DEATH OF PHILOSOPHY 8

Branches/doctrines

Metaphysics/Ontology, Epistemology, Aesthetics

1 A philosophical branch is a broad division of the overall subject. A philosophical doctrine is a particular
theory, principle, position, system, code of beliefs or body of teachings. These are the famous “-isms” of
Philosophy.

Within each branch, there are any number of related, similar or opposing doctrines covering different aspects of
the whole, although many doctrines overlap with, and may have repercussions in, more than one branch of
Philosophy. The distinction between philosophical doctines or theories, and the various movements or schools
of philosophy is sometimes blurred.
Philosophy as a whole is traditionally split into four or more main branches. The main four are:
Metaphysics
(the study of existence and the nature of reality)
Epistemology
(the study of knowledge, and how and what we know)
Ethics
(the study of how people should act, and what is good and valuable)
Aesthetics
(the study of basic philosophical questions about art and beauty)

In addition to these, two more branches are often added:

Logic
(the study of good reasoning, by valid inference and demonstration)
Political Philosophy
(the study of how people should
interact in a proper society)

In addition to these, there are other branches concerned with philosophical questions arising from other
disciplines, including:
Philosophy of Mind
(the study of the nature of mind, consciousness, etc)
Philosophy of Religion
(the study of the nature of religion, God, evil, prayer, etc)
Philosophy of Language
(the study of the nature, origins, and usage of language)
Philosophy of Education
(the study of the purpose, process, nature and ideals of education)
Philosophy of History
(the study of the eventual significance, if any, of human history)
Philosophy of Science
(the study of the assumptions, foundations, and implications of science)

Many others could be added to this list such as Philosophy of Law, Philosophy of Sociology, Philosophy of
Mathematics, Philosophy of Ethnology (also known as Ethnophilosophy), Philosophy of Psychology, even
Philosophy of Philosophy (also known as Meta-Philosophy). http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch.html

2 Before we look at the meaning of these so-called branches of philosophy, let us remind ourselves again of
some basics notions concerning philosophy and philosophizing. Why do we have philosophy of virtually
eveything? To answer this question we will exam the nature of philosophy, or what is understood by it. We use
philosophy to explain, investigate and understand something.
Philosophy as previously stated is derived from two Greek words philos, meaning love, and sophia meaning
wisdom. Philosoophos then refers to the love of wisdom. But what do we understand by wisdom? Some suggest
it refers to the ability (!!) to make sensible decisions and give good judgement. How is this possible or what is
required to be able to have this ability and give good judgement? It is again suggested that this is the case
because of the experience and knowledge that someone has. So to be able to be wise or have the state of wisdom
an individual have acquired knowledge (or rather the insights and understanding that might be developed from
and by means of this knowledge), he made a deliberate effort to acquire knowledge, for the sake of developing
insights and understanding. To be able to acquire knowledge for these reasons and individual already should be
in possession of the abilities of critical thinking and analysis so as to be able to make concrete, good
judgements.
How does one acquire the abilities of critical thinking anf analysis and what do these things mean? They imply,
among other things the motivation and ability for relevant questioning and pursuing this questioning. These
things imply the ability to reason, to pose relevant questions, to execute questioning and in the process identify
meaningful insights that can dissolve the questioning. The insights are not so much facts or factuak knowledge
bu understanding, understanding of the ideas the questioning was concerned with. Unless we view such ideas
and concepts as knowledge-contents, it seems as if this aspect of philosophy does not have any contents.
In the light of this generalizations concerning the nature and function of philosophy and philosophizing suggest
that philosophy is a way of exploring and simplying complex notions and statements made by such notions
about many, or any, areas of life and experiences of such things, with the aim of understanding them better and
thereby to make sense of them. If the reasoning aspect of this practice is emphasized it will be claimed that it is
a rational attempt to find answers to such questioning. This questioning consists of certain types of questions,
questions that ask about the how does anyone know something, what do they mean by what they say , write or
express and why is that the case. Such second order or meta questions require the exploration and identification
of reasons.
The discipline or activity of philosophy, the doing of philosophizing, often reveals one or more of these tyes or
modes - systematic speculation, making prescriptions but setting out standards, principles, grounds or criteria for
the making of decisions about and judgemens of what is the most appropriate, meaningul, correct, truthful way
of thinking, behaving or the values to subscribe to.
In the light of this it is sometimes said that philosophizing attempts to find rational and reasoned solutions
concerning fundamental questions of mankind in the spheres of say everyday life, law, morality, politics,
science, art, and other socio-cultural practices. Note that here we already have the involvement of the
philosophical discourse in other discourses or socio-cultural practices and the notion of different branches of
philosophy.
The third type or mode of philosophy, or aspect of some philosophical investigation is the so-called analytical.
This mode assists further in the exploration and understanding of mankind, its life-worlds, realities, universes
and behaviour. An analytic investigation uncovers and identifies what are the structures of meaningful frames of
reference (think of Kant’s projects) for the expression of thinking, thoughts, actions, perception, etc. By means
of analysis the usage and meanings of words, concepts or ideas that play a role in huamn perception, thinking,
and other aspects of consciousness are investigated, identified and revealed.
In the professional sense philosophy has come to bee seen as an academic subject that is characterized by
logical, consistent, systematic thinking or reasoning so as to reach sound, coherent and consistent staements and
conclusions made by means of such statements. The activity of philosophizing then refers to the attitude and the
motivation for questioning by means of analysis, synthesis (think of Hegel’s emphasis) and prescription of all
sorts of issues, concenrs and problems made by means of concepts. This attitude reveals characteristics and
refers to dispositions such as logical consistency, critical thinking, being objective, tentative and comprehensive.
All discourses, socio-cultural practices and disciplines have their own subject-matter or specialized areas of
study, and they developed distinct methods, techniques, practices and methodologies to deal with those things.
What are the unique characteristics of the philosophical discourse?
We can mention at least of these namely, the investigation of phenomena that questioning are concerned with,
by means of logical reasoning and examination, the identification of underlying assumptions and pre-
suppositons. All assumptions and their implicatiopns are identified in the process of this questioning concerning
problems and issues. All conclusions being reached are merely tentative and provisional as philosophizing has
no absolute authority to appeal to except the endless reasoned questioing.

3 In the process of this questioning the philosophical tradition developed clusters of questions and answers that
became institutionalized in the philosophical tradition as branches of philosophy. Four of these are metaphysics
as the study of the fundamental nature (Ontology concerning what there is and how those things are. What
kinds of things exist? Do only particular things exist or do general things also exist? How is existence possible?
Questions as to identity and change of objects—are you the same person you were as a baby? as of yesterday?
as of a moment ago?) of reality, focusing on problems concerning this. Epistemology concerning how this
nature is known or how do we obtain knowledge, what is meant by knowing and knowledge and what makes
beliefs meaningful, justified knowledge and not mere opinion. The third branch namely logic - the study of
reasoning as employed by the first two branches and the foundations of mathematics and the fourth branch
namely ethics. The latter concerns the study of the good and how to act with respect to the good.
4 http://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/what.shtml
One reasonably good beginning characterization of philosophy is that philos-
ophy is the sustained inquiry into the principles and presuppositions of any
1. eld of inquiry. As such, philosophy is not a subject of study like other fields
of knowledge.
Any given fi eld of inquiry can have philosophical roots and ex-
tensions. From the philosophy of restaurant management to the philosophy
of physics, philosophy can be characterized as an attitude, an approach, or
perhaps, even sometimes a calling, to ask, answer, or comment upon certain
kinds of questions. These questions involve the nature, scope, and bound-
aries of practically any eld of interest in the humanities, arts, and sciences.
Philosophy is often concerned with the assumptions upon which a eld of in-
quiry is based, and these questions directly relate to the results discovered in
that eld of inquiry. In general, then, philosophy is both an activity involving
thinking about these kinds of ultimate questions and an activity involving
the construction of sound reasons or insights into our most basic assumptions
about understanding our lives and our place in the universe.

Quite often, simply asking a series of “why-questions" can reveal these

basic presuppositions. Children often ask such questions, sometimes to the
annoyance of their parents, in order to get a feel for the way the world works.
Asking an exhaustive sequence of why-questions can reveal principles upon
which life is based.
Occasionally, a major aspect of philosophy is its role as a metadiscipline. Just
as, for example, philosophical psychology is a metadiscipline, so likewise is philoso-
phy of philosophy a metadiscipline|a study of a study, so to speak. Nevertheless,
\anti-philosophies," such as those rejecting the use of reasoning and logic, are not
metaphilosophies but are normally considered part of philosophy.
http://www.slideshare.net/RightJungle/the-branches-of-philosophy-pdf

5 Another way of presenting the branches of philosophy.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Philosophy/The_Branches_of_Philosophy
1.1 Epistemology
1.2 Metaphysics
1.3 Logic
1.4 Ethics
1.5 Other Branches
http://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/what.shtml
http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/FiveBranchesMain.html
Philosophy can be divided into five branches which address the following questions:

Metaphysics Study of Existence What's out there?

Epistemology Study of Knowledge How do I know about it?
Ethics Study of Action What should I do?
Politics Study of Force What actions are permissible?
Esthetics Study of Art What can life be like?

There is a hierarchical relationship between these branches as can be seen in the Concept Chart.
(http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Chart.html) At the root is Metaphysics, the study of existence and the
nature of existence. Closely related is Epistemology, the study of knowledge and how we know about reality and
existence. Dependent on Epistemology is Ethics, the study of how man should act. Ethics is dependent on
Epistemology because it is impossible to make choices without knowledge. A subset of Ethics is Politics: the
study of how men should interact in a proper society and what constitutes proper. Esthetics, the study of art and
sense of life is slightly separate, but depends on Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics.

6 Although the two main branches or areas of the philosophical discourse namely metaphysics/ontology and
epistemology were dealt with in previous chapters, I deal with them again as background to the discussion of
other so-called branches of philosophy.
Philosophy as a whole is traditionally split into four or more main branches. The main four are:
Metaphysics
(the study of existence and the nature of reality)
Epistemology
(the study of knowledge, and how and what we know)
Ethics
(the study of how people should act, and what is good and valuable)
Aesthetics
(the study of basic philosophical questions about art and beauty)

In addition to these, two more branches are often added:

Logic
(the study of good reasoning, by valid inference and demonstration)
Political Philosophy
(the study of how people should
interact in a proper society)

In addition to these, there are other branches concerned with philosophical questions arising from other
disciplines, including:
Philosophy of Mind
(the study of the nature of mind, consciousness, etc)
Philosophy of Religion
(the study of the nature of religion, God, evil, prayer, etc)
Philosophy of Language
(the study of the nature, origins, and usage of language)
Philosophy of Education
(the study of the purpose, process, nature and ideals of education)
Philosophy of History
(the study of the eventual significance, if any, of human history)
Philosophy of Science
(the study of the assumptions, foundations, and implications of science)

Many others could be added to this list such as Philosophy of Law, Philosophy of Sociology, Philosophy of
Mathematics, Philosophy of Ethnology (also known as Ethnophilosophy), Philosophy of Psychology, even
Philosophy of Philosophy (also known as Meta-Philosophy).
http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_metaphysics.html

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of existence, being and the world. Arguably,
metaphysics is the foundation of philosophy: Aristotle calls it "first philosophy" (or sometimes just "wisdom"),
and says it is the subject that deals with "first causes and the principles of things".

