical directions: Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make.1 That Frye suggests that critics see in both directions at once separates him from most twentieth-century Shakespearean critics who exaggerate one direction at the expense of the other. In this essay I will examine criticism of King Lear, specifically criticism about the play's characters from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, as a way of assessing this distinction, focusing on two related problems: first, how the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' legacy of"inside"/"outside" talk affects twentieth-century critical debate, and second, how twentieth-century controversy polarizes "insides" and "outsides" without acknowledging the implications of doing so. If such an exaimination serves to undermine dominant twentieth-century concepts of coherence within Shakespearean criticism by pointing to unwritten rules-of-thumb, it does so, ultimately, to alter perspective on the supposed rites of passage from theories which give us cleair, alternative versions of a fictional world (traditional theories) to theories which seem to leave us floundering in a pluralist acceptance of all possible versions of a fictional world (deconstructive theories). 196 Sanford Freedman197 Eighteenth-century critics do not scrutinize King Lear from the point of view of character but rather through the mental images or ideas which the characters' words evoke. When Johnson faults Shakespeare's description of Dover Cliff in IV.vi, he argues diat the passage "does not impress die mind at once with the horrible idea of an immense height. The impression is divided; you pass on, by computation, from one stage of the tremendous space to another."2 Lifting Edgar's words out of die context of character, Johnson assumes the role of the purveyor of literature, akin to the role Pope assumed when he starred the "beauties" in his Shakespearean texts. What concernsJohnson is the "true" effect of looking down from a precipice, and he implies that the description should produce in different minds the same idea, an idea which is for him a singular idea, unmediated by composite ideas because the idea of looking down from a precipice necessitates that the immediacy of effect be synonymous with that of the idea. Edgar's purpose in leading his father to the cliffis overshadowed by the idea of looking down from a cliff, and we would do well to investigate an "outside" source, Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, rather than the Shakespearean text, as a means of discovering the purposefulness of Johnson's comment. Critical significance lies notjust inJohnson's airing ofneoclassical concern, but, more importantly, in his failure to find what he expects to be "there" in the play's "inside." Ideas, not characters, matter to the eighteenth-century's coherence, and the scope or comprehensiveness of that coherence has relatively local application; that is, editors range over several lines looking for relevant ideas but not between scenes or acts. In fact, one explanation of why they do not see a double plot is that their critical attention, like that of Swift's Lilliputians, lacks scope; dierefore, they fail to anticipate, to see patterns. Again, Johnson, for example, does not observe Gloucester's, Edgar's, and the fool's repetition of... (shrink)

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, (...) since we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

The logic of fiction has been a stand-alone research programme only since the early 1970s.1 It is a fair question as to why in the first place fictional discourse would have drawn the interest of professional logicians. It is a question admitting of different answers. One is that, since fictional names are “empty”, fiction is a primary datum for any logician seeking a suitably comprehensive logic of denotation. Another answer arises from the so-called incompleteness problem, exemplified by (...) the fact (or apparent fact) that some fictional sentences – think of “Sherlock Holmes’ mother was nick-named ‘Polly’” − are neither true nor false. These are sentences to command the attention of logicians who work on non-bivalent logics. A further spur to logical engagement is the supposed fictionality of certain kinds of ideal models in science and certain classes of mathematical objects. No doubt, there are other features of fictional discourse that provide the logician with a natural entré, but perhaps it would also be correct to say that the fiction’s biggest draw for logicians is that our quite common beliefs about the fictional constitute what Nicholas Rescher calls “aporetic clusters”, so named after the Latinized Greek aporos for “impassable”.2 An aporetic cluster is a set of claims such that.. (shrink)

In this article, I want to defend two claims. First, as regards fictional characters (ficta), one must appeal to constitutive properties, i.e., properties that are not only necessary but also essential for a fictum involved by a certain narration; namely, the internal discourse about a fictum. Such properties are indeed the properties that are truly predicated of ficta, either explicitly or implicitly, in that narration. For the appeal to such properties may explain not only i) the truth of (...) important bits of external discourse, i.e., the discourse concerning a fictum outside that narration, but also ii) a fictum’s individuation, i.e., what makes that fictum the object it is. Second, ficta are truly internally predicated such properties, i.e., they possess such properties in a specific, constitutive, mode. For those properties are members of the property sets with which ficta are somehow correlated; indeed, possession of truly internally predicated properties precisely amounts to set-membership. (shrink)

