Aesthetic Pleasure

In this paper I present an account of musical arousal that takes into account key demands of formalist philosophers such as Peter Kivy and Nick Zangwill. Formalists prioritise our understanding and appreciation of the music itself. As a result, they demand that any feelings we have in response to music must be directed at the music alone, without being distracted by non-musical associations. To accommodate these requirements I appeal to a mechanism of contagion which I synthesize with the expectation-based arousal (...) mechanism proposed by Leonard Meyer. This account connects musical expressivity and arousal in a way that formalists have rejected, but I argue that it provides the best explanation of our observations of listener responses while also focusing on the music itself. (shrink)

This book defends Aestheticism- the claim that everything is aesthetically valuable and that a life lived in pursuit of aesthetic value can be a particularly good one. Furthermore, in distilling aesthetic qualities, artists have a special role to play in teaching us to recognize values; a critical component of virtue. I ground my account upon an analysis of aesthetic value as ‘objectified final value’, which is underwritten by an original psychological claim that all aesthetic values are distal versions of practical (...) values. This is followed by systematic accounts of beauty, sublimity, comedy, drama, and tragedy, as well as appendix entries on the cute, the cool, the kitsch, the uncanny, the horrific, the erotic, and the furious. (shrink)

Why is listening to sad music pleasurable? Eerola et al. convincingly argue that we should adopt an integrative framework — encompassing biological, psycho-social, and cultural levels of explanation — to answer this question. I agree. The authors have done a great service in providing the outline of such an integrative account. But in their otherwise rich discussion of the psycho-social level of engagements with sad music, they say little about the phenomenology of such experiences — including features that may help (...) shed further light on this question. I suggest that emerging enactive perspectives on music and emotion can offer some useful resources. (shrink)

This chapter revisits three common ideas about how consciousness works when we read fiction. Firstly, I contest the notion that the reading consciousness is a container of sorts, containing a circumscribed amount of textual stimulus. Secondly, I argue against the view that readers abstract their personal concerns away in reading, and that they do so with benefit. Thirdly, I show how the reading consciousness encompasses rather than excludes the physical situation and environment of reading. For each idea revisited, I discuss (...) practical implications for how reading could be taught, assessed, and staged in educational settings. (shrink)

According to tradition, aesthetic value is non-contingently connected to a certain feeling of liking or pleasure. Is that true? Two answers are on offer in the field of aesthetics today: 1. The Hedonist answers: Yes, aesthetic value is non-contingently connected to pleasure insofar as this value is constituted and explained by the power of its possessors to please (under standard conditions). 2. The Non-Affectivist answers: No. At best, pleasure is contingently related to aesthetic value. The aim of this paper is (...) to point to a blind spot in the dialectic between these two standard positions by defending a third neglected answer to the question above, the answer of the Value-Meriting-Pleasure [VMP] advocate. According to this answer, a certain kind of (cognitive and responsive) pleasure is connected to aesthetic value non-contingently, but also non-hedonically. VMP is the view that objects of aesthetic value are non-contingently related to pleasure insofar as they merit a certain kind of pleasure. But, pace the hedonist, those objects are valuable (those that are to be engaged with etc.) neither on account of their capacity to give pleasure nor on account of the hedonic value of the attitude they merit. (shrink)

Aesthetic hedonism is the view that to be aesthetically good is to please. For most aesthetic hedonists, aesthetic normativity is hedonic normativity. This paper argues that Kant's third critique contains resources for a non-hedonic account of aesthetic normativity as sourced in autonomy as self-legislation. A case is made that the account is also Kant's because it ties his aesthetics into a key theme of his larger philosophy.

Enticing food photography which stimulates its viewers’ cravings, often given a dismissive label “food porn,” is one of the most popular contents in contemporary digital media. In this paper, I argue that the label disguises different ways in which a viewer can engage with it. In particular, food porn enables us to engage in cross-modal gustatory imaginings of a specific kind and an image’s capacity to afford such imaginings can contribute to its artistic merit.

I offer a set of sufficient conditions for beauty, drawing on Parsons and Carlson’s account of ‘functional beauty’. First, I argue that their account is flawed, whilst falling short of...