It asks questions like: "What is the nature of reality?", "How does the world exist, and what is its origin or
source of creation?", "Does the world exist outside the mind?", "How can the incorporeal mind affect the
physical body?", "If things exist, what is their objective nature?", "Is there a God (or many gods, or no god at
all)?"
Note : does it really lie in the scope of contempoprary philosophy to ask and investigate these questions in a
meaningful manner? Especially considering the existence of disciplines (that did not exist t the time of Aristotle)
such as physics, theoretical physics, chemistry, neuro- and cognitive sciences, psychology, biology, etc?

Originally, the Greek word "metaphysika" (literally "after physics") merely indicated that part of Aristotle's
oeuvre which came, in its sequence, after those chapters which dealt with physics. Later, it was misinterpreted
by Medieval commentators on the classical texts as that which is above or beyond the physical, and so over time
metaphysics has effectively become the study of that which transcends physics.

Aritstotle originally split his metaphysics into three main sections and these remain the main branches of
metaphysics:

Ontology (the study of being and existence, including the definition and classification of entities, physical or
mental, the nature of their properties, and the nature of change)
 Natural Theology (the study of God, including the nature of religion and the world, existence of the divine,
questions about the creation, and the various other religious or spiritual issues)
Universal Science (the study of first principles of logic and reasoning, such as the law of noncontradiction)

Metaphysics has been attacked, at different times in history, as being futile and overly vague, particularly by
David Hume, Immanuel Kant and A.J. Ayer. It may be more useful to say that a metaphysical statement usually
implies an idea about the world or the universe, which may seem reasonable but is ultimately not empirically
verifiable, testable or provable.

Note: what is the status of such speculations by philosophers or laymen, when the questions are not posed
within in of the disciplines?

Existence and Consciousness

Existence (the fact or state of continued being) is axiomatic (meaning that it does not rest upon anything in order
to be valid, and it cannot be proven by any "more basic" premises) because it is necessary for all knowledge and
it cannot be denied without conceding its truth (a denial of something is only possible if existence exists).
"Existence exists" is therefore an axiom which states that there is something, as opposed to nothing.

Consciousness is the faculty which perceives and identifies things that exist. In his famous formulation "Cogito
ergo sum" ("I think therefore I am"), René Descartes argued that consciousness is axiomatic, because you cannot
logically deny your mind's existence at the same time as using your mind to do the denying.

However, what Descartes did not make clear is that consciousness is the faculty that perceives that which exists,
so it requires something outside of itself in order to function: it requires, and is dependent upon, existence. The
primacy of existence states that existence is primary and consciousness is secondary, because there can be no
consciousness without something existing to perceive. Existence is independent of, makes possible, and is a
prerequisite of consciousness. Consciousness is not responsible for creating reality: it is completely dependent
upon reality.

Note: What is meant by the umbrella word consciousness? Do any of these meanings lie within the scope of the
philosophical discourse, philosophical investigation, reasoning, analysis and clarification? Are there not
disciplines that have more suitable frames of reference, terms, methods and techniques thatn philosophical
speculaltion to deal with ‘consciousness’?

Mind and Matter

Early debates on the nature of matter centred on identifying a single underlying principle (Monism): water was
claimed by Thales, air by Anaximenes, Apeiron (meaning "the undefined infinite") by Anaximander, and fire by
Heraclitus. Democritus conceived an atomic theory (Atomism) many centuries before it was accepted by
modern science.

The nature of the mind and its relation to the body has also exercised the best brains for millennia. There is a
large overlap here with Philosophy of Mind, which is is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the
mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties and consciousness, and their relationship to the
physical body.

Note: see what I stated above concerning consciousness a sit is also applicable to the vague, umbreall notion of
mind.

In the 17th Century, Descartes proposed a Dualist solution called Substance Dualism (or Cartesian Dualism)
whereby the mind and body are totally separate and different: the mental does not have extension in space, and
the material cannot think.

Idealists, like Bishop George Berkeley and the German Idealist school, claim that material objects do not exist
unless perceived (Idealism is essentially a Monist, rather than Dualist, theory in that there is a single universal
substance or principle).
Baruch Spinoza and Bertrand Russell both adopted, in different ways, a dual-aspect theory called Neutral
Monism, which claims that existence consists of a single substance which in itself is neither mental nor physical,
but is capable of mental and physical aspects or attributes.

In the last century, science (particularly atomic theory, evolution, computer technology and neuroscience) has
demonstrated many ways in which mind and brain interact in a physical way, but the exact nature of the
relationship is still open to debate. The dominant metaphysics in the 20th Century has therefore been various
versions of Physicalism (or Materialism), a Monist solution which explains matter and mind as merely aspects
of each other, or derivatives of a neutral substance.

Objects and their Properties

The world contains many individual things (objects or particulars), both physical and abstract, and what these
things have in common with each other are called universals or properties. Metaphysicians are interested in the
nature of objects and their properties, and the relationship between the two (see the sections on Realism and
Nominalism).

The problem of universals arises when people start to consider in what sense it is possible for a property to exist
in more than one place at the same time (e.g. a red car and a red rose). It seems clear that there are many red
things, for example, but is there an existing property of 'redness'? And if there is such a thing as 'redness', what
kind of thing is it? See the section on Realism for a further discussion of this.

Any object or entity is the sum of its parts (see Holism). The identity of an entity composed of other entities can
be explained by reference to the identity of the building blocks, and how they are interacting. A house can be
explained by reference to the wood, metal, and glass that are combined in that particular way to form the house;
or it could be explained in terms of the atoms that form it (see the sections on Atomism and Reductionism).

Note: mere speculation by means of philosophical notions. For more analysis of the notion of particulars see
Strawson’s book on this matter.

Identity and Change

Identity is whatever makes an entity definable and recognizable, in terms of possessing a set of qualities or
characteristics that distinguish it from entities of a different type (effectively, whatever makes something the
same or different). Thus, according to Leibniz, if some object x is identical to some object y, then any property
that x has, y will have as well, and vice versa (otherwise, by definition, they would not be identical).

Aristotle's Law of Identity (or the Axiom of Identity) states that to exist, an existent (i.e. an entity that exists)
must have a particular identity. A thing cannot exist without existing as something, otherwise it would be
nothing and it would not exist. Also, to have an identity means to have a single identity: an object cannot have
two identities at the same time or in the same respect. The concept of identity is important because it makes
explicit that reality has a definite nature, which makes it knowable and, since it exists in a particular way, it has
no contradictions (when two ideas each make the other impossible).

Change is the alteration of identities, whether it be a stone falling to earth or a log burning to ash. For something
to change (which is an effect), it needs to be acted on (caused) by a previous action. Causality is the law that
states that each cause has a specific effect, and that this effect is dependent on the initial identities of the agents
involved.

We are intuitively aware of change occurring over time (e.g. a tree loses a leaf). The Ancient Greeks took some
extreme positions on the nature of change: Parmenides denied that change occurs at all, while Heraclitus thought
change was ubiquitous.

Currently there are three main theories which deal with the problem of change:

Mereological Essentialism assumes that an object's parts are essential to it, and therefore that an object cannot
persist through any change of its parts.
Perdurantism holds that objects are effectively 4-dimensional entities made up of a series of temporal parts
like the frames of a movie (it treats the tree, then, as a series of tree-stages).
 Endurantism, on the other hand, holds that a whole object - and the same object - exists at each moment of its
history, (so that the same tree persists regardless of how many leaves it loses).

Note: add to questions concerning the above by exploring process philosophy.

Space and Time

A traditional Realist position is that time and space have existence independent from the human mind. Idealists,
however, claim that space and time are mental constructs used to organize perceptions, or are otherwise unreal.

Descartes and Leibniz believed that, without physical objects, "space" would be meaningless because space is
the framework upon which we understand how physical objects are related to each other. Sir Isaac Newton, on
the other hand, argued for an absolute space ("container space"), which can continue to exist in the absence of
matter. With the work of Sir Albert Einstein, the pendulum swung back to relational space in which space is
composed of relations between objects, with the implication that it cannot exist in the absence of matter.

Although Parmenides denied the flow of time completely in ancient times, echoed more recently by the British
Idealist J.M.E. McTaggart (1866 - 1925), much debate in both philosophy and physics has centred on the
direction of time ("time's arrow"), and whether it is reversible or symmetrical. As for whether objects persist
over time, then the endurantism / perdurantism dichotomy described above applies.

Note: Light years is not a measurement of time but of space. It is a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to
the distance that light travels in one year, which is 9.4607 × 1012 km (nearly 6 trillion miles). A light-year (or
light year, abbreviation: ly[3]) is a unit of length used informally to express astronomical distances. It is
approximately 9 petametres, or 9 trillion kilometres (or about 6 trillion miles).[note 1] As defined by the
International Astronomical Union (IAU), a light-year is the distance that light travels in vacuum in one Julian
year (365.25 days).Because it includes the word year, the term light-year is sometimes misinterpreted as a unit
of time.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-year

The light-year is most often used when expressing distances to stars and other distances on a galactic scale,
especially in non-specialist and popular science publications. The unit usually used in professional astrometry is
the parsec (symbol: pc, approximately 3.26 light-years; the distance at which one astronomical unit subtends an
angle of one second of arc).