In the debate on our engagement with and appreciation of fiction films, the thesis that the viewer of a fiction film imagines observing fictional events, and the thesis that these events are imagined to be presented by a narrator, are usually taken as two components of one theoretical package, which philosophers such as George Wilson and Jerrold Levison defend, while philosophers such as Gregory Currie and Berys Gaut reject. This paper argues that the two theses can be disentangled and (...) investigates their logical connection. The investigation shows that the second thesis entails the first but there is no entailment the other way around. Endorsing the first thesis is thus compatible with two options, namely endorsing the second thesis or abandoning it. However, the paper argues that if we endorse the first thesis, endorsing the second provides us with a more compelling explanation of our engagement with and appreciation of fiction films. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 299-309 [Access article in PDF] Conscious Fiction Mary Clayton Coleman Bard College Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, by David Lodge; 320 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002, $24.95 boards, $16.95 paper. Fictional Minds, by Alan Palmer; 275 pp. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, $45.00. Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness, by Dan Lloyd; 357 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: (...) The MIT Press, 2004, $24.95 boards, $14.95 paper. What contributions can fiction make to the representation and investigation of conscious experience? Might fiction help us to develop and advance new theories about the nature of consciousness? And might such theories, in turn, inform our understanding of the process of reading fiction? Three recent volumes—one by English critic and novelist, David Lodge; another by literary theorist, Alan Palmer; and a third by philosopher and (now) novelist, Dan Lloyd—raise these important, genre-bending questions, and they offer challenging if not always convincing answers to them. More generally, these volumes make valuable contributions to the fruitful cross-pollination that has developed between philosophers, scientists, literary theorists, and novelists who are interested in the nature of consciousness.Lodge's new collection of essays is called Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, and like all of the criticism he has written since the late eighties, this volume is intended for a general audience, not for [End Page 299] literary theorists. The title essay, "Consciousness and the Novel," is a revised version of the Richard Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature that Lodge gave at Emory University in 2001, and the other nine essays, all previously published, cover such topics as Howards End; the novels of Evelyn Waugh; The Letters of Kingsley Amis; Martin Amis's memoir, Experience; and the relationship between literature and criticism. I will focus on "Consciousness and the Novel."Lodge's thesis in this essay is that novels play an essential role in our exploration of the nature of human consciousness. This thesis is certainly true, but it is also entirely banal. Much more interesting is what Lodge says in support of it. He argues that because of the unique representative possibilities of the novel, conscious experiences can be represented more effectively in novels than they can be in scientific writing. Taken literally, as an assertion about the relative representational power of novels and scientific discourse, this is extremely implausible. However, taken more loosely—as an invitation to those of us interested in consciousness to take a closer look at the ways conscious experiences are represented in novels—Lodge's claim is sensible and appealing. I will consider the literal reading of Lodge's claim first and then turn to the looser one.It is undoubtedly true that, as a whole, novelists devote more energy to representing conscious experiences than writers of scientific discourse do. However, science writers can use whatever techniques best serve their aims, including the aim of describing conscious experiences, so there is no reason to think that conscious experiences can, in principle, be represented more effectively in novels than in broadly scientific discourse. Given that Lodge discusses such creative science writers as Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker in the course of his essay, it is surprising and disappointing to find him caricature scientific writing in the following way: "science... is a third-person discourse. The first-person pronoun is not used in scientific papers. If there were any hint of qualia in a scientific paper... it would be edited out" (p. 11). Qualia are the supposedly subjective qualitative aspects of conscious experiences. How the plucked string of a cello sounds to you; how the rotting fish in the garbage smells to you; and how it feels for you to inch down into the smooth, almost-too-hot water of a perfect bubble bath—these are all (supposedly) examples of qualia. Lodge is simply mistaken when he says that there is no hint of qualia in scientific writing. There is no consensus about whether qualia can be explained scientifically. In fact, there is no consensus about whether they exist. [End Page... (shrink)

