Museums and their practices—especially those involving collection, curation and exhibition—generate a host of philosophical questions. Such questions are not limited to the domains of ethics and aesthetics, but go further into the domains of metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of religion. Despite the prominence of museums as public institutions, they have until recently received surprisingly little scrutiny from philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. By bringing together contributions from philosophers with backgrounds in a range of traditional areas of (...) class='Hi'>philosophy, this volume demonstrates how their work can enhance our understanding of museums and shed light on the philosophical questions raised by museum practices. Many of the essays in this volume make the case that the philosophy of museums is of vital concern, not only to those philosophers at work in the emerging field but also to practitioners within the museum world and to anyone who enjoys visiting museums. (shrink)

Museums and their practices - especially those involving collection, curation and exhibition - generate a host of philosophical questions. Such questions are not limited to the domains of ethics and aesthetics, but go further into the domains of metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of religion. Despite the prominence of museums as public institutions, they have until recently received surprisingly little scrutiny from philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. By bringing together contributions from philosophers with backgrounds in a range of (...) traditional areas of philosophy, this volume demonstrates how their work can enhance our understanding of museums and shed light on the philosophical questions raised by museum practices. Many of the chapters in this volume make the case that the philosophy of museums is of vital concern, not only to those philosophers at work in the emerging field but also to practitioners within the museum world and to anyone who enjoys visiting museums. (shrink)

Borrowing from the title and some of the content of Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies, it is argued that museums have great value as sites for what may be called a philosophical culture. A philosophical culture is one in which members or citizens engage in fair-minded debate and shared reflection, presenting and evaluating reasons for different positions particularly as these have relevance for matters of governance. In a philosophical culture, persuasion is almost always a matter of (...) seeking to provide reasonable grounds for adopting some position without resorting to violence or physical force.A philosophical culture is, in turn, an important foundation for a democratic culture and republic. A philosophy of museums emerges, a model we shall call the Philosophical Culture Museum Model. This concept is stipulative and ideal in the sense that it presents a paradigm of a museum with great virtue and promise. It must be confessed, however, that, historically, this is an emerging concept of the role of museums and one not evident in many of the museums in the early modern era or today. Reasons are offered as to why the time may be right to recognize the philosophy of museums as a particular sub-field in the overall practice of philosophy. (shrink)

This volume collects fifteen essays debating the value of museums, the ontology and epistemology of exhibited objects, and museum ethics. The essays stem from talks originally given at a conference at the University of Glasgow in 2013 by philosophers working both within and outside the analytic tradition, museum scholars, and museum practitioners. The collection succeeds in showing that we need a philosophy of museums to improve our understanding of such institutions.

This two‐part article examines the very limited engagement by philosophers with museums, and proposes analysis under six headings: cultural variety, taxonomy, and epistemology in Part I, and teleology, ethics, and therapeutics and aesthetics in Part II. The article establishes that fundamental categories of museums established in the 19th century – of art, of anthropology, of history, of natural history, of science and technology – still persist. Among them, it distinguishes between hegemonic (predominantly Western) and subaltern (minority or Indigenous) (...) museums worldwide. It argues that relations between hegemonic and subaltern museums are often agonistic, and are compromised by claims of universalism on the part of proponents of the former. The article observes that most discussion of museums focuses exclusively and misleadingly on their public exhibition function, and contends that scholarship – not exhibition – is central to all museums. However, that predominantly taxonomic scholarship, while innovative and central to a dominant epistemology based on the observation of tangible things in the 19th century, was compromised by the epistemic shift to abstraction and experimentation in the 20th, which resulted in a loss of initiative and authority. Although epistemological changes currently in progress favor a renewed attention to tangible things as complex matrices to which museums ought to contribute significantly, the fundamental taxonomy of museums by collection type is a clog on the ability of museum scholars to engage with and themselves produce big ideas. In order to function well as sites of scholarship in the future, museums will have to be far more adaptable and attentive to a wider range of things and ideas (including Indigenous ideas incompatible with Western assumptions) than their existing collection divisions permit. (shrink)

Partial proceedings of the 17th World Congress, International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Bologna, 1995.

