Mr. Danto argues that recent developments in the artworld, in particular the production of works of art that cannot be told from ordinary things, make urgent the need for a new theory of art and make plain the factors such a theory can and cannot involve. In the course of constructing such a theory, he seeks to demonstrate the relationship between philosophy and art, as well as the connections that hold between art and social institutions and art history. The book (...) distinguishes what belongs to artistic theory from what has traditionally been confused with it, namely aesthetic theory and offers as well a systematic account of metaphor, expression, and style, together with an original account 0f artistic representation. A wealth of examples, drawn especially from recent and contemporary art, illuminate the argument. (shrink)

According to Arthur Danto, post-modern or post-historical art began when artists like Andy Warhol collapsed the Modern distinction between art and everyday life by bringing “the everyday” into the artworld. I begin by pointing out that there is another way to collapse this distinction: bring art out of the artworld and into everyday life. An especially effective way of doing this is to make street art, which, I argue, is art whose meaning depends on its use of the street. I (...) defend this definition and show how it handles graffiti and public art. (shrink)

Arthur C. Danto's 1981 The Transfiguration of the Commonplace begins and ends with quotations of William Shakespeare's 1604–1605 Hamlet. This chapter aims to follow the slender threads of few Shakespearean phrases to see what they can teach us about Danto's book. Danto himself points out that “mirrors and then, by generalization, artworks, rather than giving us back what we already can know without benefit of them, serve instead as instruments of self‐revelation.” In The Transfiguration of the (...) class='Hi'>Commonplace, Danto hardly mentions money or social power and their role in our evaluation of meaning. Danto is wrong when he says that “in his final statement” Shakespeare put art on “on the lowest ontological rung.” Danto quotes, as support, the much‐quoted Shakespearean phrase from The Tempest, that art is “an insubstantial pageant fading”. (shrink)

Arthur Danto in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and Richard Wollheim in Painting as an Art have each advanced a certain meaning theory of art (MT), more specifically, a theory according to which something is a work of art just in case it expresses a proposition. The first part of this essay sets out that view in more detail, with textual support that Danto and Wollheim do in fact hold that theory. The second part offers reasons against accepting (...) MT. (1) There seem to be persuasive counterexamples to MT: objects that are clearly works of art but which do not appear to exhibit any tendency towards propositionality. (2) Neither theorist provides an explanation as to why someone with something to say would choose to, as it were, hide his thought behind a painting. (3) MT will force a theory of the evaluation of art that parallels the evaluation of (say) scientific or philosophical thought. Artworks will be judged according to the profundity of the thoughts they express rather than by their aesthetic features – which would make Duchamp a greater artist than Monet! (shrink)

Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace is a new theory of art, seeking to catch the flavour and essence of its contemporary phenomenology. It is obliged, however, to pit itself in toto against aesthetic philosophy, leaning on the derivatives from deuteropraxis and institutional definition while committing itself to a concept of arthood extracted from exoteric ideas, which are held to comprise the artworks’ individuation and identity. This paper examines the principal notions in support of his contentions and contrasts (...) them to the chief principles of aesthetic philosophy. In this juxtaposition, it transpires that conviction eludes Danto, as his suppression of aesthetic criteria yields unsuspected aporias from a disconjugate amalgam of inherence, ontology, epistemology and concept integration. Thus the leap from “mere real things” to the plateau of arthood is never accomplished, as it falters at the step where a perceiving subject has a stake in, and the power of authorisation, of this co... (shrink)

Arthur C. Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace is one of the most influential recent books on philosophy of art. It is noteworthy for both his method, which emphasizes indiscernible pairs and sets of objects, and his conclusion, which is that artworks are distinguished from non-artwork counterparts by a semantic and aesthetic transfiguration that depends on their relationship to art history. In numerous contexts, Danto has confirmed that the relevant concept of art is the concept of fine (...) art. Examples of music that are not fine art demonstrate that semantic and aesthetic transfiguration does not require a relationship to art history or art theory. Appropriate interpretation and individuation of a great deal of music can be achieved by listeners who do not grasp art theory and who do not guide their interpretation by reference to the concept of art. (shrink)

