A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
Imaginative Resistance and Empathic Resistance (2020)

Szanto, T. (2020). Imaginative Resistance and Empathic Resistance. Topoi, 39(4), 791-802. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09642-9

JYU-tekijät tai -toimittajat

Szanto, Tamas

Julkaisun tiedot

Julkaisun kaikki tekijät tai toimittajat: Szanto, Thomas

Lehti tai sarja: Topoi

ISSN: 0167-7411

eISSN: 1572-8749

Julkaisuvuosi: 2020

Volyymi: 39

Lehden numero: 4

Artikkelin sivunumerot: 791-802

Kustantaja: Springer Netherlands

Julkaisumaa: Alankomaat

Julkaisun kieli: englanti

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09642-9

Julkaisun avoin saatavuus: Ei avoin

Julkaisukanavan avoin saatavuus:

Tiivistelmä

In the past few decades, a growing number of philosophers have tried to explain the phenomenon of imaginative resistance (IR), or why readers often resist the invitation of authors to imagine morally deviant fictional scenarios. In this paper, I critically assess a recent proposal to explain IR in terms of a failure of empathy, and present a novel explanation. I do so by drawing on Peter Goldie’s narrative account of empathic perspective-taking, which curiously has so far been neglected in the IR-literature. I argue that, in some cases, IR is due to a partial confusion of two kinds of imaginative perspective-taking towards a fictional character: an internal, genuinely empathic, perspective-taking, on the one hand, and an external, crypto-empathic, stance that can be characterized as in-her-shoes-imagining, on the other. I argue that, in the cases at issue, IR is not so much a resistance to imagining but, rather, to empathically enacting an evildoer’s moral and phenomenal first-person perspective. I conclude by considering some more general lessons that follow from my account for what has recently been called sadistic empathy and point to an unresolved issue for future thinking about IR.

YSO-asiasanat: mielikuvitus; fiktio; empatia

Vapaat asiasanat: imaginative resistance; empathic perspective-taking; Peter Goldie

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