A unit of time is any particular time interval, used as a standard way of measuring or expressing duration. The
base unit of time in the International System of Units (SI), and by extension most of the Western world, is the
second, defined as about 9 billion oscillations of the caesium atom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_time

1 Historical
2 Scientific time units
3 List
4 Units of time interrelated
5 References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time
Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession
from the past through the present to the future.[1][2][3] Time is a component quantity of various measurements
used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates
of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience.[4][5][6][7] Time is often referred to as
the fourth dimension, along with the three spatial dimensions.[8]

Time has long been an important subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a
manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars.[2][6][7][9][10][11]
Nevertheless, diverse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all
incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems.[12][13][14] Two contrasting
viewpoints on time divide prominent philosophers. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of
the universe—a dimension independent of events, in which events occur in sequence. Isaac Newton subscribed
to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time.[15][16] The opposing view is that
time does not refer to any kind of "container" that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that
"flows", but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number)
within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz[17]
and Immanuel Kant,[18][19] holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor
can it be travelled.
Oxford Dictionaries:Time". Oxford University Press. 2011. Retrieved 18 December 2011. "the indefinite
continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole"

"Webster's New World College Dictionary". 2010. Retrieved 9 April 2011. "1.indefinite, unlimited duration in
which things are considered as happening in the past, present, or future; every moment there has ever been or
ever will be… a system of measuring duration 2.the period between two events or during which something
exists, happens, or acts; measured or measurable interval"
"The American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary". 2002. Retrieved 9 April 2011. "A duration or
relation of events expressed in terms of past, present, and future, and measured in units such as minutes, hours,
days, months, or years."
"Collins Language.com". HarperCollins. 2011. Retrieved 18 December 2011. "1. The continuous passage of
existence in which events pass from a state of potentiality in the future, through the present, to a state of finality
in the past. 2. physics a quantity measuring duration, usually with reference to a periodic process such as the
rotation of the earth or the frequency of electromagnetic radiation emitted from certain atoms. In classical
mechanics, time is absolute in the sense that the time of an event is independent of the observer. According to
the theory of relativity it depends on the observer's frame of reference. Time is considered as a fourth coordinate
required, along with three spatial coordinates, to specify an event."
"The American Heritage Science Dictionary @dictionary.com". 2002. Retrieved 9 April 2011. "1. A
continuous, measurable quantity in which events occur in a sequence proceeding from the past through the
present to the future. 2a. An interval separating two points of this quantity; a duration. 2b. A system or reference
frame in which such intervals are measured or such quantities are calculated."
"Eric Weisstein's World of Science". 2007. Retrieved 9 April 2011. "A quantity used to specify the order in
which events occurred and measure the amount by which one event preceded or followed another. In special
relativity, ct (where c is the speed of light and t is time), plays the role of a fourth dimension."

"Time". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Fourth ed.). Houghton Mifflin Company.
2011. "A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past
through the present to the future."
Merriam-Webster Dictionary the measured or measurable period during which an action, process, or condition
exists or continues : duration; a nonspatial continuum which is measured in terms of events that succeed one
another from past through present to future
Compact Oxford English Dictionary A limited stretch or space of continued existence, as the interval between
two successive events or acts, or the period through which an action, condition, or state continues. (1971)

"Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy". 2010. Retrieved 9 April 2011. "Time is what clocks measure. We use
time to place events in sequence one after the other, and we use time to compare how long events last... Among
philosophers of physics, the most popular short answer to the question "What is physical time?" is that it is not a
substance or object but rather a special system of relations among instantaneous events. This working definition
is offered by Adolf Grünbaum who applies the contemporary mathematical theory of continuity to physical
processes, and he says time is a linear continuum of instants and is a distinguished one-dimensional sub-space of
four-dimensional spacetime."
"Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on Random House Dictionary". 2010. Retrieved 9 April 2011. "1. the
system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future; indefinite and
continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another.... 3. (sometimes initial capital letter) a
system or method of measuring or reckoning the passage of time: mean time; apparent time; Greenwich Time. 4.
a limited period or interval, as between two successive events: a long time.... 14. a particular or definite point in
time, as indicated by a clock: What time is it? ... 18. an indefinite, frequently prolonged period or duration in the
future: Time will tell if what we have done here today was right."
Ivey, Donald G.; Hume, J.N.P. (1974). Physics. 1. Ronald Press. p. 65. "Our operational definition of time is
that time is what clocks measure."

Le Poidevin, Robin (Winter 2004). "The Experience and Perception of Time". In Edward N. Zalta. The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 9 April 2011.
"Newton did for time what the Greek geometers did for space, idealized it into an exactly measurable
dimension." About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, Paul Davies, p. 31, Simon & Schuster, 1996, ISBN
978-0684818221
Sean M Carroll (2009). From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. Dutton. ISBN 978-
0-525-95133-9.
Adam Frank, Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang, "the time we imagined from the cosmos
and the time we imagined into the human experience turn out to be woven so tightly together that we have lost
the ability to see each of them for what it is." p. xv, Free Press, 2011, ISBN 978-1439169599
St. Augustine, Confessions, Simon & Brown, 2012, ISBN 978-1613823262
Official Baseball Rules, 2011 Edition (2011). "Rules 8.03 and 8.04" (Free PDF download). Major League
Baseball. Retrieved 7 July 2012. "Rule 8.03 Such preparatory pitches shall not consume more than one minute
of time...Rule 8.04 When the bases are unoccupied, the pitcher shall deliver the ball to the batter within 12
seconds...The 12-second timing starts when the pitcher is in possession of the ball and the batter is in the box,
alert to the pitcher. The timing stops when the pitcher releases the ball"
"Guinness Book of Baseball World Records". Guinness World Records, Ltd. Retrieved 7 July 2012. "The record
for the fastest time for circling the bases is 13.3 seconds, set by Evar Swanson at Columbus, Ohio in 1932...The
greatest reliably recorded speed at which a baseball has been pitched is 100.9 mph by Lynn Nolan Ryan
(California Angels) at Anaheim Stadium in California on 20 August 1974."
Zeigler, Kenneth (2008). Getting organized at work : 24 lessons to set goals, establish priorities, and manage
your time. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 9780071591386. 108 pages
Rynasiewicz, Robert : Johns Hopkins University (12 August 2004). "Newton's Views on Space, Time, and
Motion". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. Retrieved 5 February 2012. "Newton did
not regard space and time as genuine substances (as are, paradigmatically, bodies and minds), but rather as real
entities with their own manner of existence as necessitated by God's existence ... To paraphrase: Absolute, true,
and mathematical time, from its own nature, passes equably without relation to anything external, and thus
without reference to any change or way of measuring of time (e.g., the hour, day, month, or year)."
Markosian, Ned. "Time". In Edward N. Zalta. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2002 Edition).
Retrieved 23 September 2011. "The opposing view, normally referred to either as “Platonism with Respect to
Time” or as “Absolutism with Respect to Time,” has been defended by Plato, Newton, and others. On this view,
time is like an empty container into which events may be placed; but it is a container that exists independently
of whether or not anything is placed in it."
Burnham, Douglas : Staffordshire University (2006). "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) Metaphysics – 7.
Space, Time, and Indiscernibles". The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 9 April 2011. "First of all,
Leibniz finds the idea that space and time might be substances or substance-like absurd (see, for example,
"Correspondence with Clarke," Leibniz's Fourth Paper, §8ff). In short, an empty space would be a substance
with no properties; it will be a substance that even God cannot modify or destroy.... That is, space and time are
internal or intrinsic features of the complete concepts of things, not extrinsic.... Leibniz's view has two major
implications. First, there is no absolute location in either space or time; location is always the situation of an
object or event relative to other objects and events. Second, space and time are not in themselves real (that is,
not substances). Space and time are, rather, ideal. Space and time are just metaphysically illegitimate ways of
perceiving certain virtual relations between substances. They are phenomena or, strictly speaking, illusions
(although they are illusions that are well-founded upon the internal properties of substances).... It is sometimes
convenient to think of space and time as something "out there," over and above the entities and their relations to
each other, but this convenience must not be confused with reality. Space is nothing but the order of co-existent
objects; time nothing but the order of successive events. This is usually called a relational theory of space and
time."
Mattey, G. J. : UC Davis (22 January 1997). "Critique of Pure Reason, Lecture notes: Philosophy 175 UC
Davis". Retrieved 9 April 2011. "What is correct in the Leibnizian view was its anti-metaphysical stance. Space
and time do not exist in and of themselves, but in some sense are the product of the way we represent things.
The[y] are ideal, though not in the sense in which Leibniz thought they are ideal (figments of the imagination).
The ideality of space is its mind-dependence: it is only a condition of sensibility.... Kant concluded "absolute
space is not an object of outer sensation; it is rather a fundamental concept which first of all makes possible all
such outer sensation."...Much of the argumentation pertaining to space is applicable, mutatis mutandis, to time,
so I will not rehearse the arguments. As space is the form of outer intuition, so time is the form of inner
intuition.... Kant claimed that time is real, it is "the real form of inner intuition.""
McCormick, Matt : California State University, Sacramento (2006). "Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) Metaphysics:
4. Kant's Transcendental Idealism". The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 9 April 2011. "Time,
Kant argues, is also necessary as a form or condition of our intuitions of objects. The idea of time itself cannot
be gathered from experience because succession and simultaneity of objects, the phenomena that would indicate
the passage of time, would be impossible to represent if we did not already possess the capacity to represent
objects in time.... Another way to put the point is to say that the fact that the mind of the knower makes the a
priori contribution does not mean that space and time or the categories are mere figments of the imagination.
Kant is an empirical realist about the world we experience; we can know objects as they appear to us. He gives a
robust defense of science and the study of the natural world from his argument about the mind's role in making
nature. All discursive, rational beings must conceive of the physical world as spatially and temporally unified,
he argues."

Accurate time vs. PC Clock Difference

Exploring Time from Planck Time to the lifespan of the universe
Different systems of measuring time
Time on In Our Time at the BBC. (listen now)
Time in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Bradley Dowden.
Le Poidevin, Robin (Winter 2004). "The Experience and Perception of Time". In Edward N. Zalta. The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 9 April 2011.
Time at Open Directory

Religion and Spirituality

Theology is the study of God and the nature of the Divine. This is sometimes considered a whole separate
branch of philosophy, the Philosophy of Religion (see that section for more detail). It asks questions like:

Does the Divine intervene directly in the world (Theism), or is its sole function to be the first cause of the
universe (Deism)?
Is there one God (Monotheism), many gods (Polytheism) or no gods (Atheism or Humanism), or is it
impossible to know (Agnosticism)?
Are God and the universe identical (Pantheism, Monism) or are they different (Panentheism, Dualism)?
Does religious belief depends on faith and revelation (Fideism), or on reason (Deism)?

Note: Philosophy does not have unique or special methods, tools and techniques to investigate or speculate
meaningfully or more meaningfully than theology and other disciplines about these things.

Within Western Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, and theology in general, reached it peak with Medieval
Christian schools of thought like Scholasticism.

Necessity and Possibility

A necessary fact is true across all possible worlds (that is, we could not imagine it to be otherwise). A possible
fact is one that is true in some possible world, even if not in the actual world. This idea of possible worlds was
first introduced by Gottfried Leibniz, although others have dealt with it in much more detail since, notably the
American analytic philosopher David Lewis (1941 - 2001) in his theory of Modal Realism.

The concept of necessity and contingency (another term used in philosophy to describe the possibility of
something happening or not happening) is also central to some of the arguments used to justify the existence or
non-existence of God, notably the Cosmological Argument from Contingency (see the section on Philosophy of
Religion for more details).

Abstract Objects and Mathematics

Some philosophers hold that there are abstract objects (such as numbers, mathematical objects and fictional
entities) and universals (properties that can be possessed by multiple objects, such as "redness" or "squareness"),
both of which which are outside of space and time and/or are causally inert.

Realism, best exemplified by Plato and his Platonic Forms, teaches that universals really exist, independently
and somehow prior to the world.

