Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts
Kendall Walton's book is one of the few genuinely distinguished contributions to aesthetic theory published in the last decade or two. It will be essential reading for anyone in the field and contains much that will be of great interest to scholars and critics of the arts. (Marshall Cohen, University of Southern California)Rigor, ingenuity and arresting subtlety are evident in the detailed working out of Walton's ideas. (Times Literary Supplement)Walton's aim...is to explore and explain the foundations of the representational arts. His theory is one that he has stated and restated with increasing detail and sophistication over the last seventeen years, and in this book it bears all the refinement and subtlety of argument that analytic philosophy can muster. This is an engaging, insightful, and persuasive volume. (Philosophy and Literature)This is philosophy at its best; combining the breadth of concern of the best continental philosophy (but shorn of its often wilful cloudiness) and the precision of the best analytical philosophy...A work of very great importance that will set the agenda for discussions in aesthetics for a long time to come. (Philosophy)