Explanatory accounts of emotion require, among other things, theoretically tractable representations of emotional experience. Common methods for producing such representations have well-known drawbacks, such as observer interference or lack of ecological validity. Literature offers a valuable supplement. It provides detailed instructions for simulating emotions; when successful, it induces empathic emotions. It too involves distortions, through emotion-intensifying idealization and ideological biases. But these also relate to emotion study. There are three levels at which literature bears on emotion research: (1) the individual (...) work; (2) generic and related patterns; and (3) properties found widely across individual works and genres. Even at the third, most general level, literature suggests potentially important hypotheses about our pleasure in emotional simulation and our need to share emotional experiences. (shrink)

Literature and Moral Feeling argued that ethics is best understood as a constraint on egocentric self-interest. That constraint is specified variously by groups or individuals who set parameters differently within common ethical principles, and who use a range of emotion-guided narrative genres to imagine and evaluate possible actions. Though it covers many ethical concerns (collectively termed “morality”), this account leaves out fairness (alternatively, justice). The following essay seeks to make up for that deficit. Framing its analysis by reference to a (...) well-known problem in Milton's Paradise Lost, it distinguishes two systems of ethical response organized around first- and third-person perspectives. Like the first-person concerns of morality, third person concerns of justice are specified by setting parameters within common principles. In treating these principles and parameters, the essay articulates cognitive and affective components of third-person ethical evaluation. These, then, help to resolve the problem with Milton's poem. That resolution, in turn, suggests further complications in the account of ethical evaluation. (shrink)

Literature provides us with otherwise unavailable insights into the ways emotions are produced, experienced and enacted in human social life. It is particularly valuable because it deepens our comprehension of the mutual relations between emotional response and ethical judgment. These are the central claims of Hogan's study, which carefully examines a range of highly esteemed literary works in the context of current neurobiological, psychological, sociological and other empirical research. In this work, he explains the value of literary study for (...) a cognitive science of emotion and outlines the emotional organization of the human mind. He explores the emotions of romantic love, grief, mirth, guilt, shame, jealousy, attachment, compassion and pity - in each case drawing on one work by Shakespeare and one or more works by writers from different historical periods or different cultural backgrounds, such as the eleventh-century Chinese poet Li Ch'ing-Chao and the contemporary Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts is the first student-friendly introduction to the uses of cognitive science in the study of literature, written specifically for the non-scientist. Patrick Colm Hogan guides the reader through all of the major theories of cognitive science, focusing on those areas that are most important to fostering a new understanding of the production and reception of literature. This accessible volume provides a strong foundation of the basic principles of cognitive science, and allows (...) us to begin to understand how the brain works and makes us feel as we read. (shrink)

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion in neuroscientific and related research treating aesthetic response. This book integrates this research with insights from philosophical aesthetics to propose new answers to longstanding questions about beauty and sublimity. Hogan begins by distinguishing what we respond to as beautiful from what we count socially as beautiful. He goes on to examine the former in terms of information processing and emotional involvement. In the course of the book, Hogan examines such issues as how (...) universal principles of aesthetic response may be reconciled with individual idiosyncrasy, how it is possible to argue rationally over aesthetic response, and what role personal beauty and sublimity might play in the definition of art. To treat these issues, the book considers works by Woolf, Wharton, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Beethoven, Matisse, and Kiran Rao, among others. (shrink)

This book explores how the creations of great authors result from the same operations as our everyday counterfactual and hypothetical imaginations, which cognitive scientists refer to as 'simulations'. Drawing on detailed literary analyses as well as recent research in neuroscience and related fields, Patrick Colm Hogan develops a rigorous theory of the principles governing simulation that goes beyond any existing framework. He examines the functions and mechanisms of narrative imagination, with particular attention to the role of theory (...) of mind, and relates this analysis to narrative universals. In the course of this theoretical discussion, Hogan explores works by Austen, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Racine, Brecht, Kafka and Calvino. He pays particular attention to the principles and parameters defining an author's narrative idiolect, examining the cognitive and emotional continuities that span an individual author's body of work. (shrink)

Surveying 2,500 years of philosophically oriented literary theory, Patrick Hogan provides students and teachers of literature with both explication and ...

