Abstract

It has always been controversial to make a sharp distinction between the philosophical and the psychological approaches to aesthetics; and the revolution brought about by cognitive science has led many to believe that the philosophy of art no longer controls a sovereign territory of its own. To take one case in point: recent aesthetics has addressed the problem of fiction, asking how it is that real emotions can be felt towards merely imagined events. Several philosophers have tried to solve this problem by leaning on observations in psychology – Jenefer Robinson, for example, exploring the domain of pre-conscious and non-rational responses, and Greg Currie, invoking simulation theory from the realm of cognitive science. I am not yet persuaded that either has succeeded in solving the philosophical question: but the fact that such sophisticated and well-informed philosophers should begin from studies in empirical psychology says much about how the subject of aesthetics has changed since the early days of linguistic analysis.