Arthur Danto's The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art is Danto's most recent, through-written monograph on the philosophy of art. An obvious question occasioned by its publication is: what is it intended to add to Danto's previous treatises on the philosophy of art, such as The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and After the End of Art? The simple answer, of course, is beauty. But, why, one asks, does Danto need to address beauty? . . .Danto, (...) it seems to me, needs to come to terms with beauty as a matter of theoretical damage control. beauty, narrowly conceived, has the potential to threaten the generality of Danto's theory of art. Therefore, Danto needs, so to speak, to contain it. (shrink)

I reply to Andrea Baldini's critical discussion of my "Street Art: The Transfiguration of the Commonplaces" (2010) by taking up the question: what is "the street" in street art? I argue that the relevant notion of the street is a space whose function it is to facilitate self-expression. I show how this clarifies and extends the theory developed in Riggle (2010). I then argue, contra Baldini, that street art is not always subversive, and when it is, it is not (...) always in virtue of its challenging the co-opting of public space by commercial art. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Reading Art Other Pictures The Commonplace Transfiguration Reading Prints Ekphrasis Moving Past The Vulgar Re‐evaluating Values Paragone Exemplary Marsyas Image–Word–Sound Saints and Painters Refiguring Error.

In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981) Arthur Danto propone la nozione di «stile individuale» identificando quest’uldma con qualcosa di dato che appartiene all’artista in maniera essenziale e inseparabile. In contrasto con questa idea, la sua teoria della fine dell’arte, presentata in After the End of Art (1997) e altrove, suggerisce la liberazione degli artisti da qualsiasi impegno stilistico. Come si accordano queste due teorie? Possono esserci stili individuali dopo la fine dell’...

Arthur Danto's theory of art contains a theological way of thinking about indiscernible realities that have been the subject of theological dispute for almost two millennia. This long tradition raises new questions for how to understand that theory. Transfiguration – metamorphosis – necessarily involves a change at some point in appearance or in what Danto treats as aesthetic properties inessential to the being of art. Transubstantiation means an ontological change that excludes a priori any perceptible difference. Danto often insists (...) on this very particular aspect when he explains the relationship between artworks and commonplace objects: a non‐art object can look exactly like an artwork. In the Catholic tradition, transubstantiation can occur only if those performing the sacrament act faithfully and in conformity to a tradition. Danto's theory is understand better by reference to transubstantiation than to transfiguration. (shrink)

This article challenges a series of assumptions associated with abstract painting, arguing that this type of art makes one understand a visual manifestation which does no longer refer to the visible world only, but also to an intelligible world, accessible to the senses. Non-figurative painting abandons the reproduction of the visible, in order to present us with the invisible, and in order to account for this phenomenon the author elaborates three types of philosophical decision to interpret the mode of being (...) of the image. The comprehension of this original experience of abstract art is then compared to the relations between the visible and the invisible, as Christian theology delineates them. Christianity is defined first by the experience of the figuration of God, by His embodiment, which actually enables one to conceive of certain images, such as the icon of the Orthodox liturgy, but at the same time it also bestows, for the first time, an incredible status to the disappearance of the visible divine body, when it returns to the invisible, while remaining present in the visible. (shrink)

