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The visual arts have long been held to have an intimate link with emotions. Despite this, the topic remains underexplored; when the expression of emotion is discussed, it is usually in relation to music. This volume corrects this lacuna and presents a variety of perspectives on the expression of emotion in the visual arts with contributions from both established and early career academics. There are chapters on the empathy theory of beauty; enaction and artistic expression; emotion and experimental psychology; a ‘persona’ theory of visual expression; and self-expression in portraiture. There are also chapters discussing the contributions to the topic by Susanne Langer and Richard Wollheim as well as a chapter comparing the work of R.G. Collingwood and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Expression of Emotion in the Visual Arts will be of interest to students and researchers in the philosophy of art and aesthetics, as well as those interested in conceptual issues in the visual arts.
As a well-known phenomenon in everyday communication, ambiguity has increasingly become the subject of interdisciplinary research in recent years. However, within this context, it has been observed that words or expressions situated within the artistic framework of storytelling have not yet been at the centre of research interest. This book aims to bridge this gap by examining the phenomenon of ambiguity from the perspective of narratology – understood as a general theory of narration and narrative communication. The volume pursues two goals: Firstly, it seeks to demonstrate that the interdisciplinary combination of linguistics, cultural history and narratology enriches the field of litera...
This volume critically discusses the role empathy plays in different processes of understanding. More precisely, it clarifies empathy’s role in interpersonal understanding and appreciating works of literature and art. The volume also includes a section on historical theories of empathy’s role in understanding. When it comes to understanding other persons, empathy is typically seen as a process that enables the empathizer to recognize a target person’s mental states, a process which is in turn seen as “understanding” this person. This volume, however, explores empathy’s role in understanding beyond mere mental state recognition. With contributions on processes of interpersonal und...
This volume highlights interdisciplinary research on the ethical, metaphysical, and experimental dimensions of extended reality technologies, including virtual and augmented realities. It explores themes connected to the nature of virtual objects, the value of virtual experiences and relationships, experimental ethics, moral psychology in the metaverse, and game/simulation design. Extended Reality (XR) refers to a family of technologies aiming to augment (AR) or virtually replace (VR) human experience. The chapters in this volume represent cutting-edge research on XR experiences from a wide range of approaches including philosophy, psychology, Africana studies, and the cognitive sciences. Th...
This collection of twelve new essays examines some of what Jane Austen has become in the two hundred years since her death. Some of the chapters explore adaptations or repurposings of her work while others trace her influence on a surprising variety of different kinds of writing, sometimes even when there is no announced or obvious debt to her. In so doing they also inevitably shed light on Austen herself. Austen is often considered romantic and not often considered political, but both those perceptions are challenged her, as is the idea that she is primarily a writer for and about women. Her books are comic and ironic, but they have been reworked and drawn upon in very different genres and styles. Collectively these essays testify to the extraordinary versatility and resonance of Austen’s books.
What does it mean to understand something? What is the essence of understanding, when compared across multiple domains? Varieties of Understanding offers new and original work on the nature of understanding, raising questions about what understanding looks like from different perspectives and exploring how ordinary people use the notion of understanding. According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world-that it calls on different cognitive resources and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus, in order to understand p...
This book is concerned with the appropriate form of explanations in historiography and the social sciences. It combines action theory and philosophy of historiography and develops a theory of teleological explanations of human actions based on late-Wittgensteinian and Ordinary Language Philosophy insights. In philosophy of action, many philosophers favor causal theories of human action. Additionally, in current philosophy of historiography the majority view is that historians should explain historical phenomena by their causes. This book pushes back against these mainstream views by reviving an anti-causal view of explanation of current and past human actions. The author argues that discipli...
This book provides a philosophical analysis of the notion of selfhood that underlies identity politics. It offers a unique theory of the self that combines previous scholarly work on recognition and the phenomenology of space. The politics of identity occupy the centre of a contested terrain. Marginalised and oppressed peoples continue to seek the transformation of our shared social world and our political institutions required for their lives to be liveable. Public criticism and academic treatments of identity politics often take a disparaging view that treats it as subordinate to more general political questions about justice and the organisation of society and its institutions. This book ...
“Relevance” is one of the most widely used buzz words in academic and other socio-political discourses and institutions today, which constantly ask us to “be relevant.” To date, there is no profound scholarly conceptualization of the term, however, which is widely accepted in the humanities. Relevance and Narrative Research closes this gap by initiating a discussion which turns the vaguely defined evaluative tool “relevance” into an object of study. The contributors to this volume do so by firmly situating questions of relevance in the context of narrative theory. Briefly put, they ask either “What can ‘relevance’ do for narrative research?” or “What can narrative research do for better understanding ‘relevance?’” or both. The basic assumption is that relevance is a relational term. Further assuming that most (if not all) relations which human beings encounter within their cultures are narratively constructed, the contributors to this volume suggest that reflections on narrative and narrative research are fundamental to any endeavor to conceptualize notions of “relevance.”
This book brings together the study of self-reflective fiction and the contemporary 4E theories of cognition in order to challenge existing cognitive-theoretical models and approaches to literary phenomena. Polvinen presents reflective attention on artifice as an integral part of engagement with fictional narratives, rather than as an external viewpoint that would obscure immersive experiences. The detailed analyses included are both of traditionally metafictional texts by John Barth, A.S. Byatt, Dave Eggers, and Ali Smith, as well as of speculative fictions by Ted Chiang, China Miéville, Christopher Priest, and Catherynne M. Valente. Each of the chapters focuses on a specific issue of fict...