The strangeness of aesthetic experience
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Keywords

Paradox of fiction
Intentionality
Imagination

Abstract

The sympathetic and negative emotions triggered in and by aesthetic experiences are among the enduring explanatory needs of reception aesthetics. Kant may have found a plausible formula for the intellectual pleasure of artworks in the free play of the powers of imagination. But it might be too intellectualistic to explain the aesthetic experience of music or immersive films. In English-language aesthetics, it has been discussed for decades as the paradox of fiction, why we are scared, for instance, in horror movies at all, even though we know that there is no real danger. The lecture seeks answers to these questions in the intentionality of the mind and the imagination.

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