An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

works of art as products of thought and action, need not replicate or match any isolated“inner,”“private,”mental object, plan, i ...

Michael Baxandall has usefully developed in detail an account of inten- tions and reasons for action that are at work in the mak ...

Pluralism and constraint in interpretation: Abrams, Fish, and Derrida With this conception of the nature of an artist-agent’s re ...

itself from illusory linguistic constraints in order to become liberated, pro- ducing the meanings that it makes rather than dis ...

of when and in what way we have gone wrong...The use and understanding of language...depends on tacit consensual regularities wh ...

communication situation, then author and readers can be expected roughly to agree on construals of the text, and they agree that ...

of how our identities are necessarily caught up in antagonisms that run through civilization or as exclusively simply urging a r ...

writers, from Hegel to Virginia Woolf. There is every reason to think that in tracing these tropes Abrams is doing something spe ...

for literature.^22 That call was soon taken up by music critics who are also accomplished in philosophy, sociology, and literary ...

relations.”^28 Many artifacts–industrial or commercial or legal, for example– can be understood as coming into existence for a v ...

critic does, according to Isenberg, is give us“directions for perceiving”; the critic“guides us in the discrimination of details ...

I am suggesting that the concept“firm design”be matched with the interest of the picture. You may follow my prompting or not; an ...

This sadness in this piece of music, that is to say, is not a property whose presence can be verified by a sensibility-independe ...

political, perhaps unconscious, perhaps just sociohistorical) as the object of interpretation, quite apart from any concern with ...

choice of one work over another.”^45 Hence premise 2b is false as a description of all critical activity, and the conclusion, 3, ...

path of our becoming”^51 in illuminating ways while pulling back from claiming too much.^52 What calls for interpretation is the ...

different meanings for us–with somewhat altered subject matters fused differently to expressive and affective significances–afte ...

effusions on the part of the critic or one or another form of projection, in such a way that contact with the work is lost. But ...

sometimes seem as though we may never“really know”the“full meaning” of any work of art, even of any human utterance or act. But ...

7 Identifying and evaluating art Why we go on arguing about which works are good The identification and evaluation of objects or ...