A post by Jonathan M. Weinberg

In the decades since Radford’s classic (1975) “How can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina?”, philosophers of the imagination have increasingly shifted away from confronting that titular question and its close relatives in terms of resolving a paradox, and more towards treating our affective responses to works of fiction as a complex set of phenomena to which a theory of the imagination must be adequate. My goal here is to raise such concerns of adequacy about one such theory’s treatment of the psychological particulars: Peter Langland-Hassan’s one-box theory, and its operator-theoretic approach to fiction.