This article aims to address the widespread thesis according to which medieval scholastics would not handle the idea of fine art. Based on a suggestion by Anzulewicz, the author shows how Albert the Great did understand the peculiarity of fine arts and put them in close relationship with liberal arts. There are fine arts, such as music, which are sought after for their own sake and can, therefore, be considered as fully liberal. In contrast to them, there are other arts (...) called mechanical, whose purpose is utilitarian. In the third place, there are other arts which, although also possessing some utility, are chosen for their own sake and are therefore partly liberal; we should place fine arts such as architecture in that group. The more art participates in reason and the beauty of the soul, the more it will be fine and liberal. The product is called to be a metaphor for the honest good of virtue. The very contemplation of this beauty embodied by art evokes an aesthetic enjoyment. In this way, we can see that Albert, no less than Aquinas, speaks of the pleasure linked to the contemplation of beauty. (shrink)

McMahon, Jennifer A. Routledge. 2018. pp. 230. £115.

This paper examines the notion of aesthetic pleasure within the framework of an aesthetics of value. The topic is introduced in sect. 1, while sect. 2 presents Moritz Geiger’s distinction between two kinds of aesthetic pleasure: liking, which enables us to grasp the aesthetic values of the artwork; and enjoyment, which is understood to be an emotional response. Sect. 3 reassesses the main tenets of Geiger’s account in the light of current research. In particular, I provide arguments in favor of (...) Geiger’s distinction between liking and enjoyment, but I call into question the claim that liking reveals aesthetic values. In sect. 4, I suggest that liking is a form of feeling motivated by the cognition of aesthetic value and I distinguish it from both the grasping of values and emotional responses. I conclude in sect. 5 by briefly summarizing my main claims. (shrink)

One of the oldest platitudes about beauty is that it is pleasant to perceive or experience. In this article, I take this platitude at face value and try to explain why experiences of beauty are seemingly always accompanied by pleasure. Unlike explanations that have been offered in the past, the explanation proposed is designed to suit a “realist” view on which beauty is an irreducibly evaluative property, that is, a value. In a nutshell, the explanation is that experiences of beauty (...) are experiences in which it appears that something is beautiful, and that such experiences are identical to experiences of aesthetic pleasure. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to reassess the prospects of a widely neglected affective conception of the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art. On the proposed picture, the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art are non-contingently constituted by a particular kind of pleasure. Artworks that are valuable qua artworks merit, deserve, and call for a certain pleasure, the same pleasure that reveals (or at least purports to reveal) them to be valuable in the way that they are, and constitutes (...) their aesthetic evaluation and appreciation. This is why and how art is non-contingently related to pleasure. Call this, the Affective View. While I don’t advance conclusive arguments for the Affective View in this paper, I aim to reassess its prospects by (1) undermining central objections against it, (2) dissociating it from hedonism about the value of artworks (the view that this value is grounded in, and explained by, its possessors’ power to please), and (3) introducing some observations on the practice of art in support of it. Given that the objections I discuss miss their target, and given the observations in support of it, I conclude that the Affective View is worth serious reconsideration. (shrink)

In this article, I first address the question of how musical forms come to represent meaning—that is, the semantics of music—and illustrate an important conceptual distinction articulated by Leonard Meyer in Emotion and Meaning in Music between absolute or intramusical meaning and referential or extramusical meaning through a critical analysis of two recent films. Second, building examples of scholarship around a single piece of music frequently used in film—Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings—I follow the example set by Murray Smith in (...) Film, Art, and the Third Culture and discuss the complementary approaches of the humanities, the behavioral sciences, and the natural sciences to understanding music and its use in film. (shrink)

Aesthetic hedonists agree that an aesthetic value is a property of an item that stands in some constitutive relation to pleasure. Surprisingly, however, aesthetic hedonists need not reduce aesthetic normativity to hedonic normativity. They might demarcate aesthetic value as a species of hedonic value, but deny that the reason we have to appreciate an item is simply that it pleases. Such is the approach taken by an important strand of South Asian rasa theory that is represented with great clarity and (...) ingenuity in the work of K. C. Bhattacharyya. Bhattacharyya is an aesthetic hedonist who grounds aesthetic normativity in freedom. (shrink)

The default theory of aesthetic value combines hedonism about aesthetic value with strict perceptual formalism about aesthetic value, holding the aesthetic value of an object to be the value it has in virtue of the pleasure it gives strictly in virtue of its perceptual properties. A standard theory of aesthetic value is any theory of aesthetic value that takes the default theory as its theoretical point of departure. This paper argues that standard theories fail because they theorize from the default (...) theory. (shrink)

