Category: Aesthetics

Dreams for Waking Minds: Theories of Fictionality

On By AdminIn Aesthetics, Philosophy of Language
Image: John William Waterhouse, Miranda (1916). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is a post by Manuel García-Carpintero (University of Barcelona).

My recently published book Truth and Reference in the Making of Fiction (CUP 2025) puts together work on philosophical issues about fiction that I have been doing over the past decade and a half. The core topic of the book is ontological: what is the nature of fiction, in contrast with non-fiction? Say, what is, if any, the metaphysical difference between Peter Weir’s 1982 fictional film The Year of Living Dangerously, and Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary The Act of Killing, both intuitively about the same Indonesian 1965-6 events?

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Who’s Afraid of (Objective) Taste?

On By AdminIn Aesthetic Judgements, Aesthetics

This is a post by Filippo Contesi (University of Milan), Enrico Terrone (University of Genoa), Marta Campdelacreu (University of Barcelona) and Genoveva Martí (ICREA, University of Barcelona).

If we had a penny for every time we hear the saying “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”… Since at least the 18th century, philosophers and common people alike have pondered the question of whether or not the proverb is true. Some have answered one way, others the other. However, philosophers have typically agreed that, in general, people often claim that the proverb is true and that our aesthetic preferences are indeed a matter of individual or subjective taste.

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