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur Danto The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art by Arthur Danto.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Artforum, Andy Warhol, and the Art of Living:What Art Educators Can Learn from the Recent History of American Art WritingDavid Carrier (bio)When around 1980 I began writing art criticism, Artforum was much concerned with historical analysis.1 When presenting the work of younger painters and sculptors, it seemed natural to explain artists' accomplishments by identifying precedents for their work. Much of my criticism published in the 1980s presented post-formalist accounts (...) of abstract painting. Seeking precedents for the painting I admired, I looked to the history of art. But such pleas for the value of tradition were doomed. Commentators preaching the values of tradition lost out to the writers emphasizing a break with the past. Much of interest for art education can be learned by studying the history of this very influential, small circulation journal.Only in retrospect did the urgency of this felt need for a break with the past become apparent. The history of responses to Abstract Expressionism suggested a different way of thinking about moments of change. HaroldRosenberg's conception of "action painting" implied that Pollock broke dramatically with the past. Clement Greenberg, by contrast, in a famous phrase said: "I do not think it exaggerated to say that Pollock's 1946-1950 manner really took up Analytic Cubism from the point at which Picasso and Braquehad left it...in their collages of 1912 and 1913."2 Greenberg's counter-intuitive analysis, asking us to see very different looking paintings as essentially similar, had prevailed. So it was not unreasonable to expect that after Greenberg, concern with tradition would remain important. But that was not what happened.Demand for a break with the past often carries political overtones. Historians debate whether the French Revolution broke with the past, or merely developed trends of the old regime. The idea of a complete break with tradition can seem attractive, but of course such dramatic ways of thinking underestimate real continuities. Struggle among post-Greenbergian artwriters to define a new critical paradigm mimics conflicts among artists to define the [End Page 1] leading post-Abstract Expressionist tradition. Once a critical paradigm has been established, debate may proceed peacefully. But when defining a period style is at issue, the stakes are high, and so conflicts are ferocious. Of course, struggle is always accompanied also by co-operation, but failing to grasp the real role of conflict leads to all-too-pious visions of what is possible.Greenberg developedthe most influential critical approach, and so when his way of thinking was rejected, a radically different approach was of most interest. Here we are dealing with what Harold Bloom famously called the anxiety of influence. Just as the most interesting painting after Abstract Expressionism deconstructed that tradition, so in criticism no ways of thinking too similar to Greenberg's stood a chance of being important. I think it interesting to reconstruct the process rationally in which an individual obtains such power. A totem, Freud explains, is "an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan."3 The communion bread and wine are just bread and wine, but for the believer they become Christ's body and blood. Rationally speaking, a representational painting is just pigment on canvas; and a minimalist sculpture, just shaped metal. But in what Arthur Danto calls the "transfiguration of the commonplace," "a work of art...has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks...We are dealing with an altogether different order of things."4 Greenberg became a totem. He was not just an important writer whose arguments entitled him to reasonable respect. The mere mention of his name invoked irrational fears.Greenberg was obsessed with tradition. Abstract Expressionism was rooted in early modernism, so that the era from Manet through Pollock defined a period style. Greenberg's historiography may seem inescapable. How can a young painter be understood except by seeking precedents for her achievement? Cannot the now famous artists who emerged in the 1980s be understood in these terms? Barbara Kruger comes out of John Heartfield and dada... (shrink)

Covering the theories of, among others, Derrida, Lefort and Laclau, this volume opens up space to the political (polemicisation). Chapters cover themes such as social structure, ethical arguments, and political organisation.

This chapter contains sections titled: Part I: System and Method Part II: Intention and Interpretation Part III: Philosophy of Art Part IV: Historical Knowledge Part V: What Philosophy Is.

This chapter contains sections titled: “To Serve Man” “Will the Real Martian Please Stand up?” “The Eye of the Beholder” Conclusion Notes.

Why should one go to see works of art if one can look at faces in clouds and other somewhat more complex forms in tarmac? Does my aesthetic experience discover something unprecedented when it takes products of human Intentionality as substrate rather than “natural objects” supposedly lacking all Intentionality? These questions raise that of the contribution of authorship in the framework of aesthetic experience ; they question the role of the author from one of a number of possible points of (...) view. The aim here is to advance this thought setting out from an experience of thought. Borrowing from the methodology of Arthur Danto displayed in The transfiguration of the commonplace, this experience of thought seeks to determine the structural differences between an aesthetic experience undertaken concerning Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and that undertaken concerning an indiscernable perceptible said to have been generated randomly by nature. The question at the heart of this article is how to characterize the difference implied by the presence of the data-author for the aesthetic experience (transl. J. Dudley). (shrink)

Nelle pagine che chiudono la monografia The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: a Philosophy of Art Danto osserva che lo stile segue il destino che la sua etimologia determina: c’è stile quando lo stilus, che è lo strumento di scrittura latino che ha la caratteristica di lasciare «qualcosa del proprio carattere sulla superficie che segna», lascia sulla “superficie” “qualcosa” «del carattere della mano che lo dirige». Lo stile è una questione di “carattere” nel senso nel quale Aristotele descr...

Arthur Danto, in Transfiguration of the Commonplace, poses the important, but easily neglected question, as to whether art is the sort of thing of which there can be a philosophy (1981, 54). If it...