"Form and Void" is the eighth and final episode in season one of True Detective. "Form and Void" both diminished the element of cosmic horror into something more terrestrial and mundane and replaced Rust Cohle's trademark philosophical pessimism with a metaphysical optimism. True Detective demonstrated real bravery by having a character like Rust Cohle. This chapter defines cosmic horror, supernatural horror, or weird fiction. The cosmic horror and pessimistic philosophy are undermined by the final acts of "Form and Void", the (...) finale. First, the Yellow King, Carcosa, and the Green Man are all revealed as "ordinary" occurrences. This is not to say that cults, child molesters, and serial killers are not frightening. But, if one were to ask one's most cheerful, optimistic friends if such things existed, they would have to say "yes". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 133-134 [Access article in PDF] Fictional Beings J. M. Coetzee What Does It Mean, "To Understand"? A tennis coach is teaching a young player a forehand topspin drive. He does so with a mixture of demonstrations (nonverbal) and explanations (verbal), such as, "At the moment of impact you roll the wrist over like this" (demonstrates). The player tries the stroke again and (...) again, and each time the coach shakes his head and says, "You haven't got it yet." Then the player gets the stroke right. The coach says "Now you've got it! Now you understand! Now let's do it again!"Is this a legitimate use of the word understand? I think it is. The coach intends the following: At first you may have understood my words but from your actions—the practice strokes you played—I could not see that you had understood my meaning. Then, when you got the stroke right, and could repeat it, I saw that you had finally understood the meaning behind my words.Understanding is in this case the effective translation of words, or words plus demonstrations, into actions, where effectiveness can be easily measured. The translation is from a verbal, or mixed verbal, system into an entirely nonverbal system of electrochemical impulses.Conversely, one can picture an exhaustive analysis of forehand topspin drives by André Agassi, conducted by microphotography, implanted sensors, and so on, to issue in a mixed verbal and diagrammatic account of how Agassi plays the stroke. In this case the physiologic system of the stroke has been successfully translated into a (partially) verbal system. Again, it would be meaningful to say that the sports physiologist who does the analysis has come to understand how the stroke is played.Although in both these cases understanding is conceived of as a translation process, I concentrate from here onward on the translation process from the verbal to the nonverbal, exemplified by understanding how to play a particular stroke.The coach says X and the player tries to "do" X, but fails and fails, until finally he succeeds. When the player has at last "done" X, he has understood. Thereafter, by steps, the player ceases to depend on the coach and the coach's X: the player can do X by himself; he understands X in the sense that whenever he says X to himself he can do X. He has made X his own.I read The Sound and the Fury, the part devoted to Benjy. Benjy says X and I don't understand. I understand the words on the page one by one, many of the sentences I understand one by one in the sense that I can translate them into other English sentences, but I don't understand the logic that gets Benjy from one sentence to the next, I don't understand the references of many words that are usually referential, and sometimes I am baffled by the syntax.For whatever reason, I go on reading Benjy. In a few respects I begin to understand better. For instance, there are sentences that stop in midstride, and I begin to suspect that such sentences stop because Benjy does not want to think what [End Page 133] comes next—that is to say, that the Faulkner behind Benjy means me to understand that Benjy lacks the wherewithal to face what would naturally come next. Mainly, however, I remain in the dark.Then I begin to experience something interesting. I find that I am, in my mind, going through some of the movements of Benjy's language. I am, as it were, practicing the characteristic strokes of his game. Although I remain, for the most part, unable to translate his pages into connected discourse—that is, into a discourse in which the logical connection between one sentence and the next is, however faulty, at least clear—I am better and better able to "do" Benjy."Doing" Benjy in this case means more than parrot-like repetition of Benjy's words. I can now speak of "entering Benjy" in a way that makes sense. I... (shrink)

Some fictions seem to involve branching time, where one time series ‘splits’ into two or two time series ‘fuse’ into one. We provide a new framework for thinking about these fictional representations: not as representations of branching time series but rather as branching representations of linear time series. We explain how branching at the level of the representation creates a false impression that the story describes a branching of the time series in the fictional world itself. This involves (...) explaining away the illusion of various causal connections which may at first appear essential to understanding the story as a unified whole. This provides a more accurate account of the relationship between the representation and what is represented, which in turn reveals the extent to which it is legitimate to draw conclusions about actual time from fictional representations. (shrink)

I present and discuss a counterexample to Kendall Walton's necessary condition for fictionality that arises from considering serial fictions. I argue that although Walton has not in fact provided a necessary condition for fictionality, a more complex version of Walton's condition is immune from the counterexample.

