This article explores parallel tendencies in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Ernst Gombrich’s thinking that aimed to dissolve misconceptions about mind, culture, and art that emerged in modernity but that continue to influence current art education. Section one gives an overview of Wittgenstein’s and Gombrich’s therapeutic projects, which drew on perspicuity and genealogy to eliminate confusions in thinking, rather than advance new theories. The second section illustrates Wittgenstein’s and Gombrich’s curative response to modern misconceptions about mind and culture. The analysis is extended (...) in a thematic way to dissolve similar misconceptions that prevail in current art education. The aim of the article is to provide conditions for sustaining better practices of art education. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the three interpretations of sections 65-67 in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, where he answers the question “do we call different things by the same word because of a common feature?” Interpretation A holds that we call different things by the same word because of overlapping similarities between them; Interpretation B adopts a socio-historical reading, where concepts evolved and extended historically on the basis of some similarities; and interpretation C includes aspects of the first two interpretations, but (...) sees similarities as just one of several kinds of relations and affinities between concepts which explain why we call different things by the same word. Through an investigation of Wittgenstein’s answer and the objections made to interpretation A, I argue that interpretation C, although not prominent in the secondary literature, provides better answers to the objections raised. (shrink)