We often go out to the movies, theater, or ballet, preferring to share the experience with others rather than watch at home alone. We do the same with food and drink, for instance, by going to tasting rooms to sample wines and talk with others. To have these sorts of experiences, we plan, coordinate, and engage in a range of complex social practices. These practices often lead to the formation of audiences, and philosophers since Aristotle have argued that the success (...) of certain art forms depends on audience reactions.1 In addition, many processes of aesthetic education involve individuals learning about aesthetic objects and judgments together. If so, then understanding how groups experience aesthetic objects... (shrink)

I argue that our experience of expressive properties (such as the joyfulness or sadness of a piece of music) essentially involves the sensuous imagination (through simulation) of an emotion-guided process which would result in the production of the properties which constitute the realisation of the expressive properties experienced. I compare this proposal with arousal theories, Wollheim’s Freudian account, and other more closely related theories appealing to imagination such as Kendall Walton’s. I explain why the proposal is most naturally developed in (...) terms of simulation and briefly comment upon the impact of work on cross-cultural perception of facial expression, modularity and autism for the proposal. (shrink)