On the other hand, (Nominalism), holds that there is really no such thing as abstract objects, which really exist
only as names, because a single object cannot exist in multiple places simultaneously.

Moderate Realism, as espoused by Aristotle among others, tries to find some middle ground between
Nominalism and Realism, and holds that there is no realm as such in which universals exist, but rather they are
located in space and time wherever they happen to be manifest. Conceptualism, the doctrine that universals exist
only within the mind and have no external or substantial reality, is also an intermediate solution.

Other positions such as Formalism and Fictionalism do not attribute any existence to mathematical entities, and
are anti-Realist.

The Philosophy of Mathematics overlaps with metaphysics in this area.

Determinism and Free Will

Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition, decision and action,
is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.Thus, there is at any instant only one
physically possible future, and no random, spontaneous, mysterious or miraculous events ever occur.

This posits that there is no such thing as Free Will, where rational agents can exercise control over their own
actions and decisions. Incompatibilists (or Hard Determinists) like Baruch Spinoza, view determinism and free
will as mutually exclusive. Others, labelled Compatibilists (or Soft Determinists), like Thomas Hobbes, believe
that the two ideas can be coherently reconciled.

It should be noted that Determinism does not necessarily mean that humanity or individual humans have no
influence on the future (that is known as Fatalism), just that the level to which human beings have influence
over their future is itself dependent on present and past.

Cosmology and Cosmogony

Cosmology is the branch of metaphysics that deals with the world as the totality of all phenomena in space and
time. Historically, it was often founded in religion; in modern use it addresses questions about the world and the
universe which are beyond the scope of physical science. Cosmogony deals specifically with the origin of the
universe, but the two concepts are closely related.

Pantheists, such as Spinoza, believe that God and the universe are one and the same. Panentheists, such as
Plotinus, believe that the entire universe is part of God, but that God is greater than the universe. Deists, such as
Voltaire, believe that God created the universe, set everything in motion, and then had nothing more to do with
it. See the section on Philosophy of Religion for more details.
Major Doctrines Back to Top

Under the heading of Metaphysics, the major doctrines or theories include:

Agnosticism
Atheism
Atomism
Deism
Determinism
Dualism
Essentialism
Existentialism
Fideism
Idealism
Intellectualism
Materialism
Monism
Monotheism
Naturalism
Nominalism
Nihilism
Objectivism
Panentheism
Pantheism
Phenomenology
Physicalism
Pluralism
Polytheism
Realism
Reductionism
Relativism
Solipsism
Subjectivism
Theism
Voluntarism

7 The second so-called branch of traditional philosophical speculation is epistemology. So I repeat what I
mentioned on this topic in an earlier chapter as it was, is, usually closely associated with certain notions of
philosophy, philosophical subject-matter and philosophizing.

Epistemology is the study of the nature and scope of knowledge and justified belief. It analyzes the nature of
knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief and justification. It also deals with the
means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims. It is essentailly
about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry.

Note: Can someone from outside specialized disciplines, eg physics, mathematics, visual art, chemistry, biology,
zoology, etc really make meaningful jdgements on what is opinion, justified belief, meaningful knowledge,
acceptable and suitable methods, techniques, tools, concepts etc in any of these or other disciplines? More so
than experts of those disciplines can? What kind of tools will philosophy use to make such judgements? What
methods and techniques and concepts or terms will it employ to investigate these problems and come up with
acceptable, logical, rational, meaningful and truthful answers?

Epistemology asks questions like: "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", "What do people
know?", "What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge?", "What is its structure, and what are
its limits?", "What makes justified beliefs justified?", "How we are to understand the concept of justification?",
"Is justification internal or external to one's own mind?"

The kind of knowledge usually discussed in Epistemology is propositional knowledge, "knowledge-that" as

opposed to "knowledge-how" (for example, the knowledge that "2 + 2 = 4", as opposed to the knowledge of
how to go about adding two numbers).

What Is Knowledge?

Note: As stated in the note above -

Can someone from outside specialized disciplines, eg physics, mathematics, visual art, chemistry, biology,
zoology, etc really make meaningful jdgements on what is opinion, justified belief, meaningful knowledge,
acceptable and suitable methods, techniques, tools, concepts etc in any of these or other disciplines? More so
than experts of those disciplines can? What kind of tools will philosophy use to make such judgements? What
methods and techniques and concepts or terms will it employ to investigate these problems and come up with
acceptable, logical, rational, meaningful and truthful answers?

Knowledge is the awareness and understanding of particular aspects of reality. It is the clear, lucid information
gained through the process of reason applied to reality. The traditional approach is that knowledge requires three
necessary and sufficient conditions, so that knowledge can then be defined as "justified true belief":

truth: since false propositions cannot be known - for something to count as knowledge, it must actually be
true. As Aristotle famously (but rather confusingly) expressed it: "To say of something which is that it is not, or
to say of something which is not that it is, is false. However, to say of something which is that it is, or of
something which is not that it is not, is true."
belief: because one cannot know something that one doesn't even believe in, the statement "I know x, but I
don't believe that x is true" is contradictory.
justification: as opposed to believing in something purely as a matter of luck.

The most contentious part of all this is the definition of justification, and there are several schools of thought on
the subject:
 According to Evidentialism, what makes a belief justified in this sense is the possession of evidence - a belief
is justified to the extent that it fits a person's evidence.
Different varieties of Reliabilism suggest that either: 1) justification is not necessary for knowledge provided
it is a reliably-produced true belief; or 2) justification is required but any reliable cognitive process (e.g. vision)
is sufficient justification.
Yet another school, Infallibilism, holds that a belief must not only be true and justified, but that the
justification of the belief must necessitate its truth, so that the justification for the belief must be infallible.

Another debate focuses on whether justification is external or internal:

Externalism holds that factors deemed "external" (meaning outside of the psychological states of those who
are gaining the knowledge) can be conditions of knowledge, so that if the relevant facts justifying a proposition
are external then they are acceptable.
Internalism, on the other hand, claims that all knowledge-yielding conditions are within the psychological
states of those who gain knowledge.

As recently as 1963, the American philosopher Edmund Gettier called this traditional theory of knowledge into
question by claiming that there are certain circumstances in which one does not have knowledge, even when all
of the above conditions are met (his Gettier-cases).
For example: Suppose that the clock on campus (which keeps accurate time and is well maintained) stopped
working at 11:56pm last night, and has yet to be repaired. On my way to my noon class, exactly twelve hours
later, I glance at the clock and form the belief that the time is 11:56. My belief is true, of course, since the time
is indeed 11:56. And my belief is justified, as I have no reason to doubt that the clock is working, and I cannot
be blamed for basing beliefs about the time on what the clock says. Nonetheless, it seems evident that I do not
know that the time is 11:56. After all, if I had walked past the clock a bit earlier or a bit later, I would have
ended up with a false belief rather than a true one.

How Is Knowledge Acquired?

Propositional knowledge can be of two types, depending on its source:

a priori (or non-empirical), where knowledge is possible independently of, or prior to, any experience, and
requires only the use of reason (e.g. knowledge of logical truths and of abstract claims); or
a posteriori (or empirical), where knowledge is possible only subsequent, or posterior, to certain sense
experiences, in addition to the use of reason (e.g. knowledge of the colour or shape of a physical object, or
knowledge of geographical locations).

Knowledge of empirical facts about the physical world will necessarily involve perception, in other words, the
use of the senses. But all knowledge requires some amount of reasoning, the analysis of data and the drawing of
inferences. Intuition is often believed to be a sort of direct access to knowledge of the a priori.

Memory allows us to know something that we knew in the past, even, perhaps, if we no longer remember the
original justification. Knowledge can also be transmitted from one individual to another via testimony (that is,
my justification for a particular belief could amount to the fact that some trusted source has told me that it is
true).

There are a few main theories of knowledge acquisition:

Empiricism, which emphasizes the role of experience, especially experience based on perceptual observations
by the five senses in the formation of ideas, while discounting the notion of innate ideas. Refinements of this
basic principle led to Phenomenalism, Positivism, Scientism and Logical Positivism.
Rationalism, which holds that knowledge is not derived from experience, but rather is acquired by a priori
processes or is innate (in the form of concepts) or intuitive.
Representationalism (or Indirect Realism or Epistemological Dualism), which holds that the world we see in
conscious experience is not the real world itself, but merely a miniature virtual-reality replica of that world in an
internal representation.
Constructivism (or Constructionism), which presupposes that all knowledge is "constructed", in that it is
contingent on convention, human perception and social experience.

What Can People Know?

The fact that any given justification of knowledge will itself depend on another belief for its justification appears
to lead to an infinite regress.
Skepticism begins with the apparent impossibility of completing this infinite chain of reasoning, and argues that,
ultimately, no beliefs are justified and therefore no one really knows anything.

Fallibilism also claims that absolute certainty about knowledge is impossible, or at least that all claims to
knowledge could, in principle, be mistaken. Unlike Skepticism, however, Fallibilism does not imply the need to
abandon our knowledge, just to recognize that, because empirical knowledge can be revised by further
observation, any of the things we take as knowledge might possibly turn out to be false.

In response to this regress problem, various schools of thought have arisen:

Foundationalism claims that some beliefs that support other beliefs are foundational and do not themselves
require justification by other beliefs (self-justifying or infallible beliefs or those based on perception or certain a
priori considerations).
Instrumentalism is the methodological view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments, and
their worth is measured by how effective they are in explaining and predicting phenomena. Instrumentalism
therefore denies that theories are truth-evaluable. Pragmatism is a similar concept, which holds that something is
true only insofar as it works and has practical consequences.
Infinitism typically take the infinite series to be merely potential, and an individual need only have the ability
to bring forth the relevant reasons when the need arises. Therefore, unlike most traditional theories of
justification, Infinitism considers an infinite regress to be a valid justification.
Coherentism holds that an individual belief is justified circularly by the way it fits together (coheres) with the
rest of the belief system of which it is a part, so that the regress does not proceed according to a pattern of linear
justification.
Foundherentism is another position which is meant to be a unification of foundationalism and coherentism.

