In her recent book, Only Imagine, Kathleen Stock promotes extreme intentionalism with respect to fictional content. She writes, ‘the fictional content of a particular text is equivalent to exactly what the author of the text intended the reader to imagine’. There are at least three separate points here: the author’s intentions determine the fictional content; the fictional content is identical with the content of what the reader imagines; reading fiction necessarily entails imagining. The first two points are normative; they are (...) concerned with truth in fiction. The third point takes for granted that fiction necessarily involves imagining on the part of the reader; the main debates here focus on the kind of imagining that is involved in reading fiction. In the following discussion, I leave aside the normative issues marked by the first two points and concentrate on the third point—namely, the relation between fiction and imagining. (shrink)

_Aesthetic Order_ challenges contemporary theories of aesthetics, offering the idea of beauty as quantitative yet different from the traditional discursive order. It will be of importance to all interested in aesthetic theory.

_Aesthetic Order_ challenges contemporary theories of aesthetics, offering the idea of beauty as quantitative yet different from the traditional discursive order. It will be of importance to all interested in aesthetic theory.