In recent years, the philosophy of art has profited enormously by applying to the study of art insights derived from the philosophies of mind and language, naturalized epistemology, psychology, evolutionary theory, and cognitive science. A case in point: the discussion of the nature of picturing and pictorial perception has obviously benefited from the influence of perceptual psychology and cognitive studies. Likewise, the theorization of art in relation to the emotions has also exploited contem porary advances in adjacent areas of inquiry. 1 Of course, that art has something to do with feeling is a common place, not only among plain viewers, readers, and listeners, but also among theorists, dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle, iterated maybe most vociferously by proponents of Romanticism, and argued, as well, by Tolstoy, Collingwood, and Langer. Outside the Western tradition, the rasa system of Hindu aesthetics echoes the conviction that art and feeling are intimately joined. Thus, the relation between art and the emotions has been an article of faith for a long time, not merely in the minds of common folk, but in addition, for theorists.

Yet, although the nexus between art and the emotions has been observed almost perennially, it has not always been well understood. The proposals of previous philosophers, though suggestive, were also often obscure. Collingwood proposes that art clarifies emotions, but precisely what he means by an emotion as well as how he thinks someone would go about clarifying one is unclear. Perhaps a reason for the limitations found in earlier theorists of the connection between art and the emotions is that the concepts of the emotions at their disposal were often not as refined as they might have been. The vagueness in their theories of art, in other words, mirrored the vagueness in their theories of the emotions. But, then,