Major Doctrines

Under the heading of Epistemology, the major doctrines or theories include:

Constructivism
Deconstructionism
Empiricism
Externalism
Fallibilism
Foundationalism
Historicism
Holism
Internalism
Instrumentalism
Logical Positivism (Logical Empiricism)
Ordinary Language Philosophy
Phenomenalism
Positivism
Pragmatism
Rationalism
Representationalism
Scientism
Skepticism
Verificationism

8 Diagram showing the branches of philosophy - http://www.slideshare.net/RightJungle/the-branches-of-

philosophy-pdf
9 Other branches of Philosophy. Ethis and Aesthetics, theory of art, art theory, philosophy of art.

http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch.html

Ethics
(the study of how people should act, and what is good and valuable)

Note: I already dealth with Ethics in the last chapter 7. I have also dealt there with Aesthetics to a certain extent,
but as it necessary to distinguish between certain notions I will mention this branch here again.
http://aesthetics-online.org/?
American Society for Aesthetics
relating to the philosophy of aesthetics; concerned with notions such as the beautiful and the ugly.
2.
relating to the science of aesthetics; concerned with the study of the mind and emotions in relation to the sense
of beauty.
3.
having a sense of the beautiful; characterized by a love of beauty.
4.
relating to, involving, or concerned with pure emotion and sensation as opposed to pure intellectuality.
noun
5.
the philosophical theory or set of principles governing the idea of beauty at a given time and place:
the clean lines, bare surfaces, and sense of space that bespeak the machine-age aesthetic; the Cubist aesthetic.
6.
Archaic. the study of the nature of sensation.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/aesthetic
https://global.britannica.com/topic/aesthetics
Aesthetics, also spelled esthetics , the philosophical study of beauty and taste. It is closely related to the
philosophy of art, which is concerned with the nature of art and the concepts in terms of which individual works
of art are interpreted and evaluated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics
Aesthetics (/ɛsˈθɛtɪks/; also spelled æsthetics and esthetics also known in Greek as Αισθητική, or "Aisthētiké")
is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of art, beauty, and taste, with the creation and appreciation of
beauty.[1][2] It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes
called judgements of sentiment and taste.[3] More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical
reflection on art, culture and nature".[4][5] In modern English, the term aesthetic can also refer to a set of
principles underlying the works of a particular art movement or theory: one speaks for example of the Cubist
aesthetic.[6]

Contents

1 Etymology
2 Aesthetics and the philosophy of art

Aesthetics is for the artist as Ornithology is for the birds.

— Barnett Newman[10][11]

For some, aesthetics is considered a synonym for the philosophy of art since Hegel, while others insist that there
is a significant distinction between these closely related fields. In practice, aesthetic judgement refers to the
sensory contemplation or appreciation of an object (not necessarily an art object), while artistic judgement refers
to the recognition, appreciation or criticism of art or an art work.

Philosophical aesthetics has not only to speak about art and to produce judgments about art works, but has also
to give a definition of what art is. Art is an autonomous entity for philosophy, because art deals with the senses
(i. e. the etymology of aesthetics) and art is as such free of any moral or political purpose. Hence, there are two
different conceptions of art in aesthetics: art as knowledge or art as action, but aesthetics is neither epistemology
nor ethics.
Barnett Newman Foundation, Chronology, 1952 Retrieved 30 August 2010
The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, By Arthur Coleman Danto, p.1, Published by Open
Court Publishing, 2003, ISBN 0-8126-9540-2, ISBN 978-0-8126-9540-3

3 History before the 20th century

4 New Criticism and The Intentional Fallacy
5 Post-modern aesthetics and psychoanalysis
6 Recent aesthetics
Guy Sircello has pioneered efforts in analytic philosophy to develop a rigorous theory of aesthetics, focusing on
the concepts of beauty,[30] love[31] and sublimity.[32] In contrast to romantic theorists Sircello argued for the
objectivity of beauty and formulated a theory of love on that basis.

British philosopher and theorist of conceptual art aesthetics, Peter Osborne, makes the point that "'post-
conceptual art' aesthetic does not concern a particular type of contemporary art so much as the historical-
ontological condition for the production of contemporary art in general ...".[33] Osborne noted that
contemporary art is 'post-conceptual in a public lecture delivered in 2010.

Gary Tedman has put forward a theory of a subjectless aesthetics derived from Karl Marx's concept of
alienation, and Louis Althusser's antihumanism, using elements of Freud's group psychology, defining a concept
of the 'aesthetic level of practice'.[34]

Gregory Loewen has suggested that the subject is key in the interaction with the aesthetic object. The work of
art serves as a vehicle for the projection of the individual's identity into the world of objects, as well as being the
irruptive source of much of what is uncanny in modern life. As well, art is used to memorialize individuated
biographies in a manner that allows persons to imagine that they are part of something greater than themselves.
[35]
Guy Sircello, A New Theory of Beauty. Princeton Essays on the Arts, 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1975.
Guy Sircello, Love and Beauty. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Guy Sircello, "How Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 51,
No. 4 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 541–550
Peter Osborne, Anywhere Or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso Books, London, 2013. pp. 3 &
51
Tedman, G. (2012) Aesthetics & Alienation, Zero Books
Gregory Loewen, Aesthetic Subjectivity, 2011 pages 36–7, 157, 238)

7 Aesthetics and science

8 Truth as beauty, mathematics
9 Computational inference of aesthetics
10 Evolutionary aesthetics
11 Applied aesthetics
12 Aesthetic ethics
13 Aesthetic judgment
13.1 Factors involved in aesthetic judgment
13.2 Are different art forms beautiful, disgusting, or boring in the same way?
13.3 What is "art"?
13.4 What should art be like?
13.5 The value of art

Judgments of aesthetic value rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level. Aesthetics examines our
affective domain response to an object or phenomenon. Immanuel Kant, writing in 1790, observes of a man "If
he says that canary wine is agreeable he is quite content if someone else corrects his terms and reminds him to
say instead: It is agreeable to me," because "Everyone has his own (sense of) taste". The case of "beauty" is
different from mere "agreeableness" because, "If he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the
same liking from others; he then judges not just for himself but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a
property of things."

Aesthetic judgments usually go beyond sensory discrimination. For David Hume, delicacy of taste is not merely
"the ability to detect all the ingredients in a composition", but also our sensitivity "to pains as well as pleasures,
which escape the rest of mankind." (Essays Moral Political and Literary. Indianapolis, Literary Classics 5,
1987.) Thus, the sensory discrimination is linked to capacity for pleasure. For Kant "enjoyment" is the result
when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging something to be "beautiful" has a third requirement: sensation
must give rise to pleasure by engaging our capacities of reflective contemplation. Judgments of beauty are
sensory, emotional and intellectual all at once.

Viewer interpretations of beauty possess two concepts of value: aesthetics and taste. Aesthetics is the
philosophical notion of beauty. Taste is a result of an education process and awareness of elite cultural values
learned through exposure to mass culture. Bourdieu examined how the elite in society define the aesthetic values
like taste and how varying levels of exposure to these values can result in variations by class, cultural
background, and education.[70] According to Kant, beauty is subjective and universal; thus certain things are
beautiful to everyone.[71][citation needed] The contemporary view of beauty is not based on innate qualities,
but rather on cultural specifics and individual interpretations.[citation needed]
Factors involved in aesthetic judgment
Rainbows often have aesthetic appeal.

Judgments of aesthetical values seem often to involve many other kinds of issues as well. Responses such as
disgust show that sensory detection is linked in instinctual ways to facial expressions, and even behaviours like
the gag reflex. Yet disgust can often be a learned or cultural issue too; as Darwin pointed out, seeing a stripe of
soup in a man's beard is disgusting even though neither soup nor beards are themselves disgusting. Aesthetic
judgments may be linked to emotions or, like emotions, partially embodied in our physical reactions. Seeing a
sublime view of a landscape may give us a reaction of awe, which might manifest physically as an increased
heart rate or widened eyes. These unconscious reactions may even be partly constitutive of what makes our
judgment a judgment that the landscape is sublime.

Likewise, aesthetic judgments may be culturally conditioned to some extent. Victorians in Britain often saw
African sculpture as ugly, but just a few decades later, Edwardian audiences saw the same sculptures as being
beautiful. Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability, perhaps even to sexual desirability. Thus,
judgments of aesthetic value can become linked to judgments of economic, political, or moral value.[72] In a
current context, one might judge a Lamborghini to be beautiful partly because it is desirable as a status symbol,
or we might judge it to be repulsive partly because it signifies for us over-consumption and offends our political
or moral values.[73]

Aesthetic judgments can often be very fine-grained and internally contradictory. Likewise aesthetic judgments
seem often to be at least partly intellectual and interpretative. It is what a thing means or symbolizes for us that
is often what we are judging. Modern aestheticians have asserted that will and desire were almost dormant in
aesthetic experience, yet preference and choice have seemed important aesthetics to some 20th-century thinkers.
The point is already made by Hume, but see Mary Mothersill, "Beauty and the Critic's Judgment", in The
Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, 2004. Thus aesthetic judgments might be seen to be based on the senses,
emotions, intellectual opinions, will, desires, culture, preferences, values, subconscious behaviour, conscious
decision, training, instinct, sociological institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on
exactly which theory one employs.
Are different art forms beautiful, disgusting, or boring in the same way?

A third major topic in the study of aesthetic judgments is how they are unified across art forms. We can call a
person, a house, a symphony, a fragrance, and a mathematical proof beautiful. What characteristics do they
share which give them that status? What possible feature could a proof and a fragrance both share in virtue of
which they both count as beautiful? What makes a painting beautiful is quite different from what makes music
beautiful, which suggests that each art form has its own language for the judgement of aesthetics.[74]

At the same time, there is seemingly quite a lack of words to express oneself accurately when making an
aesthetic judgment. An aesthetic judgment cannot be an empirical judgement. Therefore, due to impossibility for
precision, there is confusion about what interpretations can be culturally negotiated. Due to imprecision in the
standard English language, two completely different feelings experienced by two different people can be
represented by an identical verbal expression. Wittgenstein stated this in his lectures on aesthetics and language
games.

A collective identification of beauty, with willing participants in a given social spectrum, may be a socially
negotiated phenomenon, discussed in a culture or context. Is there some underlying unity to aesthetic judgment
and is there some way to articulate the similarities of a beautiful house, beautiful proof, and beautiful sunset?
[75] Defining it requires a description of the entire phenomenon, as Wittgenstein argued in his lectures on
aesthetics. Likewise there has been long debate on how perception of beauty in the natural world, especially
perception of the human form as beautiful, is supposed to relate to perceiving beauty in art or artefacts. This
goes back at least to Kant, with some echoes even in St. Bonaventure.[citation needed]
What is "art"?
Main article: Theory of art
Harmony of colours
How best to define the term "art" is a subject of constant contention; many books and journal articles have been
published arguing over even the basics of what we mean by the term "art".[76] Theodor Adorno claimed in 1969
"It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident."[77][78] Artists, philosophers, anthropologists,
psychologists and programmers all use the notion of art in their respective fields, and give it operational
definitions that vary considerably. Furthermore, it is clear that even the basic meaning of the term "art" has
changed several times over the centuries, and has continued to evolve during the 20th century as well.

