The practice of make-believe has traditionally been viewed as valuable by psychologists and philosophers more or less exclusively as a mechanism for social initiation, a tool for everyday problem solving, or a method for children to learn about adult responsibilities. This instrumentalist approach has influenced the development of a wide variety…

There are indications of a positive trend in education. International comparative investigations on academic achievement and longitudinal studies on life courses prove the need for and the importance of children's high intellectual knowledge. At the same time, new research initiatives and projects comply with the demand that aesthetic/cultural…

There are many prominent examples of artists with autism. However, even when confronted with evidence of these accomplished "autistic savants", pragmatic aesthetic theories cannot adequately account for the work of these accomplished artists as "artists". This article first examines the nature of autism and explores a prominent psychological…

Michelle Roberts has written of the "joy of the human imagination, without which we would be unable to understand one another, and would thus wither and perish." This is the baseline for the author's discursive analysis of imagination and beauty in art as it relates to the work of Kant and Kandinsky. While both accepted the forward movement of…

This article deals with a comparison of the congruent and divergent aspects of expressionistic and phenomenological theories of aesthetics and some implications for aesthetic education. (Author)

Asserting that the mind of the creative reader operates precisely like the mind of the creative writer, the author examines theories of the psychology of poetic composition, in order to draw implications for the teaching of literature. (SJL)