Dr Stacie Friend - "Fiction and Feeling"

Stacie argues how we can rationally have genuine emotional responses to characters and events, when represented in fiction".

Abstract: "A puzzle in aesthetics and philosophy of mind is to explain how we can rationally have emotional responses to fictional characters and events, when we know that they are not real.

Kendall Walton has notoriously argued that we do not experience genuine fear, pity, and other emotions in response to fiction. I defend this suprising conclusion for the particular case of responses to real people represented in fiction".

Stacie Friend is Lecturer in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Language at Birkbeck.

Stacie's work focusses on issues at the intersection of aesthetics, mind and language, especially as these pertain to problems raised by our engagement with fictional narratives.

Her current research is a project studying the epistemological implications of narrative. How can we explain the epistemological distinction between fiction and nonfiction, when works of nonfiction are often false and their authors unreliable? Do certain narrative devices undercut the justification of beliefs founded on authorial testimony? If some authors mix the ‘factual’ with the ‘fictional’, how can we be justified in believing anything they write? Other projects include an account of the propositional content of imaginings and a critique of fictionalism in metaphysics.

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