The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance

Gendler, Tamar Szabó

doi:10.2307/2678446

Cited by 306 publications

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“…But, as cases of moral imaginative resistance in fiction show, such moral views are in an important way more stable across 'all possible worlds' than the laws of physics. 43 We rightly resist imagining that extraordinary parental neglect is morally acceptable. When God remains hidden from His children who cannot possibly understand why, we should rightly resist imagining that such non-intervention is morally just.…”

Section: Moral Imaginative Resistance To Heavenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral Imaginative Resistance to Heaven: Why the Problem of Evil is so Intractable

Kramer

2018

Ethica

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The majority of philosophers of religion, at least since Plantinga’s reply to Mackie’s logical problem of evil, agree that it is logically possible for an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God to exist who permits some of the evils we see in the actual world. This is conceivable essentially because of the possible world known as heaven. That is, heaven is an imaginable world in a similar way that logically possible scenarios in any fiction are imaginable. However, like some of the imaginable stories in fiction where we are asked to envision an immoral act as a moral one, we resist. I will employ the works of Tamar Gendler on imaginative resistance and Keith Buhler’s Virtue Ethics approach to moral imaginative resistance and apply them to the conception of heaven and the problem of evil. While we can imagine God as an omnibenevolent parent permitting evil to allow for morally significant freedom and the rewards in heaven or punishments in hell (both possible worlds), we should not. This paper is not intended to be a refutation of particular theodicies; rather it provides a very general groundwork connecting issues of horrendous suffering and imaginative resistance to heaven as a possible world.

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Section: Moral Imaginative Resistance To Heavenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral Imaginative Resistance to Heaven: Why the Problem of Evil is so Intractable

Kramer

2018

Ethica

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“…Even for a reader who does not share this moral condemnation of the novel as a whole descriptions, moral disgust for his extreme brutalities, and sympathy for his Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/18 11:41 PM helpless victims. All this will encourage readers to distance themselves from the narrator, blocking out empathetic tendencies and possibly resulting in what has been called "imaginative resistance" (Gendler 2000), or the complete rejection of the character's moral perspective (see Caracciolo 2013).…”

Section: "You've Done Some Terrible Things:" Engaging With Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Unknowable Protagonists and Narrative Delirium in American Psycho and Hotline Miami: A Case Study in Character Engagement Across the Media

Caracciolo

2014

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

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“…Recent discussion of 'imaginative resistance' has noted that it is very commonly (though not exclusively) a moral response: e.g. Gendler (2000), (2006) (responding to the lively discussion provoked by the earlier paper); Stock (2005). perceptual resemblance, without inferential reasoning, it is not possible to do so in the right way without causal understanding.…”

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confidence: 99%

Cognition in Aristotle's Poetics

Heath

2009

Mnemosyne

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This paper examines Aristotle's understanding of the contributions of perceptual and rational cognition to the composition and reception of poetry. An initial outline of Aristotle's cognitive psychology shows that Aristotelian perception is sufficiently powerful to sustain very rich, complex patterns of behaviour in human as well as non-human animals, and examines the interaction between perception (cognition of the particular and the 'that') and the distinctive capacity for reason (which makes possible cognition of the universal and the 'why') in human behaviour. The rest of the paper applies this framework to a number of problems in the Poetics: (i) If Aristotelian tekhnê is defined as a productive disposition involving reason, how can poetic tekhnê be manifested in the work of poets who work by non-rational habit or talent? (ii) Why does Aristotle believe that the pleasure taken in imitation qua imitation involves rational inference? (iii) What does Aristotle mean when he contrasts history (concerned with the particular) and poetry (concerned with the universal)? (iv) How is Aristotle's insistence on universality and rationality in the construction of poetic plots to be reconciled with his willingness to tolerate irrationalities and implausibilities?

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The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance

Cited by 306 publications

References 0 publications

Moral Imaginative Resistance to Heaven: Why the Problem of Evil is so Intractable

Moral Imaginative Resistance to Heaven: Why the Problem of Evil is so Intractable

Unknowable Protagonists and Narrative Delirium in American Psycho and Hotline Miami: A Case Study in Character Engagement Across the Media

Cognition in Aristotle's Poetics

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