Hogan argues that the basis of interpretive method is ordinary inferential reasoning - that there is no general methodological difference between interpretation in the humanities and theory construction in the physical sciences. Further, the nature of interpretation does not entail cultural, historical, or other forms of relativism, as is commonly thought. However, this does not imply that there is only one way of approaching interpretation or that there is one true meaning of any particular work. Rather, there are many (...) kinds of interpretation and many kinds of meaning and the interpreter is free to stipulate one of these in the context of a particular enquiry. More exactly, discussing the constraints upon stipulation, Hogan says that, although there are a large number and variety of intents (those of authors and readers, conscious and unconscious), there are no nonintentional meanings - Platonic, social, essential, or otherwise. (shrink)

In recent years, few areas of research have advanced as rapidly as cognitive science, the study of the human mind and brain. A fundamentally interdisciplinary field, cognitive science has both inspired and been advanced by work in the arts and humanities. In _Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies: Literature, Language, and Aesthetics,_ Frederick Luis Aldama and Patrick Colm Hogan, two of the most prominent experts on the intersection of mind, brain, and culture, engage each other in a lively (...) dialog that sets out the foundations of a cognitive neuroscientific approach to literature. Despite their shared premises, Aldama and Hogan differ—sometimes sharply—on key issues; their discussion therefore presents the reader not with a single doctrine, but with options for consideration—an appropriate result in this dynamic field. With clarity and learning, Aldama and Hogan consider five central topics at the intersection of literature and cognitive science. They begin with the fundamental question of the nature of the self. From here, they turn to language, communication, and thought before moving on to the central issue of the structure and operation of narrative. The book concludes with thought-provoking explorations of aesthetics and politics. Illustrating their arguments with work that ranges from graphic fiction and popular cinema to William Faulkner and Bertolt Brecht, Aldama and Hogan leave the reader with a clear sense of what cognitive cultural studies have already achieved and the significant promise the discipline holds for the future. (shrink)

