Biography
Curriculum Vitae- Ph.D., Cornell University, 1967
- B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 1961
Kendall Walton turned to philosophy as an undergraduate at Berkeley, after considering a career in music. He specializes in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, and in related aspects of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. He has written on the nature of fiction, emotional responses to works of fiction, the ontological status of fictional entities, pictorial representation, photography, aesthetic value, relations between aesthetic and moral value, metaphor, imagination, empathy, sports, and the aesthetics of music, including musical expressiveness, musical representation, and listeners’ experiences.
His many publications include Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Harvard, 1990), Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts (Oxford, 2008) and In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence (Oxford, forthcoming).
Walton is past president of the American Society for Aesthetics, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Several international conferences have focused on his writings. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Nottingham University in 2005.