There are several attempts to build a theory of art starting from analytical philosophy, the best of which is probably the one provided by Nelson Goodman. Pavel's work is the first attempt to write a theory of literature from the premisses of analytical philosophy. Pavel, whose earlier work was influenced among others by Eco, Greimas, Hrushovsky and Brooke-Rose, begins with an analysis of recent philosophical positions regarding fiction and distinguishes on one side the hard-line "segregationist" position of Bertrand Russell (...) which denies "nonexistent individuals any ontological status" and maintains that any "statements on such individuals are false on logical grounds", a view more moderately followed by P. F. Strawson and G. Ryle. On the other side he finds the more tolerant and "integrationist" theories, derived from the views of Alexis von Meinong, according to which every kind of object is "equally endowed with being, although not necessarily with existence". Pavel clearly inclines towards broadly Meinongian theories but he would like to qualify them in a number of ways. First he finds it useful to speak, like premodern cosmologists, of "degrees of being". Furthermore he outlines a "speech-act theory of fiction" in which the measure of a genuine statement would be the epistemological adherence to the linguistic practice of a community or the correspondence to a "coordinate system" as Quine would say. (shrink)

In this entry I present one of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary analytic philosophy regarding the nature of fictional entities and the motivations that might be adduced for and against positing them into our ontology. The entry is divided in two parts. In the first part I offer an overview of the main accounts of the metaphysics of fictional entities according to three standard realist views, fictional Meinongianism, fictional possibilism and fictional creationism. (...) In the second part I describe two main kinds of arguments for or against positing fictional entities into our ontology. The first kind is traditionally inspired by the linguistic data coming from our talk about fictional characters. The second kind is more recent and it builds on genuine ontological considerations. (shrink)

This Course Companion supports the new syllabus for 2009 and includes all options. It promotes cross-cultural links and connections to TOK, international-mindedness and the IB learner profile. Written by two experienced IB examiners and teachers, it contains historical information alongside data from the latest research. Students are stimulated by a wealth of engaging activities and features. They are encouraged to think critically and relate ideas to other subjects and to world issues. There is an emphasis on research and research methods, (...) as well as advice on internal and external assessment. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of the semantics of fiction have tended to be problematic in one of two ways: either they have denied that items used in fictional discourse have their plain meaning, introducing complications into otherwise satisfactory accounts of semantics, or they have posited special kinds of entities, introducing complications into otherwise satisfactory accounts of ontology. Accounts that tried to avoid these problems by positing mere possibilia as fictional entities were thought to be hopeless inasmuch as it was thought (...) impossible to pick out unique mere possibilia, and there could be no causal connection to them of the sort that was thought to be necessary for reference. I proposed to try to deal with the first problem by using counterfactuals, which each pick out a relatively small, constrained set of possible worlds, and presumably could so limit the possibilia contained in them to make picking out unique ones possible. I improve on David Lewis' counterfactual semantics for fiction by altering the analysis to make the experience of a hypothetical listener central, rather than the actions of a hypothetical narrator. As for the second, I show bow the causal theory of names can plausibly be expanded to a counterfactual theory of names, which would allow for naming across possible worlds. I conclude that fictional names rigidly designate mere possibilia, which allows for a more normal semantics for fiction than had seemed possible. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel explanandum for a theory of fictional truth. I explore a range of theoretical treatments of the data, and argue that it motivates the adoption of a distinctive style of relativism about truth-in-fiction.

Suppose that fictional objects are abstract objects dependent for their existence and their identity on the creative intentions of their authors. Is an author who intends to create indeterminately identical fictional objects committed to incoherent created objects? My claim is that she is not so committed. I argue that indeterminate identity is an ambiguous notion, allowing for an incoherent interpretation and for at least three coherent ones; and I show that if an author of fiction applies coherent indeterminate (...) identity when creating fictional objects, she succeeds in creating coherent objects, whereas she fails to create fictional objects when she tries to apply incoherent indeterminate identity in her creation. In so doing, I offer a reply to a challenge first raised by Everett against realist philosophers on fictional objects and more recently reproposed by Friedell, allowing for the creation of fictional objects along the lines proposed by Evnine. (shrink)

Certain realists about properties and relations identify them with universals. Furthermore, some hold that for a wide range of meaningful predicates, the semantic contribution to the propositions expressed by the sentences in which those predicates figure is the universal expressed by the predicate. I here address ontological issues raised by predicates first introduced to us via works of fiction and whether the universal realist should accept that any such predicates express universals. After assessing arguments by Braun, D. and Sawyer, (...) S. for fictional universal anti-realism, I propose a novel, Kripke-inspired argument for the same conclusion. I ultimately defend the claim that while this argument presents the strongest case for fictional universal anti-realism, it is nonetheless unsound. I conclude that nothing stands in the way of accepting that some fictional predicates express fictional universals. (shrink)

The paper discuses whether the mathematical singularities characterizing first-order phase transitions are 'fictions'.

