Catherine M. Robb, Alfred Archer, Matthew J. Dennis (eds.) (2024), Bloomsbury Academic (edited volume; ISBN 9781350401297) — DOI-10.5040/9781350401327
Key takeaways
- The first introductory collection on the philosophy of fame and celebrity, arguing that work on admiration, achievement, epistemic authority, virtue and moral psychology can be brought to bear on what fame is and how it shapes how we live.
Seeded from the abstract alone, not a reading. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Against the background of cancel culture, digital identities and parasocial relationships, the editors note that philosophy has said little about celebrity, even though work on admiration, achievement, talent, epistemic authority, virtue and moral psychology bears on it directly. The volume offers an introductory overview in four parts: conceptual differences between fame and celebrity, the experience of fame, celebrities’ interactions with the public and the motives for seeking fame; fame and virtue and the ethics of fame; and fame in contemporary online culture.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 80 seconds of active reading over 2 sessions. Deferred because nobody has read it closely here yet, not on merit.
Priority for a deeper reading: low — t=80s over two sessions suggests interest, but it is a closed-access edited volume; pick single chapters instead.
What a deeper reading should check:
- Crossref’s chapter list includes Brady, “Fame and flourishing”; Pacovská, “‘Fame goes to one’s head’”; Miller, “Celebrity and dishonesty”; Howe on fame, narrative and memory; Archer and Robb, “Marginalization, celebrity, and the pursuit of fame”; Widdows and MacCallum on “Instafame”; Croce, Liberti and Vaccarezza, “The power of fame”; Osman and Harrison, “Online celebrities as moral role models”; Wallbank, “Celebrity and epistemic influence”; Willard on celebrity intimacy and parasocial relationships; Isern-Mas, “The inappropriateness of fans’ blame”; Radzik, “Cancelling celebrities”; and an afterword by DeVito.
- Wallbank’s chapter on epistemic influence and Radzik’s on cancelling are the chapters most likely to bear on the record’s governance and epistemic-authority threads.
- Companion to LIT-172 (Archer and Robb on parasocial relationships) and LIT-174 (Bunton on celebrities speaking out).
Access when seeded: philpapers is blocked here; resolved via Crossref, which gives the book DOI, the editors and the chapter DOIs and titles (closed access per OpenAlex; Bloomsbury’s page returned 403). The abstract is from OpenAlex’s copy of the publisher description. Publication date conflicts: a Warwick repository record of one chapter gives 2024-10-17 (used here), while a search-engine summary said 2024-11-14; Crossref gives only 2024. The table of contents below is from Crossref chapter records, not from the book.