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James Harold, Jonathan Gilmore, Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and Other Creatures of the Mind, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 79, Issue 2, Spring 2021, Pages 272–275, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpab009
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Jonathan Gilmore’s new book, Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and Other Creatures of the Mind, is a treat: it is bold, compelling, and carefully argued. It makes important contributions to a variety of different debates in and around the philosophy of art, including the status of imagined or quasi-emotions, the (so-called) paradox of tragedy, the debate over artistic functions, and the problem of moral and aesthetic interaction. It is beautifully written, filled with vivid and apt examples from the arts and thoughtful application of results from the sciences. Most important, its main argument is both original and significant. Gilmore’s contributions to familiar (sometimes over-familiar) debates feel like a breath of fresh air. The worst thing one can say about this book, in fact, is that it should have been longer and said even more.
The book makes a single extended argument for the importance of distinguishing between giving a descriptive account of our engagement with fiction and giving a normative account of how that engagement should go. Gilmore argues that while our imagined beliefs, desires, emotions, and evaluative attitudes (including moral attitudes) are more or less continuous with their real-world counterparts, the norms that govern those imagined states are often quite different from the norms that govern their real-world counterparts. Gilmore defends “descriptive continuity”: the view that the psychological states we experience when engaging with fiction are mostly similar to real-world counterparts.
