ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|122 pages
Fiction and the Verbal Arts
chapter 5|20 pages
Fear and Loathing in Fictional Worlds
part II|118 pages
Visual Art, Photography, and Music
chapter 9|17 pages
The Puzzle of Make-Believe About Pictures
part III|61 pages
Themes in Aesthetics
chapter 18|22 pages
Playing With the Rules of the Game
part IV|75 pages
Beyond Aesthetics
part V|12 pages
Walton in Conversation