Ogni volta che leggo uno scritto di Danto resto colpito dalla cultura, dai piaceri dell’intelligenza e dai sentimenti che vi circolano. Ogni volta imparo qualcosa di vitale, nel senso di qualcosa che fa venire in mente altre idee. Danto è incapace di annoiare. Ha una mente pirotecnica e avventurosa, e una scrittura inconfondibile. Forse, proprio per questo tradurre il suo libro, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, non è stato facile: si è trattato, sì, di tradurre un libro di (...) filosofia, a... (shrink)

In Bielefeld, Germany in April, 1997 an author conference was devoted to Arthur C. Danto's 1995 Mellon Lectures After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History . This essay provides an introduction to seven essays given at that conference and expanded for this Theme Issue of History and Theory. Danto presented his view of the nature of art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace . He then added in the Mellon lectures a sociological perspective (...) on the current situation of the visual arts, and an Hegelian historiography. The history of art has ended, Danto claims, and we now live in a posthistorical era. Since in his well-known book on historiography, Analytical Philosophy of History , Danto is unsympathetic to Hegel's speculative ways of thinking about history, his adaptation of this Hegelian framework is surprising. Danto's strategy in After the End of Art is best understood by grasping the way in which he transformed the purely philosophical account of The Transfiguration into a historical account. Recognizing that his philosophical analysis provided a good way of explaining the development of art in the modern period, Danto radically changed the context of his argument. In this process, he opened up discussion of some serious but as yet unanswered questions about his original thesis, and about the plausibility of Hegel's claim that the history of art has ended. (shrink)

Though Arthur Danto has long been engaged with issues of embodiment in art and beyond, neither he nor most of his interlocutors have devoted significant attention to the art form in which art and embodiment most vividly intersect, namely dance. This article, first, considers Danto’s brief references to dance in his early magnum opus, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Second, it tracks the changes in Danto’s philosophy of art as evidenced in his later After the End of Art (...) and The Abuse of Beauty. And finally, it utilizes Danto’s most recent work on the philosophy of action to suggest a new Danto-inspired definition of art, namely "apposite bodies.". (shrink)

Arthur Danto’s recent book, Andy Warhol, leads the reader through the story of the iconic American’s artistic life highlighted by a philosophical commentary, a commentary that merges Danto’s aesthetic theory with the artist himself. Inspired by Warhol’s Brillo Box installation, art that in Danto’s eyes was indiscernible from the everyday boxes it represented, Danto developed a theory that is able to differentiate art from non-art by employing the body of conceptual art theory manifest in what he termed the ‘artworld’. The (...) strength of Danto’s theory is found in its ability to explain the art of the post-modern era. His body of work weaves philosophy, art history and art criticism together, merging his aesthetic philosophy with his extensive knowledge of the world of art. Danto’s essentialist theory of embodied meaning provides him with a critical tool that succeeds in explaining the currents of contemporary art, a task that many great thinkers of art history were unable to do. If Warhol inspired Danto to create a philosophy of art, it is appropriate that Danto write a tribute to Warhol that traces how Warhol brought philosophy into art. Danto’s account of ‘Warhol as philosopher’ positions him as a pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century art, effecting a sea change in how art was made and viewed. Warhol achieved this by conceiving of works that embodied the answers to a series of philosophical puzzles surrounding the nature of art. Warhol, as Danto describes him, manifests himself in his art because he had transformed himself, in a way, into an icon of the times. This pragmatist notion that art should undermine the dichotomies that exist between art and life would, by some accounts, position Warhol to be the philosopher that Danto claims him to be, for he dissolved the philosophical questions posted by late modern aesthetic thinkers by creating art that imploded the accepted notions of art at the time. One of Danto’s greatest contributions to aesthetics is his theory’s ability to distinguish art from non-art, recognizing that it is the artist’s intention that levels the sublimity of art into the commonplace, thereby transfiguring the everyday. However, acknowledging this achievement, I argue that Warhol’s philosophical contribution actually manifests itself in a manner different from that proposed by Danto. Danto maintains that the internal drive of art leads to the unfolding of art theoretical concepts that ineluctably shift the terrain of world of art. I would agree with Danto that Warhol, almost as Hegel viewed Napoleon as Geist on a horse, pushed forward the boundaries of art through the actualization of art’s internal drive. But I would disagree that the conceptual nature of art is one that unfolds merely as a relation of concepts that artists trace through a connection to the meaning of history they forge using their unmediated grasp of style. Rather, I would argue that the artist’s style is not bound so narrowly to the meanings they express. Through their aesthetic articulations, artists initiate a process of social interaction. This process employs the philosophical logic which Danto attributes to Warhol indirectly, and through it, it is able to transfigure the vocabulary of art—the concepts of the artworld—by superseding the language of modernism. Warhol’s philosophical contribution is seen in his mastery of both the medium of art and the underlying logic of the medium’s expression and reception. (shrink)

