About Me
I was educated at the LSE and at the University of California, Berkeley. I teach Philosophy at the University of York and my Erdős number is 6. I teach and research on the arts and cognition. I am executive editor of Mind & Language. I am a fellow of the British Academy, and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
New Papers
"Poetry and the possibility of paraphrase", written with Jacopo Frascaroli, is about to appear in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
My paper "The agency in art" has just appeared in Sonia Sedivy (ed) Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall Walton. Routledge, 2021. For a near final version see here.
The January 2022 issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics will publish commentaries on my book Imagining and Knowing by Catharine Abell and Jonathan Gilmore. In the same issue I reply to their commentaries as well as commenting myself on Abell, Fiction: a Philosophical Analysis and Gilmore, Apt Imaginings.
Wimmer, L., Currie, G., Friend, S. & Ferguson, H. (2021) Correlates of lifetime exposure to print fiction. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, ISSN 0276-2366.
Wimmer, L., Friend, S., Currie, G. & Ferguson, H. (2021) Reading fictional narratives to improve social and moral cognition: the influence of narrative perspective, transportation, and Identification. Frontiers in Communication 5. ISSN 2297-900X.
Learning from Fiction
Our Leverhulme-funded project on "learning from fiction" started in September 2018. Go to the Research page for more detail.
A reader of my most recent book
Research
My current main project is a book, Signs of Agency, under contract with Oxford University Press. I am completing an essay, "The agency in art", for a volume of essays in honour of Kendal Walton. With Jon Robson (University of Nottingham) I am writing an article for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the arts and cognition.
Talks
All my talks for 2020 have been cancelled or delayed by covid-19. As things are rescheduled information will go on this page.
Books
I have published books dealing with fiction, film, imagination, narrative and the arts. My most recent book is Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction, published by Oxford University Press.