Danto and His Critics (eBook)

Mark Rollins (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2012 | 2. Auflage
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-118-25298-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Updated and revised, the Second Edition of Danto and His Critics presents a series of essays by leading Danto scholars who offer their critical assessment of the influential works and ideas of Arthur C. Danto, the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University and long-time art critic for The Nation.

• Reflects Danto's revisions in his theory of art, reworking his views in ways that have not been systematically addressed elsewhere
• Features essays that critically assess the changes in Danto's thoughts and locate Danto's revised theory in the larger context of his work and of aesthetics generally
• Speaks in original ways to the relation of Danto's philosophy of art to his theory of mind
• Connects and integrates Danto's ideas on the nature of knowledge, action, aesthetics, history, and mind, as well as his provocative thoughts on the philosophy of art for the reader

Mark Rollins is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program, and the Sam Fox School of Art and Visual Design at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of several books on the role of images in perception and cognition and as symbols in literature and art. 

Inhalt

Notes on Contributors ix

Acknowledgments xi

Selected Bibliography of the Works of Arthur Danto xiii

Introduction 1

Mark Rollins

Part I System and Method 13

1 Danto as Systematic Philosopher, or Comme on lit Danto en
francais 15

David Carrier

2 Danto's Gallery of Indiscernibles 30

Richard Wollheim

Part II Intention and Interpretation 41

3 The Invisible Content of Visual Art 43

Mark Rollins

4 Deja vu All Over Again: How Danto's Aesthetics Recapitulates
the Philosophy of Mind 55

Jerry A. Fodor

5 Surface and Deep Interpretation 69

Peg Brand and Myles Brand

6 "Other Pictures We Look at, - His Prints We Read": Danto
Reading Lamb Reading Hogarth on the Art of the Commonplace 84

Lydia Goehr

Part III Philosophy of Art 109

7 A Tale of Two Artworlds 111

Postscript

George Dickie

8 Essence, Expression, and History: Arthur Danto's
Philosophy of Art 118

Noel Carroll

9 Danto's New Definition of Art and the Problem of Art Theories
146

Noel Carroll

10 Danto and Kant: Together at Last? 153

Diarmuid Costello

11 Atomism, Art, and Arthur: Danto's Hegelian Turn 172

Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins

Postscript

Kathleen M. Higgins

Part IV Historical Knowledge 197

12 Art and Its Doubles: Danto, Foucault, and Their Simulacra
Postscript 199

Gary Shapiro

13 The Beginning of the End: Danto on Postmodernism 215

Daniel Herwitz

14 Danto's Aesthetic: Is It Truly General As He Claims?
232

David Carrier

Part V What Philosophy Is 249

15 Art as Religion: Transfigurations of Danto's Dao 251

Richard Shusterman

16 Looking Beyond the Visible: The Case of Arthur Dantwo
267

Carlin Romano

Part VI Responses 283

17 Replies to Essays 285

Arthur C. Danto

Afterword: Not by a Soap Box but First by a Kiss 313

Arthur C. Danto

Index 317

Rezensionen

"Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates
through researchers/faculty. (Choice, 1 February
2013)

Danto and his Critics was always the best place to find
illuminating discussions of Danto's work, especially his philosophy
of art. The expanded edition brings it up date and makes it even
better.





Robert Stecker , Central Michigan University

Textauszug

Chapter 1

Danto as Systematic Philosopher, or Comme on lit Danto en français

David Carrier

It is of less importance to enact the ritual task of philosophical journeymanship – putting holes in leaking conceptual vessels – than to ponder whether this vessel will serve our purpose even if sound.

Danto, Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge

There are three ways that the history of philosophy may be thought of: in Descartes' way; as Hegelian historicists do; and as Derrida does. The first view is that the essential philosophical problems are there, waiting to be discovered. The history of philosophy is the story of the discovery of these problems which, because they are problems about the structures of our thought about the world, do not change with time. We associate problems with the names “Plato” or “Kant,” but these problems can be connected with work done at other times. Descartes' Meditations sets forward positions on much-discussed issues without indicating how he was influenced by the earlier literature.

Second, the history of philosophy is the history of reflection on these issues. It is impossible to distinguish between how these problems are understood and how they are described by philosophers. Schopenhauer thinks differently from Descartes because Hume and Kant intervene between him and his precursors. There is no way to identify the problems as such apart from mentioning the proper names of the philosophers who deal with them. For the Hegelian historicist, not all things are possible at all times.

A third, Derridian, position claims not just that ways of thinking about these issues have changed, but that we cannot even describe the earlier positions in our vocabulary.1 The belief that Descartes, Hume, Wittgenstein, and Davidson are concerned with “the same problems” may be an illusion. When we use our language to describe Descartes' work, inevitably we will get things wrong because we must translate his account of what we call mental representation into our language. Descartes' view of representation differs so radically from ours that it is unclear how they may be compared. The problem is not translating his Latin or French into our English; but translating an alien conceptual scheme. The medium of talk, language, is itself a system of representation. There is no way around this problem, no neutral way of talking about philosophical problems. Discussion of the theory of representation uses one or another medium of linguistic representation. And that language involves philosophical presuppositions.

Baudelaire's poetry does not entirely translate into English, which lacks equivalent rhymes and rhythms; but we can explain in English roughly what has been lost. In philosophy the situation is different. We can say a lot about older ways of talking about representation and about our ways of describing them; what is lacking is the possibility of comparing them. Since each way of talking employs a different, incommensurable view of representation there is no sense in which some common topic is being discussed.