The main claim of the paper is that, on Kant's account, aesthetic pleasure is an exercise of rational agency insofar as, when proper, it has the following two features: (1) It is an affective responsiveness to the question: “what is to be felt disinterestedly”? As such, it involves consciousness of its ground (the reasons for having it) and thus of itself as properly responsive to its object. (2) Its actuality depends on endorsement: actually feeling it involves its endorsement as an (...) attitude to have. I claim that seeing that nature of aesthetic pleasure requires that we divest ourselves of the following dilemma: either feelings are the non-cognitive, passive ways through which we are affected by objects; or they are cognitive states by virtue of the theoretical beliefs they necessarily involve. On my reading of Kant, this dilemma is false. Aesthetic pleasure is neither passive, nor theoretically cognitive, and yet, it is an exercise of rational agency by virtue of belonging to a domain of rationality that is largely overlooked in the history of philosophy, but that deserves, I argue following Kant, our close attention: aesthetic rationality. In the first section, I explain this nature of aesthetic pleasure, and in the second section, I respond to a charge of “over-intellectualism.". (shrink)

We argue that the aesthetic domain falls inside the scope of rationality, but does so in its own way. Aesthetic judgment is a stance neither on whether a proposition is to be believed nor on whether an action is to be done, but on whether an object is to be appreciated. Aesthetic judgment is simply appreciation. Correlatively, reasons supporting theoretical, practical and aesthetic judgments operate in fundamentally different ways. The irreducibility of the aesthetic domain is due to the fact that (...) aesthetic judgment is a sensory-affective disclosure of, and responsiveness to, merit: it is a feeling that presents an object, and is responsive to it, as worthy of being liked. Aesthetic judgment is thus shown to be, on the hand, first personal and non-transferable; and, on the other hand, a presentation of reality. We thereby capture what is right in both subjectivist and objectivist conceptions of aesthetic judgment. (shrink)

In § 49 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant puts forward a view that the feeling of pleasure in the experience of the beautiful can be stimulated not merely by perceptual properties, but by ideas and thoughts as well. The aim of this paper is to argue that aesthetic ideas fill in the emptiness that abstract and emotion concepts on their own would have without empirical intuitions. That is, aesthetic ideas make these concepts more accessible to us, (...) by creating image schemas that allow us to think about these abstract concepts in a way linked to sensory experience, thereby imbuing them with a more substantive meaning and understanding. (shrink)

In this essay, I’ll argue, first, that an art object's aesthetic value (or merit) depends not just on its intrinsic properties, but on the response it evokes from a consumer who shares the producer's cultural background. My question is: what is the role of culture in relation to this response? I offer a new account of aesthetic pleasure that answers this question. On this account, aesthetic pleasure is not just a “feeling” or “sensation” that results from engaging with a work (...) of art. It is rather a mental state that facilitates engagement with an artwork, and (in the long run) enables a consumer to learn how to maximize this kind of pleasure. This is where culture comes in. If you belong to a culture, you know how to engage pleasurably with an artwork that is produced so you can engage with it in just this way. The aesthetic value of an artwork is that it plays into such a culture-pleasure nexus. -/- . (shrink)

This edited collection sets forth a new understanding of aesthetic-moral judgment organised around three key concepts: pleasure, reflection, and accountability. The overarching theme is that art is not merely a representation or expression like any other, but that it promotes shared moral understanding and helps us engage in meaning-making. This volume offers an alternative to brain-centric and realist approaches to aesthetics. It features original essays from a number of leading philosophers of art, aesthetics, ethics, and perception, including Elizabeth Burns Coleman, (...) Garrett Cullity, Cynthia A. Freeland, Ivan Gaskell, Paul Guyer, Jane Kneller, Keith Lehrer, Mohan Matthen, Jennifer A. McMahon, Bence Nanay, Nancy Sherman, and Robert Sinnerbrink. Part I of the book analyses the elements of aesthetic experience— pleasure, preference, and imagination—with the individual conceived as part of a particular cultural context and network of other minds. The chapters in Part II explain how it is possible for cultural learning to impact these elements through consensus building, an impulse to objectivity, emotional expression, and reflection. Finally, the chapters in Part III converge on the role of dissonance, difference, and diversity in promoting cultural understanding and advancement. Social Aesthetics and Moral Judgment will appeal to philosophers of art and aesthetics, as well as to scholars in other disciplines interested in issues related to art and cultural exchange. (shrink)