In this paper I argue that a norm of literary fiction is to compel the reader to form beliefs about the world as it is. It may seem wrong to suggest that the reason I believe p is because I imagined p, yet literary fiction can make this the case. I argue for an account grounded in indexed doxastic susceptibilities mapped between a fictional context and the particular properties of a reader, more specifically the susceptibilities in her beliefs, attitudes, (...) and psychological states. Works of fiction can be about different things at the same time, some of which are fictive and some of which are factual. Since belief can be weak or strong, partial or complete, tenuous or robust, opaque or clear, there are susceptibilities throughout a doxastic set out of which new beliefs are formed. Skillful works of fiction exploit these susceptibilities and create new ones. This is an aesthetic achievement of such works: they take what should be a norm-violating practice of belief-formation on the basis of imaginative engagement and they make it so. (shrink)

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] have been many studies of the nature of fictional characters: whether and what sense, they are real, and how, if not real, there can be truths apparently about them. But, as the authors of this lively, original and provocative essay point out, the ontology of fiction is by no means exhausted by the (...) characters of fiction, and to focus mono-maniacally on characters misses some fascinating problems in the philosophy of fiction, and perhaps risks distorting one’s view of it. And one very large part of fictional ontology, without which narrative fiction would simply not exist, is time, and this is, as I think the authors can justifiably claim, the first monograph-length analytic philosophical treatment of the topic. The OUP website puts... (shrink)

This E-Special issue brings together a range of articles from the Theory, Culture, & Society archive that directly explore the relations between fiction and social theory. Each article develops a different perspective on these relations, yet they all share a common interest in probing at the different ways in which fiction might enrich and provoke our conceptual imaginations. These articles ask how theory might be used to understand or illuminate fiction, whilst also considering how theory might be extended, challenged or (...) informed by fictional resources. In general terms, the articles take three types of overlapping approach. First, there are those that use fiction to extend the imagination of social theory. Second are the articles that use fiction as a documentary resource and platform for theorizing. And, finally, there are those articles that use theory to reanimate and re-examine fictional forms. In exploring these three intersecting branches the pieces illustrate the different ways in which fiction and social theory might interweave in our thinking. The articles gathered here provide frameworks, ideas and resources through which the reader might continue to think imaginatively and creatively about the social world. (shrink)

Classical spinning particles are interpreted in terms of an underlying geometric theory. They are described by trajectories on the Poincaré group. Upon quantization an eleven-dimensional Kaluza-Klein type theory is obtained which incorporates spin and isospin in a local SL(2, C)×U(1)×SU(2) gauge theory, unifying gravity and the pre-Higgs standard model. The relation to parametrized relativistic quantum theory is discussed.

In a recent paper, Anthony Everett has mounted a very serious attack against realism with respect to fictional entities. According to Everett, ficta raise deep logico-ontological worries, for they violate some basic logical laws and are problematically indeterminate with respect to both their existence and identity. Since an antirealist account for sentences apparently committing us to ficta is available, no such committment is really needed. In this paper I will try to show, first, that the antirealist account Everett (...) proposes for those sentences is not convincing. Moreover, by relying on the Meinongians’ distinctions between i) predicative and propositional negation and ii) either modes of predication or kinds of property, I will argue that the logico-ontological problems Everett arises against ficta can be solved. Finally, I will try to show that both the ‘modes of predication’- and the ‘kinds of property’- distinctions (especially the first one) are not so problematic as Everett holds. (shrink)

