I come back to the philosophy papers blog and there’s only one paper to report. Maybe better luck tomorrow.

To make up for it, there’s a draft paper on imaginative resistance by blogger John Holbo that I should have linked yesterday. John looks at a quite different angle to me, looking at the connection between resistance and the aesthetic quality of fictional works. I’m not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, in particular I think there’s a tighter correlation between imaginability and aesthetic quality than Holbo allows. But he’s right I think that a distasteful underlying moral message is not enough to generate imaginative resistance – we don’t treat The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant of Venice as being like the toy examples of resistance even though in each case the intended moral message is pretty clear, and pretty obnoxious.