2025/01/30 by Iris Vidmar · 1 voice · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Law in Society and Culture #Media Influence and Health #Misinformation and Its Impacts
paper · doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayae008
openalex publication_date 2025/01/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Ever since Aristotle first set the foundations for defending the cognitive value of poetry, philosophers have been looking at his theory as an inspiration for the claim that art is a reliable source of knowledge and other epistemically valuable states, primarily understanding. Yet, rarely have they asked for the empirical evidence to corroborate such claims, and this kind of empirical challenge has only recently started to be considered seriously. Just as rarely did they consider the capacity of art to make us morally worse: looking to counter Plato’s concerns about the corruptive influence of fictional literature, aesthetic cognitivists have, for the most part, theorized about the ways in which art can make us morally better. Carl Plantinga’s edited collection, Screen Stories and Moral Understanding: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, rectifies both of these shortcomings of philosophical discussions about art’s cognitive value and its capacity to influence our moral sensibility. It does so by acknowledging the need to incorporate more empirical research into the traditional philosophical accounts of how art influences our moral sensibility and by recognizing the very real option that such influence might be negative. In that sense, this collection offers an extremely comprehensive and informative overview of the most important contemporary positions regarding aesthetic cognitivism, as it is defended and understood by the scholars coming from several areas of study: film scholars, media scholars, aestheticians, scholars working in communication, and media psychologists.