The paper attempts to clarify a fundamental similarity and some relevant differences between empirical-scientific and fictional thought experiments. For this purpose, the second section of the paper provides a brief outline of a quasi-Kantian account of thought experiments (TE) in the empirical sciences from the viewpoint of a radically functional, strictly not material, a priori. On the basis of this account, a fundamental similarity and two main differences between empirical-scientific and narrative thought experiments are brought to the fore: the (...) counterfactual construction of idealised scenarios is a fundamental characteristic that is shared by scientific and fictional thought experiments (and, more generally, by science and art). The differences depend on the different intentionalities to which this construction is subordinated. Fictional TEs, instead of resolving the dimension of counterfactuality in real empirical facts or processes, use it to transpose certain cultural contents (thoughts, feelings, possible courses of action, etc.) into a dimension outside any particular space and time, which are able to produce a symbolic shelter that protects us from the particular adverse events of concrete life. This, on the one hand, generates in us the feeling of pleasure or enjoyment that tradition has so often linked to artistic enjoyment and, on the other, urges us, implicitly or explicitly, to re-enact those contents in the first person and to take an evaluative stance towards them. (shrink)

What has fiction to do with science? At first glance, the two activities seem to have entirely different aims and products. Science aims at truth, while fiction can deviate wildly from it. Science produces theories, which we are asked to believe. Fiction produces stories, which we are asked to imagine. Given these differences, associating science and fiction might seem like a serious mistake, or even a threat to science. And yet many authors have tried to understand science by looking (...) to fiction. This article will consider three strands of thought on the topic: Hans Vaihinger’s classic work on fictions; fictionalist views, especially van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism; and recent work on models and fiction. As we will see, none of these strands pose a threat to science. Instead, each tries to understand the nature of scientific knowledge by drawing on fiction in different ways, and for different theoretical purposes. (shrink)

This paper is focused on the abstractist theory of fictional discourse, namely, the semantic theory according to which fictional names refer to abstract entities. Two semantic problems that arise in relation to that position are analysed: the first is the problem of accounting for the intuitive truth of typically fictive uses of statements containing fictional names; the second is the one of explaining some problematic metafictive uses, in particular, the use of intuitively true negative existentials.Este artículo (...) se ocupa de la teoría abstracta del discurso de ficción, a saber, la teoría semántica según la cual los nombres de ficción refieren a entidades abstractas. Se analizan dos problemas semánticos que surgen en relación con esta posición: el primero es el problema de dar cuenta de la verdad intuitiva de usos típicamente fictivos de enunciados que contienen nombres de ficción; el segundo es el de explicar algunos usos metafictivos problemáticos, en particular el uso de existenciales negativos intuitivamente verdaderos. (shrink)

This paper examines the logic of fictions within fictions. I argue that consistently nested consistent fictions must have certain formal characteristics. The most important is that they form a tree structure. Depending on one’s theory of fictional objects, additional constraints may apply regarding the appearance of a fictional object in two or more fictional universes. The background motivation for the paper is to use iterated fiction operators as a tool for making sense of iterated modal operators; I (...) conclude by noting briefly where the results about nested fictions can, and where they cannot, be extended to nested possible worlds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity by Suparno BanerjeeBarnita BagchiSuparno Banerjee. Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020. xiii + 256 pp. E-book, ISBN 9781786836670.Suparno Banerjee’s monograph examines science fiction (henceforth SF) from India, a country that has a rich and fascinating tradition of SF. This is a book that will be of interest and value to scholars and students in (...) higher education of utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction, and to readers across disciplines interested in SF as a mode. It is quite clear today that Darko Suvin’s canonical definition of SF as cognitive estrangement, an interplay between the familiar and the strange, and its emphasis on the novum that is created in SF, has been enriched with further attention to context, including postcolonial contexts. Whose familiarity in cognition are we speaking about, and what happens when contexts are not necessarily hegemonic Anglo-American or Western ones? Indeed, even in Western contexts, science is not a given, but an element that always has political, historical, and ideological overtones. The novum, too, as with the term utopia, is moored in the contexts of the text.Banerjee’s book is one among several excellent monographs on Indian SF that have been published in the 2020s: Sami Ahmad Khan’s Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction (2021) and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India (2020) come to mind. Khan adopts a refreshing fan’s guide to Indian SF register in his monograph, discussing mythology, materiality, ideology, and technology, and he coins the abbreviation TransMIT to capture his approach. Mukherjee’s book examines how Indian SF syncs with or questions the technological and scientific paradigms of India under Nehru and the Non-Aligned Movement; arguing that Indian SF needs to be seen as semiperipheral, the book also applies concepts from energy humanities [End Page 586] to Indian SF in an arresting way. Suparno Banerjee’s monograph is a solidly grounded work in its clearly explained choice of corpus, and a methodology that elicits particularly generative insights in a number of areas, including the epistemological status of science in Indian SF, the importance of SF written in bhasha or non-English Indian languages, the interplay between past and future in Indian SF, analysis of how Indian SF imaginatively represents the Other, and attention to Indian women writers of SF.Banerjee offers a lucid and useful chronology of Indian SF in four historical periods: 1835–1905, 1905–47, 1947–95, and 1995–2019. The period from 1835 to 1905 offers the first specimens of Indian SF, primarily in the form of future histories that question colonialism, in the utopian mode, and adventure tales and stories with scientific and technological elements. The establishment of a British education system, starting in the 1820s, gave an impetus to the birth of Indian SF. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” was published in 1905, a year that heralds the second period lasting until Indian independence. In this period, SF starts appearing not just in the English, Bengali, and Hindi languages, as in the first period, but also in a number of other Indian languages, such as Assamese, Marathi, and Tamil. Children’s and youth magazines develop from the 1920s, spaces where science writing and SF both appear. Nationalist, anticolonial stances emerge, challenging western hegemony, in the 1940s. In the early post-Independence period, the nationalistic elements become even stronger, and SF interacts quite strongly with older forms of fantastic writing such as myths, fairytales, and ghost stories. This third period, Banerjee argues, is the golden age of bhasha SF. From the 1990s English-language SF again becomes very prominent in India and its diaspora, though SF in bhashas continues to flourish.Banerjee examines fiction not just from post-Independence India, but also from colonial British India, and diasporic Indian writing. SF written primarily in Bengali, English, Hindi, and Marathi is examined and, when possible, the book also brings into its ambit of analysis SF written in the languages Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. Reflexivity about the corpus of... (shrink)