Christian Wolff’s view regarding sensory perception – which is formed on a Leibnizian framework – forms the base of his aesthetics. He explains the concept of perfection and pleasure according to the clear but disordered essence of sensory perception that is present in this framework and through this very path guides towards the definition of beauty. Thus, according to him, perfection is the consistency or accordance of diversity or the abundance of things or their parts; pleasure is the result of (...) the intuition of the perfection present in things; and beauty is the perfection of a thing from the aspect of it being suitable in creating pleasure in us. Therefore, in this article we intend to explore the essence of sensory perception according to him and the relation between it, perfection and pleasure with beauty in his aesthetics so that it becomes clear how aesthetics emerges from the heart of epistemological discussions in general and from the depths of sensory perception in particular. Finally, while keeping in mind the important fact that he did not directly claim to have an independent theory in the field of aesthetics, we will critique and give our views in regards to the requisites connected to his aesthetics so that the limits of his extreme rationalist views in dealing with issues such as the extent that beauty covers, the levels of beauty and the difference of views in relation to taste and liking become clear. (shrink)

A distinctive feature of Russian formalism, something we do not see in Bell and Fry or in Wölfflin and Riegl (or see it more rarely, see Section IV below), is this emphasis on the analysis of everyday perception and the ways in which art encourages us to perceive differently. But it is difficult not to read the concept of defamiliarization as a naïve early statement of what art historians and aestheticians of the second half of the 20th century criticized as (...) the “Innocent Eye” tradition. As talking about the Innocent Eye is now universally frowned upon, defamiliarization has not been taken as seriously as it should have been. The aim of this paper is to revive the concept of defamiliarization by showing that it has nothing to do with the “Innocent Eye” tradition and to propose a new interpretation of it in terms of distributed attention. I conclude that this reinterpreted concept of defamiliarization can be very useful for contemporary post-formalist accounts of the history of vision (and imagination as well as visual attention). (shrink)

Music impinges upon the body and the brain and has inductive power, relying on both innate dispositions and acquired mechanisms for coping with the sounds. This process is partly autonomous and partly deliberate, but multiple interrelations between several levels of processing can be shown. There is, further, a tradition in neuroscience that divides the organization of the brain into lower and higher functions. The latter have received a lot of attention in music and brain studies during the last decades. Recent (...) developments in neuroimaging techniques, however, have broadened the field by encompassing the study of both cortical and subcortical processing of the sounds. Much is still to be investigated but some major observations seem already to emerge. The domain of music and emotions is a typical example with a major focus on the pleasure that can be derived from listening to music. Pleasure, however, is not the only emotion that music can induce and the mechanisms behind its elicitation are far from understood. There are also mechanisms related to arousal and activation that are both less differentiated and at the same time more complex than the assumed mechanisms triggering basic emotions. It is tempting, therefore, to bring together contributions from neuroscience studies with a view to cover the possible range of answers to the question of what pleasurable or mood-modifying effects music can have on human beings in real-time listening situations. (shrink)

Two dominant interpretations of Kant's notion of adherent beauty, the conjunctive view and the incorporation view, provide an account of how to form informed aesthetic assessments concerning artworks. According to both accounts, judgments of perfection play a crucial role in making informed, although impure, judgments of taste. These accounts only examine aesthetic responses to objects that meet or fail to meet the expectations we have regarding what they ought to be. I demonstrate that Kant's works of genius do not fall (...) within either of these categories. The distinguishing features of these works, namely, originality and exemplarity, become unrecognizable on these interpretations because originality and exemplarity lie in the work's ability to exceed one's expectations concerning its form and content. They contribute to artistic beauty through alternative transformation methods distinct from that of abstraction, namely, concept expansion and repudiation. These additional accounts of transformation lead to a rather surprising outcome: works of genius turn out to be paradigm cases where one can and indeed ought to form informed pure judgments of taste. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMatthen usefully distinguishes between mere ‘r-pleasures’ and ‘f-pleasures’: ‘facilitating’ pleasures that are valuable in drawing out the ‘self-reinforcing’ characteristic of good art. But there are reasons, especially from a Kantian Critical perspective with which Matthen sympathizes, to worry about any such ‘hedonistic’ approach to aesthetics, however valuable its general account of pleasure may be. Especially deserving of emphasis are the role of objectivity and the significance of aesthetic goals other than pleasure.