In his latest book about art Arthur Danto claims that aesthetic appearance-visuality in the visual arts-has become more and more irrelevant for most of contemporary art. This essay first immanently critiques the distinction between the aesthetic and artistic properties underlying this claim. Danto's claim about the irrelevance of the aesthetic is not compatible with the spirit of his own writings: what Danto denies in After the End of Art has been a cornerstone of his theoretical work since The Transfiguration (...) of the Commonplace, namely, that the aesthetic is indeed both an elementary and a defining property of art. Examples ranging from Duchamp's Fountain to a recent installation by the Art & Language group are discussed to support this critique. Second, the essay defends Danto's contention that developing a "definition of art" is a sensible enterprise. But it turns out that Danto's "essentialism" concerning art has no essentialist implications in any specific sense. (shrink)

In Bielefeld, Germany in April, 1997 an author conference was devoted to Arthur C. Danto's 1995 Mellon Lectures After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. This essay provides an introduction to seven essays given at that conference and expanded for this Theme Issue of History and Theory. Danto presented his view of the nature of art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. He then added in the Mellon lectures a sociological perspective on the (...) current situation of the visual arts, and an Hegelian historiography. The history of art has ended, Danto claims, and we now live in a posthistorical era. Since in his well-known book on historiography, Analytical Philosophy of History, Danto is unsympathetic to Hegel's speculative ways of thinking about history, his adaptation of this Hegelian framework is surprising. Danto's strategy in After the End of Art is best understood by grasping the way in which he transformed the purely philosophical account of The Transfiguration into a historical account. Recognizing that his philosophical analysis provided a good way of explaining the development of art in the modern period, Danto radically changed the context of his argument. In this process, he opened up discussion of some serious but as yet unanswered questions about his original thesis, and about the plausibility of Hegel's claim that the history of art has ended. (shrink)

On the True Sense of Art collects essays by philosophers responding to John Sallis's Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art as well as his other works on the philosophy of art, including Force of Imagination and Logic of Imagination. Each of the chapters, by some of the leading thinkers in Continental philosophy, engages Sallis's work on both ancient and new senses of aesthetics--a transfiguration of aesthetics--as a beginning that is always beginning again. With a responsive essay by Sallis (...) himself, On the True Sense of Art forms a critical introduction to the thought of this generation's most important aesthetician. (shrink)

Schuon proposes a view of man contradictory to the image of modern psychology; he views human nature in relationship to God.

ABSTRACTThe point of departure of this essay is the intuition that the relationship between the past and the present should be conceived of in terms of temporal distance. The spatial metaphor of distance at work in this intuition is thought to provide the basis for the epistemological model appropriate for understanding the nature of historical knowledge. This results in two claims: 1) epistemology is the philosophical instrument we must rely upon for understanding historical writing, and 2) the metaphor of distance (...) is—whether one is aware of it or not—the model for most, if not all, epistemological thought. This essay discusses the pros and cons of these two claims. It argues that the two claims are indeed the best way to begin our analysis of the relationship between the past and the historical text or representation. However, we cannot afford to stop there; indeed, we must ask ourselves where the associations we have with the metaphor of temporal distance may, in the end, be misleading. This will enable us to recognize that the notion of distance will, finally, have to yield its prerogatives to that of the notion of function. Historical writing is functionalist in the sense that the historical text is a substitute for the past discussed in it. That is its function. Hence the essay's title. (shrink)