Perhaps Derrida's position is not coherent. If no way of comparing these views is accessible, how can we know that the same issues are being discussed? In fact, since we think that Descartes discusses issues of concern to modern philosophers, how can there not be some overlap between his position and ours? But perhaps we can only talk about Descartes in our terms, aware that we are doing violence to his way of talking. Even if there is no possibility of indicating exactly the nature of that violence, beyond knowing that we cannot “get things right,” still we may know that it is impossible for us to accurately discuss his work.

I use this admittedly schematic account to introduce Danto's work. His very basic anti-Derridian assumption is that we can talk about the earlier philosophical models in our language. And his anti-historicist view is that the philosophical problems themselves can be discussed without needing to worry about exactly who said what. He discusses the great traditional philosophers, but does not think that identifying the positions they hold requires a historical analysis of their place in the tradition. Danto holds a Cartesian view of the history of philosophy.

Danto's anti-Derridian view is implicit everywhere in his books on Nietzsche and Sartre, whose working assumption is that Nietzsche's and Sartre's concerns may be translated into the language of analytic philosophy. So Danto's Jean-Paul Sartre translates his concepts into ours; what Sartre calls “shame” is a version of our “problem of other minds.” Analytic philosophy is often criticized for being ahistorical, and for lacking a genuine interest in other philosophic traditions. While Danto's system is in one way self-consciously ahistorical, he certainly takes an interest in “alien” philosophical systems. “I have quarried Sartre's work . . . over the years, taken fragments of his thought which I would never . . . have been able to think of by myself . . . he is part of my history and world.”2 Only when he goes a bit farther afield geographically and temporally, in his book on Oriental philosophy, does he define the limits of his determined cosmopolitanism.3 The trouble with analytic philosophy, poststructuralists say, is that it treats its parochial concerns as if they were universally valid. The force of that very general complaint is easier to understand if we focus on one detail of Danto's analysis – his use of visual models – which poststructuralists like Derrida reject. Because such metaphors play a special role in Danto's aesthetics, I focus on that part of his philosophical system.

The relation of a systematic writer's aesthetics to his philosophical system is complex. For some philosophers – Plato in Danto's account and Kant according to some commentators – philosophy plays a central role in revealing structures of the mind we would not otherwise know.4 That there are artworks changes the entire way that the world and its representations are thought of. For Schopenhauer, artworks provide privileged access to the nature of things, permitting us to experience the unity of the world as will, which normally we can only know as representation. For Nietzsche, tragedy provides privileged access to the history of European culture.

For Danto, aesthetic theory is not a special source of knowledge in these ways. The indistinguishable indiscernibles, the basis for his account of knowledge and action, appear also when we look at art. But this doesn't show that artworks are kinds of entities which reveal anything to a philosopher about the world. Artworks are not identical with the physical objects from which they are indistinguishable. In this way they are like representations; indeed, and this raises potential complications, many of them are representations. But, so far as I can see, the ontological status of art does not influence Danto's larger system. Of course, that system was developed before he published the body of his work on aesthetics. But when the materials in Analytical History of Knowledge and Analytical Philosophy of Action are reworked in his recent Connections to the World they are not redeveloped in any radical way. There is no reason why they should be. The structure of argument in Danto's aesthetic mirrors that presented in his larger philosophy, without modifying its conclusions.

No special light is shed on the basic metaphysical problem, how we know the world in our representations and change it in our actions, by art. This perhaps is one reason why Danto's involvement in the artworld did not lead him early on to write about aesthetics. His interest in art, and his art criticism, has relatively few philosophical consequences.5 In this way, Danto's aesthetic, like his historiography, developed earlier in Analytical Philosophy of History, stands outside the central concerns of his system. That our ways of knowing the world and acting have changed has no especial importance for his discussion of knowledge and action, in which the positions of Plato, Berkeley, Kant, and other classic figures are juxtaposed to the arguments of Austin, Wittgenstein, and other, more recent philosophers. That the various positions were discovered at particular historical moments plays no important role in Danto's commentary. That the various sciences of mind have advanced does not transform the structure of the philosophical problems.

Given Danto's view of the general relation between science and philosophy in which philosophical argumentation is, as he says, at right angles to scientific research, it is hard to see how research could have any effect on philosophy. Even a philosopher so uninterested in history as Wittgenstein depended, in his early work, upon the then recent discoveries of logicians. And, of course, today some philosophers of mind argue that cognitive psychology has transformed the whole discipline. Danto refers to recent scientific research, but never suggests that it can have any transformative effect on thought about conceptual problems.

This is why Danto's work on aesthetics seems to subtly transform the orientation of his whole way of thought, only implicitly, perhaps, in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace but certainly explicitly in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. In so far as...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.2.2012
• Reihe/Serie: Philosophers and their Critics
• Reihe/Serie: Philosophers and their Critics
• Reihe/Serie: Philosophers and their Critics
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit
• Schlagworte: ART • Assessment • Body • Commonplace • Critical • Critics • Current • danto • dantos • Edition • Fully • Ideas • influential • initial • Nature • Philosophie • Philosophie der Kunst • Philosophy • philosophy of art • Publication • scholars • Transfiguration • treatise • Views • Work • Works • years
• ISBN-10: 1-118-25298-5 / 1118252985
• ISBN-13: 978-1-118-25298-7 / 9781118252987