ABSTRACT: I argue, contra Mohan Matthen, that at least some aesthetic pleasures arising from the appreciation of aesthetic features of artworks are what he calls ‘r-pleasures’ as opposed to ‘f-pleasures’—and moreover, that the paradigm aesthetic pleasure appears to be an r-pleasure on Matthen's terms. I then argue that talk of r- and f-pleasures does not distinguish different kinds, but two different features of pleasure; so this supposed distinction cannot be used to characterize a sui generis aesthetic pleasure.

ABSTRACTThis paper examines Mohan Matthen's account of aesthetic pleasure. The first part explores implications of Matthen's notion of ‘fit’ between features of art objects and our pleasurable contemplation of them. Through historical comparisons with Plato and Dewey, I challenge his claim not to be offering a theory of aesthetic norms. The second part of my paper sketches how Matthen might address two important problems of contemporary aesthetics: the first concerning interpretation, and the second concerning genres of art that evoke negative (...) or painful emotions such as tragedy, melodrama, and horror. (shrink)

While I welcome Mohan Matthen’s insistence that art is connected to aesthetic pleasure, I worry about his commitment to viewing pleasure as prior to, and constitutive of, the value of art. I raise my reservations by (i) dispelling his criticism of the reversed explanatory direction, and (ii) showing problems for his commitment. As an alternative, I offer an account of pleasure that explains it in terms of the independent value of art—an account that is free of the problems Matthen raises (...) against this explanatory approach. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMatthen's functionalist account of art and his activity-centred account of aesthetic pleasure are on the right track, but he should recognize the importance of emotional as well as cognitive engagement with art.

ABSTRACTI argue that by limiting the objects of genuine or purely aesthetic pleasure to the products of human artifice, Matthen wrongly excludes aesthetic pleasure in natural items. Cases of aesthetic reflection that yield the ‘facilitating pleasure’ he takes to be definitive of our experience of art regularly occur also in our aesthetic experience of nature. That is, many kinds of aesthetic appreciation of nature meet his criteria of ‘learned’ engagements that are ‘difficult’ and ‘costly’. Aesthetic appreciation of nature thus represents (...) a kind of facilitating pleasure that enlarges our conception of ourselves and our connection to the world in ways that are at least as sophisticated as art appreciation. (shrink)

Theatrical magic is designed to elicit negative emotions such as feelings of vulnerability, loss of control, apprehension, fear, confusion, and bafflement. This commentary suggests that the DISTANCE-EMBRACING model proposed by Menninghaus et al. can help us to understand how the experience of magic can be aesthetically pleasurable, not despite, rather thanks to, some of the strong negative emotions it provokes.

Two seemingly contradictory aspects have marked art’s appreciation – and aesthetic appreciation in general. While an experience of pleasure seems to ground judgments of aesthetic value, some artworks seem to gain our praise by the very negative – unpleasant – experience they provoke. Known as the paradox of negative emotions, aestheticians have, at least since Aristotle, tried to deal with these cases and offer different explanations of the phenomenon. In this article, María José Alcaraz León does not directly offer an (...) alternative explanation; rather she focuses on the apparent tension between an understanding of aesthetic experience in terms of a certain kind of pleasure and the negative aspect that is necessarily involved in our appreciation of painful art. The purpose of her article is to show that cases of artistic appreciation that involve negative emotions do not need to give up on the idea that aesthetic value is ultimately grounded upon an experience of pleasure. (shrink)

This book offers a resolution of the paradox posed by the pleasure of tragedy by returning to its earliest articulations in archaic Greek poetry and its subsequent emergence as a philosophical problem in Plato's Republic. Socrates' claim that tragic poetry satisfies our 'hunger for tears' hearkens back to archaic conceptions of both poetry and mourning that suggest a common source of pleasure in the human appetite for heightened forms of emotional distress. By unearthing a psychosomatic model of aesthetic engagement implicit (...) in archaic poetry and philosophically elaborated by Plato, this volume not only sheds new light on the Republic's notorious indictment of poetry, but also identifies rationally and ethically disinterested sources of value in our pursuit of aesthetic states. In doing so the book resolves an intractable paradox in aesthetic theory and human psychology: the appeal of painful emotions. (shrink)

