According to one strongly supported view, fiction is a functional kind that communicates imaginings. Combining this definitional thesis with a plausible principle concerning functional kinds leads to the following evaluative thesis: features that contribute to communicating imaginings constitute good-making features as fiction, and features that impede this constitute bad-making features as fiction. However, this thesis is at odds with the actual practice of fiction. Critics can show their admiration for complicated works of fiction by stating, “That’s beyond my imagination!” I (...) argue that in resolving this paradox of hard-to-imagine fiction, we should not deny the observation, but rethink the definitional thesis. Works of fiction that are puzzling, redundant, contradictory, and collapsed can have a unique value that smooth works cannot. They can have value as fiction in that they challenge our imagination or place us in an exotic state of being lost in the imagination. (shrink)

As the fentanyl epidemic ravages North America, we must consider its bearing on social aesthetics. To this end, our reportage acknowledges atomic, vernacular, medical, statistical, and futuristic angles. We would also like to call the reader’s attention to a void in the celebrated texts, such as Shusterman’s Somaesthetics of City Life, that turn a blind eye to the acute social ills, including our topic and dire poverty, troubling our communities today.

This paper is a case study of Olafur Eliasson’s Paris installation of Ice Watch (2014-2018) that coincided with the Climate Change COP-21 conference at the United Nations in 2015, and whose message was poignantly felt as a reminder of global warming, the melting polar regions, and the current environmental crisis. In particular, I explore how and what might we learn from this installation, to consider and rethink the relationship between aesthetic value, ethical value, and the concept of sustainability. Considering that (...) Eliasson’s work requires relational perceptual-intellectual double awareness, it is argued that virtuous appreciation, judgment, and evaluation emerge if engaged for the right kinds of aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic reasons, even if one is left in deep sadness or discomfort regarding the work’s creation. Having responded to objections such as artistic instrumentalism, Ice Watch is vindicated by combining perceptual, multi-sensual experience, and beauty with tragedy, grief, and guilt—emotions derived from intellectual, contextual, and epistemic concerns and also ethical worries, including those that arise from the artist’s actions. I conclude that qualitative, aesthetic experience provides access to understanding nature’s fragility and our own fragility, when accompanied by the right kinds of internally motivated reasons, even in some instances of controversial artworks. (shrink)