Rüdiger Zymner’s scientific contributions

... In response to this challenge, various different cognitivist strategies have been developed over the last decades. It has been argued, for example, that literature was a thought experiment (Elgin 2007(Elgin , 2014; that literary works taught not through the propositions that are expressed in the work, but the ones that emerge from it (Kivy 2006); that works of literature could communicate forms of phenomenal knowledge (Walsch 1969, Schildknecht 2014, Vendrell Ferran 2018 or enhance our empathic capacities and illustrate the perspectives of others (Burri 2007, Camp 2017, Donnelly 2019; that literature enriched us not on the level of propositional knowledge, but on a deeper level of understanding, that of acknowledgement (Gibson 2003(Gibson , 2007, that it added to our conceptual and expressive capacities (Wilson 1983, Huemer 2007, or that it can enhanced our sensitivity when it comes to moral perception (Nussbaum 1990). Literature is a vast and varied phenomenon and probably each of these approaches is better suited for some, and not-so-well suited for other, forms of literature. ...

Reference:

The Trade between Fiction and Reality: Smuggling across Imagination and the World