Argument
Paradox of fiction
Overview
The paradox of fiction, or the paradox of emotional response to fiction, is a philosophical dilemma that questions how people can experience strong emotions to fictional things. The primary question asked is the following: How are people moved by things which do not exist? The paradox draws upon a set of three premises that seem to be true prima facie but upon closer inspection are said to produce a contradiction. Although the emotional experience of fictional things in general has been discussed in philosophy since Plato, the paradox was first suggested by Colin Radford and Michael Weston in their 1975 paper "How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?". Since Radford and Weston's original paper, they and others have continued the discussion by giving the problem slightly differing formulations and solutions.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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The second attempt is that of the philosophy of ‘As If’. It explains that in our mental activity we assume all manner of things, the groundlessness, indeed the absurdity, of which we fully realize. They are called ‘fictions’, but from a variety of practical motives we are led to behave ‘as if’ we believed in these fictions. This, it is argued, is the case with religious doctrines on account of their unequalled…
Sigmund Freud, The future of an illusion
States what Paradox of fiction is.
But this same Plato thinks that nothing better can happen to men than that they pass through life piously and justly, and, being separated from their bodies, be received into the bosom of the gods, who never abandon theirs; "that, oblivious of the past, they may revisit the upper air, and conceive the longing to return again to the body."[597] Virgil is applauded for borrowing this from the Platonic system…
of Hippo Augustine, The City of God, Volume I
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[Sidenote: Distinguish:—The things in which the opposites inhere generate into and out of one another: never the opposites themselves.] Socrates inclined his head to the speaker and listened. I like your courage, he said, in reminding us of this. But you do not observe that there is a difference in the two cases.
Plato, The dialogues of Plato in five volumes, Vol. 2
States what Paradox of fiction is; the author is tied to Paradox of fiction in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Paradox of fiction
Related ideas
- Philosophy
- Anna Karenina
- Ion (dialogue)
- Leo Tolstoy
- Augustine of Hippo
- Actor
- Plato
- Paradox
- Prima facie
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Confessions (Augustine)
- Contradiction
- Kendall Walton
- Noël Carroll
- Colin Radford
- Aesthetic emotions
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.