Zionism: the idea of a territorial concentration of the Jewish people in an autonomous entity as a solution to the Jewish Question. This definition (and the essay that follows) refers to Zionism as conceived by its first leaders and theoreticians — Leo Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, and Israel Zangwill, that is, to what is generally called “political” Zionism (as opposed to the nationalistic-religious trends that now dominate the so-called official “Zionist ideology in Israel). Detective fiction: one narrative in search of (...) another, the first arising from the discovery (or anticipation) of a crime, the second providing the identity of the criminal, his motivations and the modalities of his act. (shrink)

This article takes off from Freud's literary use of the term ‘fixation’ to explore how female sexuality both establishes the universal foundations of Freud's metapsychology and is excluded from it via a reading of one Freud's strangest and most provocative case presentations. Like a primal word, fixation operates in contradictory fashion: it is associated both with regression and futurity, petrified immobility and contingency. Fixation is Freud's name both for the primal origin of sexuality and the very word for what shuts (...) sexuality down. In ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Disease’, the first case history devoted to a woman after Dora, Freud recounts his brief encounter with a woman who is brought to Freud because she is suffering from a paranoid delusion that her would-be lover has arranged to have her photographed during their sexual engagements. On the basis of his fictionalized account of this fictive case, Freud establishes a curiously suggestive link between fixation, femininity and photography, and introduces, for the first time, the notion of ‘primal phantasies’. By looking how femininity, fixation and photography come together, this article explores how and why Freud attributes quasi-photographic powers to female sexuality as a means of trying to produce a figure for unseen and un-seeable images that come from a primal and unrecoverable past. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:La séduction de la fiction by Jean-François VernayDiana MistreanuVernay, Jean-François. La séduction de la fiction. Hermann, 2019. 214pp.Published in Hermann’s prestigious “Savoirs Lettres” book series founded by Michel Foucault, Jean-François Vernay’s latest work is a compelling neurophenomenology of literary fiction. This makes it a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of cognitive literary studies pioneered in Anglo-Saxon research in the late 1970s, but which French academia, with a (...) few notable exceptions such as Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Pierre-Louis Patoine, Alexandre Gefen, Catherine Grall, or Françoise Lavocat, is still largely reluctant to embrace. The author is a lecturer in Australian studies at the Global Institute in Sydney, and he is a bilingual literary scholar whose recent research explores the complex interface between fiction and human cognition.Vernay’s book starts by restating a narratological cliché: in the words of Paul Valéry, stories accompany humans from the cradle to the tomb, as monsters, pirates, fairies, and other fantastic creatures fascinate children’s minds from the first years of their lives (7). A truism follows this cliché: the origin of any story is the human brain (16), as the author reminds us by underlining the bio-anthropological origins of fiction in pages that cite the works of Umberto Eco and Nancy Huston (the writer who coined the notion of “espèce fabulatrice,” “the tale-teller species” [2008]), and that echo the research of scholars such as Mark Turner (1996) and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1999). Indeed, oral and written stories are not only created, but also interpreted by human minds, triggering states and emotions that range from extreme boredom to excitement and inviting identification with fictional characters. Nevertheless, the mechanisms of the interaction between the human mind and brain and one of its most sophisticated products, namely fiction, are largely still understudied in the field of literature. Placing fiction under the sign of seduction (8) – which allows us to read between the lines an homage to Roland Barthes, the theorist of the “plaisir du texte” referenced later in the book (85-86) – Vernay defines works of fiction as catalysts of a sensori-affective experience [End Page 151] that engages almost all our senses and arouses emotions (“le vecteur d’une expérience sensori-affective qui sollicite