An influential body of recent work on moral psychology has stressed the interconnections among ethics, narrative, and empathy. Yet as Patrick Colm Hogan argues, this work is so vague in its use of the term 'narrative' as to be almost substanceless, and this vagueness is in large part due to the neglect of literary study. Extending his previous work on universal story structures, Hogan argues that we can transform ill-defined intuitions about narrative and ethics into explicit (...) and systematic accounts of the deep connections between moral attitudes and narratives. These connections are, in turn, inseparable from empathy, a concept that Hogan proceeds to clarify and defend against a number of widely read critiques. In the course of the book, Hogan develops and illustrates his arguments through analyses of global narratives, constructing illuminating ethical interpretations of literary works ranging from Shakespeare to Chinese drama and the Bhagavad Gita. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Of Literary Universals:Ninety-Five ThesesPatrick Colm Hogan1. There is no such thing as human culture or human cultural difference without human universality.1 (A parallel point about understanding human cultural difference was made by Donald Davidson.2) Alternatively, cultural difference is variation on human universality.2. It follows that every area of a culture manifests human universality. (Otherwise, those cultural areas would not exist.) It does not follow that all areas of (...) culture are found in all cultures. The empirical study of literature, an area of some cultures, would not exist if it did not manifest human universality. It does not follow that the empirical study of literature exists in all cultures.3. The presence of verbal art in any given culture—thus the determination of whether verbal art is found in all cultures—is dependent on the investigator's definition of the term "verbal art," not on the presence or absence of a parallel term in the culture being investigated. "Verbal art" is no different from any other term or phrase in this respect. We would not conclude that there is no color orange in a place that does not have a word parallel to "orange" or that there is no astigmatism in societies without ophthalmology—or that the English do not experience ennui or Schadenfreude.On Communicative Speech4. To understand or even isolate verbal art, we must first understand the general purposes and properties of communicative speech.5. Communicative speech aims at producing some mental alteration in an addressee. That change commonly has some direct or indirect action as its desired outcome. For example, suppose I am building [End Page 145] a house with Wittgenstein and I say "Plank!" My aim is to produce a mental change in Wittgenstein that will result in him retrieving a plank and bringing it to me.6. Action commonly involves a set of generative principles for bodily motion or mental deliberation, a set of regulative principles for adjusting the motion or deliberation, and a set of motives for initiating the motion or deliberation.7. Communicative speech, then, commonly aims at fostering emotions and ideas or representations that, in combination, activate and specify generative principles for action in an addressee. (The emotion may be very weak—for example, a mild aversion to being uncooperative.) It may involve regulative principles as well.8. Verbal art—as I am using the phrase—also aims at producing a mental alteration in an addressee. However, that mental alteration is not, in the first place, governed by the overarching goal of effecting a particular actional outcome. Thus it is not designed to engage generative rules for action or to trigger emotions that motivate such action.9. Rather, verbal art is commonly designed to communicate regulative principles for action and to inspire emotions that do not have direct actional outcomes in the case at hand.10. There are two sorts of regulative principles that figure prominently in both ordinary life and verbal art—ethical and prudential. They constitute the thematic or didactic aspect of verbal art, an aspect noted in every major tradition of literary theory—European, South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern/North African.311. Here and in other cases, individual works of verbal art need not share all universal properties or share them all in the same degree.Rather, all cultural traditions have a body of works of verbal art that, as a whole, have these properties.On Emotion12. Any sort of emotion may occur in verbal art. Indeed, verbal art involves all varieties of emotion.13. However, verbal art is not about the addressee himself or herself. Therefore a literary work does not inspire narrowly egocentric emotions in its audience. It inspires empathic emotions.14. Empathic emotion may be a function of situational particularity or of group identity. In situational empathy, we share a person's or character's emotion insofar as we have been in a parallel situation. [End Page 146] The shared feeling is based on emotional memories. In group-identity empathy, we share a person's or character's feelings because we tacitly understand him or her as sharing our identity. This shared feeling is, then... (shrink)

The target article presents a thought-provoking approach to the relation of neuroscience and art. However, at least two issues pose potential difficulties. The first concerns whether is a coherent topic for scientific study. The second concerns the degree to which processing fluency can explain aesthetic feeling or may simply be one component of a more complex account.

I. When, through the power of emblems, I revealed to him fantastical cities formed from desire and fear, the great Khan baffled. Everyone else comes with politic accounts of maneuvering threats or the chance for precious goods. But me? I tell tales that arrive like stray thoughts to an idle man seated by the doorway of his home, taking in a little fresh air of an evening. "What does that serve for you, then, all that traveling?" he asks ("A che (...) ti serve, allora, tanto viaggiare?" [Calvino, Le Città, 25]).II: There are scenes in Premchand's Godān that persist in your memory. One concerns the young, motherless widow, Jhuniyā; her lover, Gobar; and Gobar's parents, Horī and Dhaniyā. Abandoned by Gobar, the pregnant .. (shrink)

In The Culture of Conformism, I set out to isolate what might be called “dominant modes of consent.” Central social hierarchies are preserved or reproduced through broad patterns of acquiescence. In other words, people generally act in accordance with common social norms, even in cases where those norms run against their self-interest, their spontaneous empathic feelings, or their moral commitments. Thus people do not generally challenge the fundamental economic principles of a system that skews the distribution of wealth to a (...) tiny minority; they accept and even celebrate a political system that minimizes their participation and allows only marginal space for the consideration of their needs; they fight in wars that, even with the best outcome, cannot benefit them or anyone like them. The Culture of Conformism focused on our participation in these large, society-wide forms of consent. Indeed, without saying so, I was primarily addressing consent at the level of nations. Thus, I concentrated on the punitive reach of the state within and outside its borders; the political economy of nations and, to a lesser extent, of international relations; the news and other media that circulate information and ideology, first of all, to a national audience. (shrink)

Hibbing et al.'s article isolates a plausible psychological factor contributing to differences in political orientation. However, there are two potential difficulties. Both the nature of negativity and the liberal–conservative opposition are ambiguous. A possible way of treating these problems enhances the theoretical framework through fuller reference to emotion systems and categories of triggers for those systems.

