 A good deal of aesthetic thinking has been taken up with arguing about the limits to its capacity to appeal to the emotions. Two issues are particularly notable, one descriptive and the other, in part, normative. What, first of all, are the facts about our (apparently) emotional responses to fictions? Do we really admire, despise or pity people we know do not exist? This sounds like an empirical question, perhaps one to be resolved by studies of the brains of people engaged by fictional work. But the prospects for this approach are poor, and not only because of practical difficulties in data gathering (see Cova &amp; Teroni 2016). Those who deny that we pity Anna Karenina do no deny that readers may display all the physiological signs that go with that emotion. What they claim is that genuine fear has a cognitive component lacking in this case: belief in the object of one’s fear. Suppose we could show empirically that readers of Tolstoy do experience all the pity-relevant physiological states while failing to believe in the existence of Anna Karenina, having instead cognitive states such as “imagining that Anna exists”. The philosophical problem would remain: are people with that psychological profile genuinely in a state of pitying, or is their state merely one of what Walton (1978) calls “quasi-pity”, which involves the typical physiological and psychological reactions of pity but which falls short of being full-fledged pity because it does not go with belief in its objects, or with the typical corresponding dispositions to action? We might at this point wonder whether what looked like a substantive question about fear and pity has been shown to be merely one about labelling. However, there are empirical considerations that bear indirectly on the issue. Gendler and Kovackovick suggest that plausible assumptions about the evolutionary proper function of the emotions tells against the idea that fear requires belief. It is likely on Darwinian grounds that our emotions were shaped not merely by their capacity to have us avoid present dangers, but also to have us avoid merely possible ones. Imagining a dangerous creature lurking in the forest may be enough to send me by a safer route, raising my chances of surviving and passing on my genes. If imagined dangers are part of the reason fear has been selected for and retained why insist that responses to the imagined creatures and events of fiction are, as Walton (1978) claims, merely quasi-fears? For other connections between aesthetics and evolutionary thinking see below,  Section 9.