la quasi-totalité de nos sens et suscite des émois” [19]). Characterized by the interdisciplinarity that forms the core of cognitive approaches to fiction, Vernay’s study investigates the literary phenomenon in its complexity, asking not only how fiction seduces us, but also why it sometimes fails to do so. Drawing on state-of-the-art research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, the book manages to eschew over-simplified or reductionist analyses. Our engagement with and consumption of literary fiction is thus analyzed by discussing marketing strategies and editorial choices, the activity of reading as a solitary pleasure versus a professional obligation, as well as the interplay between society, politics, and educational curricula. The author answers his multi-layered research question in nine different chapters, each of them exploring one facet of the relationship between literature and the human mind.The first chapter, “Émois livresques,” highlights the marketing value of books, as well as their status as objects of consumption, in the capitalistic sense of the word. Books are presented here as the targets of our desire, since in financial terms, the notion of reader, the author reminds us, is a mere euphemism for that of consumer (20-22). As we are entering the era of what Yves Citton, often quoted in this essay, calls “cognitive capitalism,” a system in which society is conceptualized as a set of machines that process information (21), fictional literature, along with the arts, is devalued. To counterbalance this trend, Vernay explains, the book industry has to adopt effective strategies that create a desire for consumption. Thus, this chapter addresses the editorial and marketing techniques designed to attract our attention and trigger our impulse to buy and read. From the smell and color of books to the blurb and the careful mention of literary prizes, no detail is overlooked or considered redundant.After addressing the... (shrink)

The aim of this book is to provide a unified solution to a wide range of philosophical problems raised by fiction. While some of these problems have been the focus of extensive philosophical debate, others have received insufficient attention. In particular, the epistemology of fiction has not yet attracted the philosophical scrutiny it warrants. There has been considerable discussion of what determines the contents of works of fiction, but there have been few attempts to explain how audiences identify their contents, (...) or to identify the norms governing the correct understanding and interpretation of works of fiction. -/- This book answers a wide range of both metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning fiction in a way that clarifies the relations between them. The metaphysical questions include: What distinguishes works of fiction from works of non-fiction?; What is the nature of fictive utterances?; What determines the contents of works of fiction?; What kinds of fictive content are there?; How broad in scope is fictive content?; and What kinds of things are fictional entities? The epistemological questions include: How do audiences identify the contents of authors’ fictive utterances?; How does understanding a work of fiction differ from interpreting it?; and What role does thinking and talking about fiction from an external perspective play in enabling communication through fiction? It develops the first single theory that provides answers to all these questions. (shrink)

Idiosyncratic responses as more strictly personal responses to fiction film that vary across individual spectators. In philosophy of film, idiosyncratic responses are often deemed inappropriate, unwarranted and unintended by the film. One type of idiosyncratic response is when empathy with a character triggers the spectator to reflect on his own real life issues. Self-reflection can be triggered by egoistic drift, where the spectator starts imagining himself in the character’s shoes, by re-experiencing memories, or by unfamiliar experiences that draw the spectator’s (...) attention. Film may facilitate self-reflection by slowing down narrative development and making the narrative indeterminate. Such scenes make idiosyncratic responses, such as self-reflection, appropriate and intended. Fiction film is a safe context for the spectator to reflect on personal issues, as it also affords him with distancing techniques if the reflection becomes too painful or unwanted. The fictional context further encourages self-reflection in response to empathy, as the spectator is relieved from real life moral obligations to help the other. (shrink)