In this fascinating book, Sarah Worth addresses from a philosophical perspective the many ways in which reading benefits us morally, socially and cognitively.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Storytelling and Narrative Knowing:An Examination of the Epistemic Benefits of Well-Told StoriesSarah E. Worth (bio)IntroductionPeople love to tell stories. When something scary, or funny, or out of the ordinary happens, we cannot wait to tell others about it. If it was really funny, etc., we tell the story repeatedly, embellishing as we see fit, shortening or lengthening it as the circumstances prescribe. When people are bad storytellers we tend (...) not to pay as close attention to their stories; our minds drift, and we hope for a swift conclusion. We tend not to remember those stories as well as the ones that were carefully constructed and skillfully delivered. Storytelling is one of our primary forms of communication with other people. Narrativity is the principle way that human beings order their experience in time. It is also one of the primary ways that humans make coherent sense out of seemingly unrelated sequences of events. Thus, an account of how this ordering works is essential to understanding one of the many ways of knowing used by humans, one that has been widely unaccounted for, I believe. What I will argue in this article is that reading, telling, and hearing well-constructed narratives are not just idle pastimes that we have created for entertainment purposes or even as a mere means of communication. Rather, there are epistemological benefits to reading, hearing, and telling well-constructed narratives. In particular, by practicing what I call narrative reasoning, we develop this skill, just as by practicing discursive reasoning we develop discursive reasoning skills. In turn, we develop an enhanced reasoning ability that arises from narrative reasoning and narrative meaning construction. Ultimately, I will argue that those who are able to develop the capacity to reason narratively will be able to have a more comprehensive understanding of the human experience. [End Page 42]Defining NarrativeTo begin, I will go into some detail about what I mean when I talk about narratives since the reasoning skills that will ultimately come from engaging with narratives will be related to the way that we come to understand and make sense of them. Since I do not intend to posit a theory of narrative, I will talk about what constitutes narrativity and what sort of features contribute to increasing the narrativity of a story. To begin, narrative is generally the representation of an event or sequence of events. It is closely tied to description, but it goes beyond description. "My cat has fleas" is a description of a state of affairs. "My cat was bitten by a flea" is a narrative about my cat, which includes a description. Some theorists (such as Barthes and Rimmon-Kenan) argue that a narrative must consist of more than one event or state of affairs in order to be minimally considered a narrative. For my purposes, the change in states of affairs from one to another will be essential for understanding the cognitive aspects that can be gained from engaging with narrative. Although I do not advocate a minimal requirement for something to be considered a narrative, at least two, if not multiple, states of affairs increase narrativity significantly. Narratives also have a unified subject and some relatively easily understood temporal structure. Although many narratives do not order all of their events sequentially, good narratives will have a temporal order that can be gleaned by its reader.1An annal might be something that is temporally ordered and likely have more than two events or states of affairs, and for this reason it might be put into a category of "story form." The primary principle of organization of an annal, however, is merely a temporal list of events. It cannot count as a full-fledged narrative since it may be a temporal list of events that has no unified subject. For example,A: "The Space shuttle Challenger explodes in 1988, the Berlin wall comes down in 1989, there is a massacre at Srebenica, Bosnia in 1995."B: "The Space Shuttle Columbia blows up upon reentry to Earth; the Space Shuttle Challenger explodes upon take off."A is a temporally ordered list of events and is an annal; B, however, is... (shrink)

Much ink has been spilled in philosophy over the question of whether morality is an objective or subjective matter. In the world of The Good Place, the answer to the moral question seems fairly firmly determined: right and wrong are objective matters, and there is a fact about whether our actions are good or bad. The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras believed that beauty was a quantifiable principle of nature, and that we could find the source of beauty in the harmony, (...) order, and regularity of beautiful things. In some ways, The Good Place appears to treat aesthetic goodness and badness as if they were objective matters. The Good Place is a sort of extended version of Jean‐Paul Sartre's (1905–1980) existentialist play No Exit. In The Good Place, hell is other people's tastes. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the question of the ways in which pleasure, as associated specifically with eating food, can help us understand the philosophical complexities of pleasure and how it can be neither purely physical nor purely intellectual. Philosophers have argued for centuries that intellectual pleasure is superior to physical pleasure, but here we make it clear that they are inextricably linked and interdependent on one another. We appeal to Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, but rely heavily on the ideals (...) of Epicurus for an understanding of the relationship between moderation and pleasure. In the end, we argue for a balanced approach to eating that can serve as a model for both physical, sexual, and intellectual pleasures. (shrink)

There has yet to be a culture discovered which lacks music. Music is a part of our existence, but we do not fully understand it. In this paper, working in the tradition of Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Langer, I elucidate some of the connections between music and the emotions. Using contemporary philosophy of mind theories of emotion, I explain how we can have a better understanding of our emotive responses to music. I follow the pattern through representational painting and abstract painting (...) to music, and show how each functions as an intentional object for the object of our emotions in response to each art form. (shrink)

Philosophers of literature direct their studies to the moral, cognitive, and emotional aspects of our involvement with fiction. In spite of this, they rarely engage works of popular fiction. In this paper I use The Da Vinci Code as a case study of the impact of popular fiction on readers in terms of these three areas. Although this book will never be considered good literature, its impact is far reaching. l address concerns dealing with the fiction/non-fiction distinction as weIl as (...) issues with history, accuracy, and falsehoods. I flesh out the issues The Da Vinci Code brings up and argue that it, along with other works of popular fiction (Oprah’s book club for example), might be taken more seriously by philosophers of literature. (shrink)

In Philip Alperson’s most recently edited collection, he skillfully puts together fifteen new articles on varying aspects of the philosophy of music. For the last two-hundred years the central philosophical question concerning music has been where its meaning lies. Alperson discusses this question in his introductory essay giving a historical introduction primarily through the views of Eduard Hanslick, who denies that the arousal of emotion in the listener or the expression of emotion in the music is the purpose of music. (...) If not in emotion, what is the meaning of music? Alperson notes that there has been a concerted effort by twentieth century aestheticians and theoreticians of music to place both music and musical practice in the broader context of human experiences and practices more generally. The essays that follow explain how music does this in several different ways. (shrink)

Roger Scruton has taken on a monumental task in his most recent book, The Aesthetics of Music. As one can see from the title, he has not attempted to work on one aspect of musical aesthetics, but takes it on all at once. Although he breaks the subject matter down into 15 separate sections, through these he attempts to get at the most fundamental questions in musical aesthetics. These are: the relation between sound and tone, the analysis of musical meaning, (...) and the nature of the purely musical experience. According to Scruton these questions have never been properly addressed in analytic aesthetics and it is his stated task in this book to do so. (shrink)

Steven Halliwell’s book has set a new standard in the scholarship on the philosophical aspects of mimesis. The book is clearly written, extensively researched, and, most importantly, it is a comprehensive analysis of the history and development of the complex, but often oversimplified, notion of mimesis. This is the kind of book scholars are lucky to come across in doing their own research, and a book of this level of achievement is something that we can all use as a model (...) for our own writing. This is undoubtedly the most extensive and useful book on the subject of mimesis available today. (shrink)