The main recent sense of the word "art" is roughly as an abbreviation for creative art or "fine art." Here we mean
that skill is being used to express the artist's creativity, or to engage the audience's aesthetic sensibilities, or to
draw the audience towards consideration of the "finer" things. Often, if the skill is being used in a functional
object, people will consider it a craft instead of art, a suggestion which is highly disputed by many
Contemporary Craft thinkers. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way it may be
considered design instead of art, or contrariwise these may be defended as art forms, perhaps called applied art.
Some thinkers, for instance, have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with
the actual function of the object than any clear definitional difference.[79] Art usually implies no function other
than to convey or communicate an idea.[citation needed]

Even as late as 1912 it was normal in the West to assume that all art aims at beauty, and thus that anything that
wasn't trying to be beautiful couldn't count as art. The cubists, dadaists, Stravinsky, and many later art
movements struggled against this conception that beauty was central to the definition of art, with such success
that, according to Danto, "Beauty had disappeared not only from the advanced art of the 1960's but from the
advanced philosophy of art of that decade as well."[77] Perhaps some notion like "expression" (in Croce's
theories) or "counter-environment" (in McLuhan's theory) can replace the previous role of beauty. Brian
Massumi brought back "beauty" into consideration together with "expression".[80] Another view, as important
to the philosophy of art as "beauty," is that of the "sublime," elaborated upon in the twentieth century by the
postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. A further approach, elaborated by André Malraux in works such
as The Voices of Silence, is that art is fundamentally a response to a metaphysical question ('Art', he writes, 'is
an 'anti-destiny'). Malraux argues that, while art has sometimes been oriented towards beauty and the sublime
(principally in post-Renaissance European art) these qualities, as the wider history of art demonstrates, are by no
means essential to it.[81]

Perhaps (as in Kennick's theory) no definition of art is possible anymore. Perhaps art should be thought of as a
cluster of related concepts in a Wittgensteinian fashion (as in Weitz or Beuys). Another approach is to say that
"art" is basically a sociological category, that whatever art schools and museums and artists define as art is
considered art regardless of formal definitions. This "institutional definition of art" (see also Institutional
Critique) has been championed by George Dickie. Most people did not consider the depiction of a store-bought
urinal or Brillo Box to be art until Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol (respectively) placed them in the context
of art (i.e., the art gallery), which then provided the association of these objects with the associations that define
art.

Proceduralists often suggest that it is the process by which a work of art is created or viewed that makes it art,
not any inherent feature of an object, or how well received it is by the institutions of the art world after its
introduction to society at large. If a poet writes down several lines, intending them as a poem, the very
procedure by which it is written makes it a poem. Whereas if a journalist writes exactly the same set of words,
intending them as shorthand notes to help him write a longer article later, these would not be a poem. Leo
Tolstoy, on the other hand, claims in his What is art? (1897) that what decides whether or not something is art is
how it is experienced by its audience, not by the intention of its creator. Functionalists like Monroe Beardsley
argue that whether or not a piece counts as art depends on what function it plays in a particular context; the same
Greek vase may play a non-artistic function in one context (carrying wine), and an artistic function in another
context (helping us to appreciate the beauty of the human figure). '

Marxist attempts to define art focus on its place in the mode of production, such as in Walter Benjamin's essay
The Author as Producer,[82] and/or its political role in class struggle.[83] Revising some concepts of the
Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, Gary Tedman defines art in terms of social reproduction of the relations of
production on the aesthetic level.[84]
See also: Classificatory disputes about art
What should art be like?

Many goals have been argued for art, and aestheticians often argue that some goal or another is superior in some
way. Clement Greenberg, for instance, argued in 1960 that each artistic medium should seek that which makes it
unique among the possible mediums and then purify itself of anything other than expression of its own
uniqueness as a form.[85] The Dadaist Tristan Tzara on the other hand saw the function of art in 1918 as the
destruction of a mad social order. "We must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the individual after the
state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits."[86] Formal
goals, creative goals, self-expression, political goals, spiritual goals, philosophical goals, and even more
perceptual or aesthetic goals have all been popular pictures of what art should be like.
The value of art

Tolstoy defined art as the following: "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by
means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are
infected by these feelings and also experience them." However, this definition is merely a starting point for his
theory of art's value. To some extent, the value of art, for Tolstoy, is one with the value of empathy. However,
sometimes empathy is not of value. In chapter fifteen of What Is Art?, Tolstoy says that some feelings are good,
but others are bad, and so art is only valuable when it generates empathy or shared feeling for good feelings. For
example, Tolstoy asserts that empathy for decadent members of the ruling class makes society worse, rather than
better. In chapter sixteen, he asserts that the best art is "universal art" that expresses simple and accessible
positive feeling.[87]

An argument for the value of art, used in the fictional work The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, proceeds that,
if some external force presenting imminent destruction of Earth asked humanity what its value was—what
should humanity's response be? The argument continues that the only justification humanity could give for its
continued existence would be the past creation and continued creation of things like a Shakespeare play, a
Rembrandt painting or a Bach concerto. The suggestion is that these are the things of value which define
humanity.[88] Whatever one might think of this claim — and it does seem to undervalue the many other
achievements of which human beings have shown themselves capable, both individually and collectively — it is
true that art appears to possess a special capacity to endure ("live on") beyond the moment of its birth, in many
cases for centuries or millennia. This capacity of art to endure over time — what precisely it is and how it
operates — has been widely neglected in modern aesthetics.[89]
Davies, 1991, Carroll, 2000, et al.
Danto, 2003
Goodman,
Novitz, 1992
Brian Massumi, Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression, CRCL, 24:3, 1997.
Derek Allan. Art and the Human Adventure. André Malraux's Theory of Art. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009)
Benjamin, Walter, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock, Verso Books, 2003, ISBN 978-1-85984-418-2
Hadjinicolaou, Nicos, Art History and Class Struggle, Pluto Press; 1978. ISBN 978-0-904383-27-0
Tedman, Gary, Aesthetics & Alienation, Zero Books; 2012.
Clement Greenberg, "On Modernist Painting".
Tristan Tzara, Sept Manifestes Dada.
Theodore Gracyk, "Outline of Tolstoy's What Is Art?", course web page.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
Derek Allan, Art and Time Archived 18 March 2013 at the Wayback Machine., Cambridge Scholars, 2013
14 Aesthetic universals

The philosopher Denis Dutton identified six universal signatures in human aesthetics:[90]

Expertise or virtuosity. Humans cultivate, recognize, and admire technical artistic skills.
Nonutilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art's sake, and don't demand that it keep them warm or put food
on the table.
Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in a recognizable style.
Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting works of art.
Imitation. With a few important exceptions like abstract painting, works of art simulate experiences of the
world.
Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience.
Denis Dutton's Aesthetic Universals summarized by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate.

15 Criticism
16 Aesthetics in Non-Western cultures
16.1 Indian aesthetics
16.2 Chinese aesthetics
 16.3 African aesthetics
16.4 Arab aesthetics
17 See also
18 References
19 Further reading
20 External links

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art, or
the branch of philosophy that deals with the principles of beauty and artistic taste.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/aestheti/
Aesthetics may be defined narrowly as the theory of beauty, or more broadly as that together with the
philosophy of art. The traditional interest in beauty itself broadened, in the eighteenth century, to include the
sublime, and since 1950 or so the number of pure aesthetic concepts discussed in the literature has expanded
even more. Traditionally, the philosophy of art concentrated on its definition, but recently this has not been the
focus, with careful analyses of aspects of art largely replacing it. Philosophical aesthetics is here considered to
center on these latter-day developments. Thus, after a survey of ideas about beauty and related concepts,
questions about the value of aesthetic experience and the variety of aesthetic attitudes will be addressed, before
turning to matters which separate art from pure aesthetics, notably the presence of intention. That will lead to a
survey of some of the main definitions of art which have been proposed, together with an account of the recent
“de-definition” period. The concepts of expression, representation, and the nature of art objects will then be
covered.
Table of Contents

Introduction
Aesthetic Concepts
Aesthetic Value
Aesthetic Attitudes
Intentions
Definitions of Art
Expression
Representation
Art Objects
References and Further Reading
1. Introduction

The full field of what might be called “aesthetics” is a very large one. There is even now a four-volume
encyclopedia devoted to the full range of possible topics. The core issues in Philosophical Aesthetics, however,
are nowadays fairly settled (see the book edited by Dickie, Sclafani, and Roblin, and the monograph by
Sheppard, among many others).

Aesthetics in this central sense has been said to start in the early eighteenth century, with the series of articles on
“The Pleasures of the Imagination” which the journalist Joseph Addison wrote in the early issues of the
magazine The Spectator in 1712. Before this time, thoughts by notable figures made some forays into this
ground, for instance in the formulation of general theories of proportion and harmony, detailed most specifically
in architecture and music. But the full development of extended, philosophical reflection on Aesthetics did not
begin to emerge until the widening of leisure activities in the eighteenth century.

By far the most thoroughgoing and influential of the early theorists was Immanuel Kant, towards the end of the
eighteenth century. Therefore it is important, first of all, to have some sense of how Kant approached the
subject. Criticisms of his ideas, and alternatives to them, will be presented later in this entry, but through him we
can meet some of the key concepts in the subject by way of introduction.

Kant is sometimes thought of as a formalist in art theory; that is to say, someone who thinks the content of a
work of art is not of aesthetic interest. But this is only part of the story. Certainly he was a formalist about the
pure enjoyment of nature, but for Kant most of the arts were impure, because they involved a “concept.” Even
the enjoyment of parts of nature was impure, namely when a concept was involved— as when we admire the
perfection of an animal body or a human torso. But our enjoyment of, for instance, the arbitrary abstract patterns
in some foliage, or a color field (as with wild poppies, or a sunset) was, according to Kant, absent of such
concepts; in such cases, the cognitive powers were in free play. By design, art may sometimes obtain the
appearance of this freedom: it was then “Fine Art”—but for Kant not all art had this quality.

In all, Kant’s theory of pure beauty had four aspects: its freedom from concepts, its objectivity, the disinterest of
the spectator, and its obligatoriness. By “concept,” Kant meant “end,” or “purpose,” that is, what the cognitive
powers of human understanding and imagination judge applies to an object, such as with “it is a pebble,” to take
an instance. But when no definite concept is involved, as with the scattered pebbles on a beach, the cognitive
powers are held to be in free play; and it is when this play is harmonious that there is the experience of pure
beauty. There is also objectivity and universality in the judgment then, according to Kant, since the cognitive
powers are common to all who can judge that the individual objects are pebbles. These powers function alike
whether they come to such a definite judgment or are left suspended in free play, as when appreciating the
pattern along the shoreline. This was not the basis on which the apprehension of pure beauty was obligatory,
however. According to Kant, that derived from the selflessness of such an apprehension, what was called in the
eighteenth century its “disinterest.” This arises because pure beauty does not gratify us sensuously; nor does it
induce any desire to possess the object. It “pleases,” certainly, but in a distinctive intellectual way. Pure beauty,
in other words, simply holds our mind’s attention: we have no further concern than contemplating the object
itself. Perceiving the object in such cases is an end in itself; it is not a means to a further end, and is enjoyed for
its own sake alone.

