An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

  • 1 The situation and tasks of the philosophy of art Preface to the second edition xi

    • Who needs a theory of art?

    • Philosophy as articulation

    • Art as a natural social practice

    • Action, gesture, and expressive freedom

    • Schiller on art, life, and modernity

    • Identification versus elucidation

    • What may we hope for from the philosophy of art?



  • 2 Representation, imitation, and resemblance

    • Representation and aboutness

    • Aristotle on imitation

    • Visual depiction, resemblance, and game-playing

    • Contemporary theories of depiction

    • Representing as natural, human, world-responsive activity

    • Distinctive functions of artistic representation



  • 3 Beauty and form

    • Beauty, absorption, and pleasure

    • Kant on natural and artistic beauty

    • General versus individual form

    • Beardsley’s theory of individual form

    • Criticisms of formalist-aesthetic theories of art

    • Defenses of the aesthetic interest of art



  • 4 Expression

    • and Collingwood Feelings about subject matters in life: Wordsworth, Tolstoy,

    • What is expressed in art? Hegel versus Danto

    • How is artistic expression achieved?

      • Collingwood’s psychodynamic theory

      • Physiognomic similarity theories

      • “Working-through”theories



    • Emotions and contemporary psychology

    • Why does artistic expression matter?



  • 5 Originality and imagination

    • Genius and the pursuit of the new: Kant

    • Hegel’s criticisms of subjectivism

    • Why originality matters: Adorno on free meaning-making

      • and feminism Criticisms of the pursuit of originality: postmodernism



    • Originality and imagination within common life

    • Creativity: Scruton and Coleridge on artistic imagination



  • 6 Understanding art

    • Six strategies for understanding art

    • The natures of thought and action: Hegel, Baxandall, and others

      • and Derrida Pluralism and constraint in interpretation: Abrams, Fish,

      • elements The special importance of the elucidation of formal-semantic



    • Nehamas and Felski on what calls for elucidatory interpretation

    • The possibility of agreement in understanding



  • 7 Identifying and evaluating art

    • Why we go on arguing about which works are good

    • Subjectivism and the sociology of taste: Smith and Bourdieu

    • Dickie’s institutional theory

    • Historical and narrative identifications: Levinson and Carroll

    • Objectivism: Mothersill and Savile

    • Hume on feeling and judgment

    • Kant on feeling and judgment

      • on taste Personal and/versus discussable: Isenberg, Scruton, and Cohen





  • 8 Art and emotion

    • Some varieties of emotional response

    • The paradox of fiction

    • Hume on tragedy: denying (1)

    • Making-believe and quasi-emotions: Walton, Levinson, and Feagin

    • Robinson on affective appraisals: denying (3)

      • Danto and Cohen on powers of attentive involvement

      • Aristotle on catharsis

      • Artistic making and the“working through”of emotion



    • 9 Art and morality

      • and others Some controversial cases: Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Finley,

      • Autonomism and experimentalism

      • Moralism and the clarification of thought and feeling

      • Clarificationism and responding to complexity

      • Art, propaganda, advertising, and cliché

      • Ethical understanding and working through puzzlement





  • 10 Art and society: some contemporary practices of art

    • The reproduction of social lifevis-à-vis“infinite satisfaction”

    • Art and modernity: Schiller and others

    • Lukács, Marcuse, and Adorno

      • and Althusser Structuralism and structural opposition in social life: Lévi Strauss



    • Foster’s postmodern sociocultural criticism

    • Avant-gardism and contemporary art

    • Can artistic beauty still matter? What about fun?

    • Art and social aspiration

      • avant-gardism, and constructivism Some contemporary practices of art: primitivism, vernacularism,





  • 11 Epilogue: the evidence of things not seen

  • Bibliography

  • Index

Free download pdf