After more than forty years I still warmly recall the edifying conversations that I had in the episcopal palace in Bergamo with my revered bishop. Msgr. Radini Tedeschi. About the persons in the Vatican, from the Holy Father downwards, there was never an expression that was not respectful, no, never. But as for women or their shape or what concerned them, no word was ever spoken. It was as if there were no women in the world. This absolute silence, this (...) lack of any familiarity with regard to the other sex, was one of the most powerful and profound lessons of my young life as a priest, and even today I thankfully keep the excellent and beneficial memory of that man who raised me in this discipline. Spiritual Diary of John XXIII, quoted in Uta Ranke‐Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: the Catholic Church and Sexuality (1990). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.4 (2004) 603-625 [Access article in PDF] Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of the Self in Eighteenth-Century Britain Lucia Dacome University College London Ae for "Adversariorum methodus." Be for "Beauty, Beneficience, Bread, Bleeding, Blemishes."1 By associating the first letter with the initial vowel of a word, generations of eighteenth-century readers, students, and observers diligently regulated access to information they (...) reputed worth retaining. Following this rule, they organized the notes they took on a certain subject, the thoughts and observations they believed were worth remembering, and the exemplary words of their favorite authors. The rule was devised by John Locke for his "new method of making commonplace-books," a method characterized by a particular system for indexing the entries of a notebook that became popular in the eighteenth century. Before Locke developed his new method readers had already familiarized themselves with the practice of keeping an account of their readings, excerpting passages of texts, and copying them in their notebooks under a relevant heading. Throughout the early modern period commonplace books provided repositories for arranging notes, excerpts, drawings, and objects.2 Regarded as aids to memory and storehouses of knowledge, they were part of a pedagogic tradition related to rhetoric and the art of memory that dated back to the classical period. Reducing vast amounts of knowledge to a [End Page 603] manageable form, they instantiated a special relationship between the accumulation of knowledge and the organization of space. At the turn of the eighteenth century Locke's new method promised to facilitate compilers' task by providing a new way of accumulating multum in parvo at a time of increasing concern for the uncontrollable growth of the "Stock of Knowledge."3 It did so by seeking to increase the amount of information one could annotate in the notebook, while also speeding up its retrieval. Many eighteenth-century compilers relied on it in order to reduce the volume of their notebooks and save time. Some were lured by the promise that this technique could also help them to order their minds and thus turn them into better people.Although commonplace books have dropped out of usage today, they were still mentioned in nineteenth-century educational manuals. As tools that lay at the intersection between practices of collecting, reading, classifying, learning, and the arts of rhetoric, they have come to the fore of historical discussion.4 In some cases, commonplace books have been regarded as capable of providing insights into compilers' reading patterns and as biographical sources casting light on compilers' personal idiosyncrasies and cataloguing manias.5 The intellectual and cultural significance of Locke's own new method of compiling has [End Page 604] accordingly been discussed in relation to Locke's own intellectual biography (and in particular his medical interests), in the context of shifting patterns of systematization of knowledge and in light of the dissemination of eighteenth-century encyclopedic projects.6 However, still little is known about the uses and the popularity of the Lockean method in the eighteenth century.What follows considers the spreading of Lockean commonplacing in the context of eighteenth-century discussions on the nature of the self. Locke himself contributed to these discussions when, in the second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1694), he famously suggested that self-identity lay in the mind and resided in the continuity of memory and consciousness.7 Now a widely shared assumption of Western modernity, the view that self lies in the mind has long been dated back to the Age of Enlightenment. Yet early in this period Locke's proposal to make self-identity coextensive with memory and self-knowledge proved controversial. The debate that followed is now part of the canon of the history of philosophy and of the philosophical literature as a whole.8 In the course of the debate some of Locke's critics doubted that it was possible to found the self in conscious memory: they wondered about the destiny of the self during intervals... (shrink)

Nietzsche's early work on culture and tragedy proved influential on subsequent art and aesthetics; the relation between the Apollonian and Dionysian is central to this work. However, that relation is widely misunderstood, especially in its connection to Nietzsche's conceptions of Socrates and modernity. This paper contributes to the rectification of misunderstandings by demonstrating the proper way of understanding these relations. The analysis proceeds by way of a phenomenological treatment of the distinctive structure of the Apollonian. The analysis is reinforced by (...) showing how Nietzsche's later work on the nature of cultural production and change reflects and depends upon it. (shrink)

Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe is the most significant event in Anglo-American aesthetics in many a year, and joins a small pantheon of landmark books such as Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art, Richard Wollheim's Art and Its Objects and Arthur Danto's Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Walton's aim is to provide a comprehensive account of the representational arts—literature, drama, cinema, painting, drawing, sculpture—from both the generative and the receptive points of view. That is to say, he attempts to explain (...) how representations are fashioned, what their representational status consists in, how representations are apprehended and what the experience of them characteristically involves. Inthese aims he is to my mind enormously, if not completely, successful. (shrink)