It is because Morality requires we rise above ourselves that such an exercise in selfless attention becomes
obligatory. Judgments of pure beauty, being selfless, initiate one into the moral point of view. “Beauty is a
symbol of Morality,” and “The enjoyment of nature is the mark of a good soul” are key sayings of Kant. The
shared enjoyment of a sunset or a beach shows there is harmony between us all, and the world.

Among these ideas, the notion of “disinterest” has had much the widest currency. Indeed, Kant took it from
eighteenth century theorists before him, such as the moral philosopher, Lord Shaftesbury, and it has attracted
much attention since: recently by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, for instance. Clearly, in this context
“disinterested” does not mean “uninterested,” and paradoxically it is closest to what we now call our “interests,”
that is, such things as hobbies, travel, and sport, as we shall see below. But in earlier centuries, one’s “interest”
was what was to one’s advantage, that is, it was “self-interest,” and so it was the negation of that which closely
related aesthetics to ethics.
2. Aesthetic Concepts

The eighteenth century was a surprisingly peaceful time, but this turned out to be the lull before the storm, since
out of its orderly classicism there developed a wild romanticism in art and literature, and even revolution in
politics. The aesthetic concept which came to be more appreciated in this period was associated with this,
namely sublimity, which Edmund Burke theorized about in his “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our
ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” The sublime was connected more with pain than pure pleasure, according
to Burke, since threats to self-preservation were involved, as on the high seas, and lonely moors, with the
devilish humans and dramatic passions that artists and writers were about to portray. But in these circumstances,
of course, it is still “delightful horror,” as Burke appreciated, since one is insulated by the fictionality of the
work in question from any real danger.

“Sublime” and “beautiful” are only two amongst the many terms which may be used to describe our aesthetic
experiences. Clearly there are “ridiculous” and “ugly,” for a start, as well. But the more discriminating will have
no difficulty also finding something maybe “fine,” or “lovely” rather than “awful” or “hideous,” and “exquisite”
or “superb” rather than “gross” or “foul.” Frank Sibley wrote a notable series of articles, starting in 1959,
defending a view of aesthetic concepts as a whole. He said that they were not rule- or condition-governed, but
required a heightened form of perception, which one might call taste, sensitivity, or judgment. His full analysis,
however, contained another aspect, since he was not only concerned with the sorts of concepts mentioned above,
but also with a set of others which had a rather different character. For one can describe works of art, often
enough, in terms which relate primarily to the emotional and mental life of human beings. One can call them
“joyful,” “melancholy,” “serene,” “witty,” “vulgar,” and “humble,” for instance. These are evidently not purely
aesthetic terms, because of their further uses, but they are still very relevant to many aesthetic experiences.

Sibley’s claim about these concepts was that there were no sufficient conditions for their application. For many
concepts—sometimes called “closed” concepts, as a result—both necessary and sufficient conditions for their
application can be given. To be a bachelor, for instance, it is necessary to be male and unmarried, though of
marriageable age, and together these three conditions are sufficient. For other concepts, however, the so-called
“open” ones, no such definitions can be given— although for aesthetic concepts Sibley pointed out there were
still some necessary conditions, since certain facts can rule out the application of, for example, “garish,”
“gaudy,” or “flamboyant.”

The question therefore arises: how do we make aesthetic judgments if not by checking sufficient conditions?
Sibley’s account was that, when the concepts were not purely perceptual they were mostly metaphoric. Thus, we
call artworks “dynamic,” or “sad,” as before, by comparison with the behaviors of humans with those qualities.
Other theorists, such as Rudolph Arnheim and Roger Scruton, have held similar views. Scruton, in fact,
discriminated eight types of aesthetic concept, and we shall look at some of the others below.
3. Aesthetic Value

We have noted Kant’s views about the objectivity and universality of judgments of pure beauty, and there are
several ways that these notions have been further defended. There is a famous curve, for instance, obtained by
the nineteenth century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, which shows how human arousal is quite generally related
to complexity of stimulus. We are bored by the simple, become sated, even over-anxious, by the increasingly
complex, while in between there is a region of greatest pleasure. The dimension of complexity is only one
objective measure of worth which has been proposed in this way. Thus it is now known, for instance, that
judgments of facial beauty in humans are a matter of averageness and symmetry. Traditionally, unity was taken
to be central, notably by Aristotle in connection with Drama, and when added to complexity it formed a general
account of aesthetic value. Thus Francis Hutcheson, in the eighteenth century, asserted that “Uniformity in
variety always makes an object beautiful.” Monroe Beardsley, more recently, has introduced a third criterion—
intensity—to produce his three “General Canons” of objective worth. He also detailed some “Special Canons.”

Beardsley called the objective criteria within styles of Art “Special Canons.” These were not a matter of
something being good of its kind and so involving perfection of a concept in the sense of Kant. They involved
defeasible “good-making” and “bad-making” features, more in the manner Hume explained in his major essay
in this area, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757). To say a work of art had a positive quality like humor, for
instance, was to praise it to some degree, but this could be offset by other qualities which made the work not
good as a whole. Beardsley defended all of his canons in a much more detailed way than his eighteenth century
predecessor however: through a lengthy, fine-grained, historical analysis of what critics have actually appealed
to in the evaluation of artworks. Also, he explicitly made the disclaimer that his canons were the only criteria of
value, by separating these “objective reasons” from what he called “affective” and “genetic” reasons. These two
other sorts of reasons were to do with audience response, and the originating artist and his times, respectively,
and either “The Affective Fallacy” or “The Intentional Fallacy,” he maintained, was involved if these were
considered. The discrimination enabled Beardsley to focus on the artwork and its representational relations, if
any, to objects in the public world.

Against Beardsley, over many years, Joseph Margolis maintained a “Robust Relativism.” Thus he wanted to say
that “aptness,” “partiality,” and “non-cognitivism” characterize art appreciation, rather than “truth,”
“universality,” and “knowledge.” He defended this with respect to aesthetic concepts, critical judgments of
value, and literary interpretations in particular, saying, more generally, that works of art were “culturally
emergent entities” not directly accessible, because of this, to any faculty resembling sense perception. The main
debate over aesthetic value, indeed, concerns social and political matters, and the seemingly inevitable partiality
of different points of view. The central question concerns whether there is a privileged class, namely those with
aesthetic interests, or whether their set of interests has no distinguished place, since, from a sociological
perspective, that taste is just one amongst all other tastes in the democratic economy. The sociologist Arnold
Hauser preferred a non-relativistic point of view, and was prepared to give a ranking of tastes. High art beat
popular art, Hauser said, because of two things: the significance of its content, and the more creative nature of
its forms. Roger Taylor, by contrast, set out very fully the “leveller’s” point of view, declaring that "Aida" and
"The Sound of Music" have equal value for their respective audiences. He defended this with a thorough
philosophical analysis, rejecting the idea that there is such a thing as truth corresponding to an external reality,
with the people capable of accessing that truth having some special value. Instead, according to Taylor, there are
just different conceptual schemes, in which truth is measured merely by coherence internal to the scheme itself.
Janet Wolff looked at this debate more disinterestedly, in particular studying the details of the opposition
between Kant and Bourdieu.
4. Aesthetic Attitudes

Jerome Stolnitz, in the middle of the last century, was a Kantian, and promoted the need for a disinterested,
objective attitude to art objects. It is debatable, as we saw before, whether this represents Kant’s total view of
art, but the disinterested treatment of art objects which Stolnitz recommended was very commonly pursued in
his period.

Edward Bullough, writing in 1912, would have called “disinterested attention” a “distanced” attitude, but he
used this latter term to generate a much fuller and more detailed appreciation of the whole spectrum of attitudes
which might be taken to artworks. The spectrum stretched from people who “over-distance” to people who
“under-distance.” People who over-distance are, for instance, critics who merely look at the technicalities and
craftwork of a production, missing any emotional involvement with what it is about. Bullough contrasted this
attitude with what he called “under-distancing,” where one might get too gripped by the content. The country
yokel who jumps upon the stage to save the heroine, and the jealous husband who sees himself as Othello
smothering his wife, are missing the fact that the play is an illusion, a fiction, just make-believe. Bullough
thought there was, instead, an ideal mid-point between his two extremes, thereby solving his “antinomy of
distance” by deciding there should be the least possible distance without its disappearance.

George Dickie later argued against both “disinterest” and “distance” in a famous 1964 paper, “The Myth of the
Aesthetic Attitude.” He argued that we should be able to enjoy all objects of awareness, whether “pure
aesthetic” or moral. In fact, he thought the term “aesthetic” could be used in all cases, rejecting the idea that
there was some authorized way of using the word just to apply to surface or formal features— the artwork as a
thing in itself. As a result, Dickie concluded that the aesthetic attitude, when properly understood, reduced to
just close attention to whatever holds one’s mind in an artwork, against the tradition which believed it had a
certain psychological quality, or else involved attention just to certain objects.

Art is not the only object to draw interest of this pleasurable kind: hobbies and travel are further examples, and
sport yet another, as was mentioned briefly above. In particular, the broadening of the aesthetic tradition in
recent years has led theorists to give more attention to sport. David Best, for instance, writing on sport and its
likeness to art, highlighted how close sport is to the purely aesthetic. But he wanted to limit sport to this, and
insisted it had no relevance to ethics. Best saw art forms as distinguished expressly by their having the capacity
to comment on life situations, and hence bring in moral considerations. No sport had this further capacity, he
thought, although the enjoyment of many sports may undoubtedly be aesthetic. But many art forms—perhaps
more clearly called “craft-forms” as a result— also do not comment on life situations overmuch, for example,
décor, abstract painting, and non-narrative ballet. And there are many sports which are pre-eminently seen in
moral, “character-building” terms, for example, mountaineering, and the various combat sports (like boxing and
wrestling). Perhaps the resolution comes through noting the division Best himself provides within sport-forms,
between, on the one hand, “task” or “non-purposive” sports like gymnastics, diving, and synchronized
swimming, which are the ones he claims are aesthetic, and on the other hand the “achievement,” or “purposive’
sports, like those combat sports above. Task sports have less “art” in them, since they are not as creative as the
purposive ones.
5. Intentions

The traditional form of art criticism was biographical and sociological, taking into account the conceptions of
the artist and the history of the traditions within which the artist worked. But in the twentieth century a different,
more scientific and ahistorical form of literary criticism grew up in the United States and Britain: The New
Criticism. Like the Russian Formalists and French Structuralists in the same period, the New Critics regarded
what could be gleaned from the work of art alone as relevant to its assessment, but their specific position
received a much-discussed philosophical defense by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1946. Beardsley
saw the position as an extension of “The Aesthetic Point of View”; Wimsatt was a practical critic personally
engaged in the new line of approach. In their essay “The Intentional Fallacy,” Wimsatt and Beardsley claimed
“the design or intention of the artist is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a
work of literary art.” It was not always available, since it was often difficult to obtain, but, in any case, it was
not appropriately available, according to them, unless there was evidence for it internal to the finished work of
art. Wimsatt and Beardsley allowed such forms of evidence for a writer’s intentions, but would allow nothing
external to the given text.

