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Ronald Moore, Freeman, Damien. Art's Emotions: Ethics, Expression and Aesthetic Experience. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012, xii + 210 pp., $27.95 paper., The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 71, Issue 2, May 2013, Pages 229–232, https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12011_9
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An unending series of philosophers since Plato has been concerned to analyze and explain relations between art, the emotions, and moral awareness. Recently, however, the volume of first rate work on this theme has dramatically increased. Just to mention a few, Mette Hjort and Sue Laver's landmark collection of papers, Emotions and the Arts, appeared in 1997; Derek Matravers's Art and Emotion in 1998; Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions in 2001; Jenefer Robinson's Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music and Art in 2005; Berys Gaut's Emotion and Ethics in 2007; and, in 2012, this new, ambitious, and richly rewarding book by Damien Freeman. There is a profoundly serious rationale behind all these studies, one that relies on the cross fertilization of subdisciplines, but only as a means to establishing important, underappreciated truths about art and our experience of it. They focus on ways we invest emotionally in artworks, derive emotional benefits from them, and incorporate these emotional ingredients into aesthetic experiences that can have a significant bearing on the leading of a rewarding life. Freeman is not alone in claiming that cultivating the kind of aesthetic experience that certain artworks afford us conduces to powerful moral consequences.