This paper presents a new account of aesthetic pleasure, according to which it is a distinct psychological structure marked by a characteristic self-reinforcing motivation. Pleasure figures in the appreciation of an object in two ways: In the short run, when we are in contact with particular artefacts on particular occasions, aesthetic pleasure motivates engagement and keeps it running smoothly—it may do this despite the fact that the object we engagement is aversive in some ways. Over longer periods, it plays a (...) critical role in shaping how we engage with objects to get this kind of pleasure from them. This account is yoked to a broadly functional understanding of art: it is not the nature of the object that makes it art, but the nature of the response that it is designed to elicit. The view does not, however, rest on individual psychology alone, as some other functional accounts do. Crucially, it is argued that shared cultural context is a key determinant of the pleasure we derive from aesthetic artefacts. The pleasure of art is always communal and communicative. (shrink)

This is a response to invited and submitted commentary on "The Pleasure of Art," published in Australasian Philosophical Reviews 1, 1 (2017). In it, I expand on my view of aesthetic pleasure, particularly how the distinction between facilitating pleasure and relief pleasure works. In response to critics who discerned and were uncomfortable with the aesthetic hedonism that they found in the work, I develop that aspect of my view. My position is that the aesthetic value of a work of art (...) is its capacity to elicit from a suitably well-informed consumer a specific kind of pleasure. (shrink)

No matter how unintuitive it might seem that aesthetic pleasure should be the point where art and morality meet, this is a noteworthy possibility that has been overshadowed by aestheticians’ more visible concerns. Here I briefly survey relevant strands in the literature over the past century, before introducing themes covered in this inaugural issue of Australasian Philosophical Review.

ABSTRACTMatthen proposes a functional definition of art as that which is designed to elicit what he calls facilitating pleasure. While this definition has the air of a theory that unites disparate strands of aesthetic thought over the last several centuries, the linkages it assumes between pleasure and art require a support stronger than the historical polysemy of the contested term ‘aesthetic’. The co-existence of meanings within the tradition is not itself evidence that these meanings are philosophically co-ordinated. To define art (...) by this facilitating pleasure is reductive—with respect both to the objects that count as art and to the attitude that people adopt toward these objects. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn response to Mohan Matthen's ‘The Pleasure of Art’, I identify three issues that deserve further critical engagement: the scope of his definition of aesthetic pleasure, the role of culture in shoring up its communal and communicable character, and the need to include an account of aesthetic properties in his psychologically grounded approach to aesthetic pleasure. Without due acknowledgment of both aesthetic properties and the intersubjective role of culture, Matthen's activity-based theory of aesthetic pleasure risks lapsing into subjectivism, thereby losing (...) the ‘communal and communicative’ character of art upon which he rightly insists. (shrink)

The Pleasures of Reason in Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic Hedonists se centra en la relación mutua entre las capacidades humanas de sentir placer y dolor y el carácter afectivo que las une con las facultades cognitivas de aprender, comprender, recordar, evocar, planificar y anticiparse. Para esto, Warren consagra toda su agudeza analítica a eminentes obras del pensamiento antiguo: particularmente nos referimos a los diálogos platónicos República, Protágoras y Filebo. Otro tanto hace con De Anima, De Memoria et Reminiscentia, Ética (...) a Nicómaco, Retórica y Poética de Aristóteles. Finalmente, hacia la mitad y sobre el final del libro, se dedica a poner en diálogo sus análisis sobre Platón y Aristóteles con las escuelas hedonistas clásicas del helenismo: epicúreos y cirenaicos. (shrink)

We offer a new answer to the paradox of tragedy. We explain part of the appeal of tragic art in terms of its acknowledgement of sad aspects of life and offer a tentative explanation of why acknowledgement is a source of pleasure.

Comparisons between audiobook listening and print reading often boil down to the fact that audiobooks impose limitations on the recipient’s continuous in-depth reflection. As a result, audiobook listening is considered a shallow alternative to reading. This chapter critically revisits the following three intuitions commonly associated with such comparisons: 1) Audiobooks elicit more mental imagery than print. 2) Audiobooks invite more inattentive processing than print. 3) Audiobook listening is more contingent on the environment than print reading. Instead of postulating the superiority (...) of print over audio, the chapter argues that the three intuitions are largely based on a misconception of print reading, its experiential characteristics, and its function. (shrink)