What is the difference between a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the symphony itself? What does it mean for musicians to be faithful to the works they perform? To answer this question, Goehr combines philosophical and historical methods of enquiry. She describes how the concept of a musical work emerged as late as 1800, and how it subsequently defined the norms, expectations, and behavior characteristic of classical musical practice. Out of the historical thesis, Goehr draws philosophical conclusions about the (...) normative functions of concepts and ideals. She also addresses current debates amongst conductors, early-music performers, and avant-gardists. (shrink)

Indeed, this is the first serious book-length study of the subject by a philosopher of science.

If Saint Thomas Aquinas was a great theologian, it is in no small part because he was a great philosopher. And he was a great philosopher because he was a great metaphysician. In the twentieth century, metaphysics was not much in vogue, among either theologians or even philosophers; but now it is making a comeback, and once the contours of Thomas's metaphysical vision are glimpsed, it looks like anything but a museum piece. It only needs some dusting off. Many are (...) studying Thomas now for the answers that he might be able to give to current questions, but he is perhaps even more interesting for the questions that he can raise regarding current answers: about the physical world, about human life and knowledge, and (needless to say) about God. This book is aimed at helping those who are not experts in medieval thought to begin to enter into Thomas's philosophical point of view. Along the way, it brings out some aspects of his thought that are not often emphasized in the current literature, and it offers a reading of his teaching on the divine nature that goes rather against the drift of some prominent recent interpretations. (shrink)

Museums have a long history and practice of trafficking in looted antiquities. An account of the moral mission of museums and the moral obligations of museum trustees is given. Based on that account, a moral critique of the actions of museums and their trustees is provided, addressing some of the rationales that museums and their trustees have offered for justifying this activity of trafficking. Some of the rationale examined involves arguments regarding collective responsibility. It is argued (...) that the loss of provenance and provenience resulting from this practice is a particularly significant moral harm done to humanity as a whole. I argue that it is a mistake to categorize human remains and cultural artifacts as property and doing so is one source of the morally problematic activity. (shrink)

This volume addresses relations between macroscopic and microscopic description; essential roles of visualization and representation in chemical understanding; historical questions involving chemical concepts; the impacts of chemical ideas on wider cultural concerns; and relationships between contemporary chemistry and other sciences. The authors demonstrate, assert, or tacitly assume that chemical explanation is functionally autonomous. This volume should he of interest not only to professional chemists and philosophers, but also to workers in medicine, psychology, and other fields in which relationships between explanations (...) based on diverse levels of description and investigation are important. (Listed on Google books). (shrink)

The Fifth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science was held at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, 27 August to 2 September 1975. The Congress was held under the auspices of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, and was sponsored by the National Research Council of Canada and the University of Western Ontario. As those associated closely with the work of the Division (...) over the years know well, the work undertaken by its members varies greatly and spans a number of fields not always obviously related. In addition, the volume of work done by first rate scholars and scientists in the various fields of the Division has risen enormously. For these and related reasons it seemed to the editors chosen by the Divisional officers that the usual format of publishing the proceedings of the Congress be abandoned in favour of a somewhat more flexible, and hopefully acceptable, method of pre sentation. Accordingly, the work of the invited participants to the Congress has been divided into four volumes appearing in the University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. The volumes are entitled, Logic, Foundations of Mathematics and Computability Theory, Foun dational Problems in the Special Sciences, Basic Problems in Methodol ogy and Linguistics, and Historical and Philosophical Dimensions of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

Museum professionalism remains an unexplored area in museum studies, particularly with regard to what is arguably the core generic question of a sui generis professional knowledge base, and its necessary and sufficient conditions. The need to examine this question becomes all the more important with the increasing expansion of the museum’s roles and functions. This paper starts by mapping out the policy and organizational context within which the roles of museums have expanded in the UK. It then situates the (...) discussion of museum professional knowledge within a cross-disciplinary matrix bearing on the question of what is professional about occupations classified—or classifiable—as professions. Against the backdrop of the current organizational context of the museum as well as theories of professional knowledge, it highlights the ways in which museum work, more specifically museography, poses a distinctive set of questions compared to other ‘professional’ fields; the paper thus homes in on the question of what it is that constitutes the uniqueness of museum professional knowledge in relation to museographic practice and the type of professional knowledge and expertise that can sustain it and enact its creative and educational potentials and affordances. (shrink)

1891. The recovered manuscript of Aristotle's Constitutional History of Athens, now for the first time given to the world from the unique text in the British...

Papers presented at the IVR 11th World Congress, Helsinki, 1983.