Art, Representation, and Make-Believe

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.

Sonia Sedivy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research focuses on perception, aesthetics, and the later work of Wittgenstein. Beauty and the End of Art: Wittgenstein, Plurality and Perception (2016) offers a new approach to the diversity of art and beauty by bringing aesthetics together with the philosophy of perception and the later work of Wittgenstein. “Aesthetic Properties, History and Perception” shows how philosophy of perception and aesthetics inform one another in Art, History, Perception, a Special Issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics that she guest edited. She is currently writing a book on perception that draws on aesthetics.