Imagining and Knowing

Gregory Currie is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York. He was educated at the London School of Economics and at the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at universities in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, and held visiting positions at the Australian National University, the University of Oxford, and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

this important and polemical book...shines a penetrating, for some disturbing, light on one of the most prominent lines of defence for a humanistic, literary education, the thought that we can learn from works of fiction in substantial ways: that reading fiction can make us better people, more wise, more morally astute, more empathetic, more knowledgeable about human follies and aspirations.... The book is a major contribution to debates about fiction by one of the pre-eminent philosophers in this area. It contains an immense amount of subtle argument, presented in a pleasing and urbane manner, the author always generous to his adversaries, modest in his own conclusions. But make no mistake, the book completely changes the landscape of "cognitivism" about literature. No one now can go on insisting on the usual beneficial effects of literature without taking serious and systematic account of Currie's arguments.

• Introduction Part I: Imagination's Empire 1: An Essential Connection 2: How Fiction Works 3: Imaginings Like Desires 4: Affective Imagining Part II: Starting to Think About Fiction and Knowledge 5: The Varieties of Knowing 6: An Empirical Question? 7: Fiction, Mentalizing, and Planning Part III: Fiction, Knowledge, and Ignorance 8: Knowledge from Imagination 9: Fiction, Truth, and the Transmission of Belief 10: Wise Authors? 11: Fiction and Empathy Where We Are