The authors explain our attraction to strange, literary places as resulting from our attraction to strange places in real life. I believe this is correct and important. The aim of the following commentary is to show that their main conclusion is closely related to – even (retrospectively) predictable from – the operation of simulation and the consequences of that operation for storytelling.

Before reinventing literary theory for the twenty-first century, we should consider what theory might do in principle. Both the functions of theory and its targets in literary study are often understood too narrowly. This chapter isolates three broad functions for theorization: description and explanation, both general and particular ; ethical-political or esthetic evaluation; and production of practical effects. From here, the chapter takes up the target orientations of literary study, organizing them into literature-oriented study and world-oriented study. These broadened conceptions (...) of the functions of theory and the orientations of literary study open up potentially valuable research programs beyond the theoretical practices of recent decades. (shrink)

The classic questions of philosophical aesthetics—how and why human beings find certain works of art beautiful or sublime—suffered from something of a hiatus in the twentieth century, but the study of beauty has seen a return in recent years, often calling on rapidly evolving research in cognitive science and neuroscience for assistance. Patrick Colm Hogan's Beauty and Sublimity: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts is an important contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of cognitive aesthetics. (...) The book makes a brave attempt to bring together insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, and literature to explain aesthetic response and justification.Hogan's focus is on the minutiae of... (shrink)

One of the primary and most consequential properties of consciousness is that it is absolutely isolated. One’s consciousness cannot be shared by anyone else. Self- consciousness about this condition can give rise to a debilitating sense of loneliness. One important task of culture is to manage this sense of loneliness, to defer and diminish it. Religion supplies ideas that function in this way. Literature supplies imaginative experiences to the same ends. After introducing the general topic through a literary example, the (...) paper takes up the problem of other minds and solipsism, considering aspects of the issue treated by Wittgenstein, Moore, Heidegger and Descartes. The possibility of solipsism both demonstrates and results from the unbridgeable isolation of consciousness. The second section turns to the mind/body relation. It argues that intentionality is irreducible to a purely physical explanatory account. This is not because the mind is a brain-like entity that interacts with the body. Rather, it is because any physical explanatory account presupposes an observer or speaker outside the system being observed or described. The irreducibility of that observer is, so to speak, the flip side of solipsism. The unobserved observer is, precisely, each one of us. Each of us is removed in just this way from the world he/she is perceiving and addressing hence, our isolation. The third section turns to the varieties of loneliness here called ‘longing’, ‘grief’ and ‘despair’ relating these to the inevitability of death, primarily the death of others. The fourth part takes up the feeling that makes loneliness intense, love. It goes on to consider the thematization of loneliness in the most common narrative structure cross- culturally, romantic tragi-comedy. The concluding sections examine the ways in which religion and literature serve not only to represent loneliness, but, what is more important, to inhibit or manage it. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is, perhaps, the most controversial philosopher of the twentieth-century. Little has been written on him or about his work and its significance for educational thought. This unique collection by a group of international scholars reexamines Heidegger's work and its legacy for educational thought.

Hugh Connelly, An authentic Celtic voice : the Irish penitential and contemporary discourse on reconciliation -- Padraig Corkery, Bio-ethics and contemporary Irish moral discourse -- Amelia Fleming, The silent voice of creation and moral discourse. -- Raphael Gallagher, CSsR., A church silence in sexual moral discourse? -- Donal Harrington, Moral discourse and journalism. -- Linda Hogan, Contemporary humanitarianism: neutral or impartial? -- Vincent MacNamara, On having a religious morality. -- Enda McDonagh, A discourse on the centrality of justice in (...) moral theology. -- Suzanne Mulligan, Moral discourse in a time of AIDS. (shrink)