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…

This essay investigates the special way in which a spectator might engage imaginatively with one work of art when the work is experienced in light of other works by the same artist. In particular, it addresses the idea that we might imaginatively identify with an unrepresented spectator in the picture after we have experienced others in which the…

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…

Drama/theater education lives in the tension of being a discipline rooted in the fine arts and humanities that has been transplanted into the social science of education. This paper suggests that a more aesthetic and philosophical reflection on what drama/theater does and can do in educational settings frees us from the scientized and instrumental…

Questions regarding the proper role of the arts in education have occupied many thinkers throughout the ages, no less than the likes of Plato and Rousseau. Like them, several have argued that paintings, for example, are mere re-presentations of and certainly not, to borrow a term from Kant, the "thing-in-itself." From a Platonic and Rousseauian…

When audience members consider aesthetic objects and/or works of art, they typically bring to their consideration a number of perspectives through which the object is considered. These include background beliefs, personal associations, taste preferences, and attitudes and values. Using Alan Goldman's aesthetic value theory as a platform, I…

Before children learn to read, they act like readers when they play with materials and objects like readers. In play, children beam their projective imagination upon inert material things and animate them with fantasy, infusing objects with meaning. The question of "the real" haunts the psychology of play and through play, the theory of fantasy:…

A number of theorists currently argue that a narrative form of reasoning is central to the way we think. It would seem to follow that better narratives would encourage better thinking, reasoning, and knowing. The question addressed in this article is whether narrative has the capability of producing more epistemological value than other forms of…

The profoundly thoughtful--not to mention extensive--character of the scholarship historically applied to the nature of the difference between Plato and Aristotle on the issue of the tragic emotions raises the obvious question: What new is there left to say? In this article, the author seeks to hold together two separate issues that have occupied…

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…

The author states that among the various approaches to music education, her dialectical and epistemological view offers a way of thinking about music and education and deciding how to go forward in teaching and learning music. In this article, she shows how this particular philosophical perspective can play out in teaching for the development of…

This paper contends that art can critique a philosophical claim about the world. Artist imagination can envision how an idea can live and whether the idea is attractive to our living. Cormac McCarthy's novel, "Blood Meridian," narratively illustrates a certain idea of divine determinism and shows that, in terms of war and human cruelty, the idea…

The relationship between skill and imagination in art is obscured by those theories of expression which make a distinction between ideas on the one hand and the technical methods adopted to express them on the other. Author suggested that this division between the idea and the technique has a wider significance beyond art education as a whole.…

This paper makes two principal assertions: first, that Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria" is a valuable and hitherto neglected resource for aesthetic educators and, second, that the distinction Coleridge makes between fancy and imagination affords the aesthetic educator a unique insight into the differences between the popular and fine…