This debate over intention in the literary arts has raged with full force into more recent times. A contemporary of
Wimsatt and Beardsley, E.D. Hirsch, has continued to maintain his “intentionalist” point of view. Against him,
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels have taken up an ahistorical position. Frank Cioffi, one of the original
writers who wrote a forceful reply to Wimsatt and Beardsley, aligned himself with neither camp, believing
different cases were “best read” sometimes just as, sometimes other than as, the artist knowingly intended them.
One reason he rejected intention, at times, was because he believed the artist might be unconscious of the full
significance of the artwork.
A similar debate arises in other art forms besides Literature, for instance Architecture, Theater, and Music,
although it has caused less professional comment in these arts, occurring more at the practical level in terms of
argument between “purists” and “modernizers.” Purists want to maintain a historical orientation to these art
forms, while modernizers want to make things more available for contemporary use. The debate also has a more
practical aspect in connection with the visual arts. For it arises in the question of what devalues fakes and
forgeries, and by contrast puts a special value on originality. There have been several notable frauds perpetrated
by forgers of artworks and their associates. The question is: if the surface appearance is much the same, what
especial value is there in the first object? Nelson Goodman was inclined to think that one can always locate a
sufficient difference by looking closely at the visual appearance. But even if one cannot, there remain the
different histories of the original and the copy, and also the different intentions behind them.

The relevance of such intentions in visual art has entered very prominently into philosophical discussion. Arthur
Danto, in his 1964 discussion of “The Artworld,” was concerned with the question of how the atmosphere of
theory can alter how we see artworks. This situation has arisen in fact with respect to two notable paintings
which look the same, as Timothy Binkley has explained, namely Leonardo’s original “Mona Lisa” and
Duchamp’s joke about it, called “L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved.” The two works look ostensibly the same, but Duchamp,
one needs to know, had also produced a third work, “L.H.O.O.Q.,” which was a reproduction of the "Mona
Lisa," with some graffiti on it: a goatee and moustache. He was alluding in that work to the possibility that the
sitter for the "Mona Lisa" might have been a young male, given the stories about Leonardo’s homosexuality.
With the graffiti removed the otherwise visually similar works are still different, since Duchamp’s title, and the
history of its production, alters what we think about his piece.
6. Definitions of Art

Up to the “de-definition” period, definitions of art fell broadly into three types, relating to representation,
expression, and form. The dominance of representation as a central concept in art lasted from before Plato’s time
to around the end of the eighteenth century. Of course, representational art is still to be found to this day, but it is
no longer pre-eminent in the way it once was. Plato first formulated the idea by saying that art is mimesis, and,
for instance, Bateaux in the eighteenth century followed him, when saying: “Poetry exists only by imitation. It is
the same thing with painting, dance and music; nothing is real in their works, everything is imagined, painted,
copied, artificial. It is what makes their essential character as opposed to nature.”

In the same century and the following one, with the advent of Romanticism, the concept of expression became
more prominent. Even around Plato’s time, his pupil Aristotle preferred an expression theory: art as catharsis of
the emotions. And Burke, Hutcheson, and Hume also promoted the idea that what was crucial in art were
audience responses: pleasure in Art was a matter of taste and sentiment. But the full flowering of the theory of
Expression, in the twentieth century, has shown that this is only one side of the picture.

In the taxonomy of art terms Scruton provided, Response theories concentrate on affective qualities such as
“moving,” “exciting,” “nauseous,” “tedious,” and so forth. But theories of art may be called “expression
theories” even though they focus on the embodied, emotional, and mental qualities discussed before, like
“joyful,” “melancholy,” “humble,” “vulgar,” and “intelligent.” As we shall see below, when recent studies of
expression are covered in more detail, it has been writers like John Hospers and O.K. Bouwsma who have
preferred such theories. But there are other types of theory which might, even more appropriately, be called
“expression theories.” What an artist is personally expressing is the focus of self-expression theories of art, but
more universal themes are often expressed by individuals, and art-historical theories see the artist as merely the
channel for broader social concerns.

R. G. Collingwood in the 1930s took art to be a matter of self-expression: “By creating for ourselves an
imaginary experience or activity, we express our emotions; and this is what we call art.” And the noteworthy
feature of Marx’s theory of art, in the nineteenth century, and those of the many different Marxists who followed
him into the twentieth century, was that they were expression theories in the “art-Historical” sense. The arts
were taken, by people of this persuasion, to be part of the superstructure of society, whose forms were
determined by the economic base, and so art came to be seen as expressing, or “reflecting” those material
conditions. Social theories of art, however, need not be based on materialism. One of the major social theorists
of the late nineteenth century was the novelist Leo Tolstoy, who had a more spiritual point of view. He said: “Art
is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to
others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”
Coming into the twentieth century, the main focus shifted towards abstraction and the appreciation of form. The
aesthetic, and the arts and crafts movements, in the latter part of the nineteenth century drew people towards the
appropriate qualities. The central concepts in aesthetics are here the pure aesthetic ones mentioned before, like
“graceful,” “elegant,” “exquisite,” “glorious,” and “nice.” But formalist qualities, such as organization, unity,
and harmony, as well as variety and complexity, are closely related, as are technical judgments like “well-
made,” “skilful,” and “professionally written.” The latter might be separated out as the focus of Craft theories of
art, as in the idea of art as “Techne” in ancient Greece, but Formalist theories commonly focus on all of these
qualities, and “aesthetes” generally find them all of central concern. Eduard Hanslick was a major late
nineteenth century musical formalist; the Russian Formalists in the early years of the revolution, and the French
Structuralists later, promoted the same interest in Literature. Clive Bell and Roger Fry, members of the
influential Bloomsbury Group in the first decades of the twentieth century, were the most noted early promoters
of this aspect of Visual art.

Bell’s famous “Aesthetic Hypothesis” was: “What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic
emotions? Only one answer seems possible— significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in a
particular way; certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and
combinations of lines and colors, these aesthetically moving forms, I call ‘Significant Form’; and ‘Significant
Form’ is the one quality common to all works of visual art.” Clement Greenberg, in the years of the Abstract
Expressionists, from the 1940s to the 1970s, also defended a version of this Formalism.

Abstraction was a major drive in early twentieth century art, but the later decades largely abandoned the idea of
any tight definition of art. The “de-definition” of art was formulated in academic philosophy by Morris Weitz,
who derived his views from some work of Wittgenstein on the notion of games. Wittgenstein claimed that there
is nothing which all games have in common, and so the historical development of them has come about through
an analogical process of generation, from paradigmatic examples merely by way of “family resemblances.”

There are, however, ways of providing a kind of definition of art which respects its open texture. The
Institutional definition of art, formulated by George Dickie, is in this class: “a work of art is an artefact which
has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by the artworld.” This leaves the content of art
open, since it is left up to museum directors, festival organizers, and so forth, to decide what is presented. Also,
as we saw before, Dickie left the notion of “appreciation” open, since he allowed that all aspects of a work of art
could be attended to aesthetically. But the notion of “artefact,” too, in this definition is not as restricted as it
might seem, since anything brought into an art space as a candidate for appreciation becomes thereby
“artefactualized,” according to Dickie— and so he allowed as art what are otherwise called (natural) "Found
Objects," and (previously manufactured) "Readymades." Less emphasis on power brokers was found in Monroe
Beardsley’s slightly earlier aesthetic definition of art: “an artwork is something produced with the intention of
giving it the capacity to satisfy the aesthetic interest”— where “production” and “aesthetic” have their normal,
restricted content. But this suggests that these two contemporary definitions, like the others, merely reflect the
historical way that art developed in the associated period. Certainly traditional objective aesthetic standards, in
the earlier twentieth century, have largely given way to free choices in all manner of things by the mandarins of
the public art world more recently.
7. Expression

Response theories of art were particularly popular during the Logical Positivist period in philosophy, that is,
around the 1920s and 1930s. Science was then contrasted sharply with Poetry, for instance, the former being
supposedly concerned with our rational mind, the latter with our irrational emotions. Thus the noted English
critic I. A. Richards tested responses to poems scientifically in an attempt to judge their value, and
unsurprisingly found no uniformity. Out of this kind of study comes the common idea that “art is all subjective”:
if one concentrates on whether people do or do not like a particular work of art then, naturally, there can easily
seem to be no reason to it.

We are now more used to thinking that the emotions are rational, partly because we now distinguish the cause of
an emotion from its target. If one looks at what emotions are caused by an artwork, not all of these need target
the artwork itself, but instead what is merely associated with it. So what the subjective approach centrally
overlooks are questions to do with attention, relevance, and understanding. With those as controlling features we
get a basis for normalizing the expected audience’s emotions in connection with the artwork, and so move away
from purely personal judgments such as “Well, it saddened me” to more universal assessments like “it was sad.”

And with the “it” more focused on the artwork we also start to see the significance of the objective emotional
features it metaphorically possesses, which were what Embodiment theorists like Hospers settled on as central.
Hospers, following Bouwsma, claimed that the sadness of some music, for instance, concerns not what is
evoked in us, nor any feeling experienced by the composer, but simply its physiognomic similarity to humans
when sad: “it will be slow not tripping; it will be low not tinkling. People who are sad move more slowly, and
when they speak they speak softly and low.” This was also a point of view developed at length by the gestalt
psychologist Rudolph Arnheim.

The discriminations do not stop there, however. Guy Sircello, against Hospers, pointed out first that there are
two ways emotions may be embodied in artworks: because of their form (which is what Hospers chiefly had in
mind), and because of their content. Thus, a picture may be sad not because of its mood or color, but because its
subject matter or topic is pathetic or miserable. That point was only a prelude, however, to an even more radical
criticism of Embodiment theories by Sircello. For emotion words can also be applied, he said, on account of the
“artistic acts” performed by the artists in presenting their attitude to their subject. If we look upon an artwork
from this perspective, we are seeing it as a “symptom” in Suzanne Langer’s terms; however, Langer believed
one should see it as a “symbol” holding some meaning which can be communicated to others.

Communication theorists all combine the three elements above, namely the audience, the artwork, and the artist,
but they come in a variety of stamps. Thus, while Clive Bell and Roger Fry were Formalists, they were also
Communication Theorists. They supposed that an artwork transmitted “aesthetic emotion” from the artist to the
audience on account of its “significant form.” Leo Tolstoi was also a communication theorist but of almost the
opposite sort. What had to be transmitted, for Tolstoi, was expressly what was excluded by Bell and (to a lesser
extent) Fry, namely the “emotions of life.” Tolstoi wanted art to serve a moral purpose: helping to bind
communities together in their fellowship and common humanity under God. Bell and Fry saw no such social
purpose in art, and related to this difference were their opposing views regarding the value of aesthetic
properties and pleasure. These were anathema to Tolstoi, who, like Plato, thought they led to waste; but the
“exalted” feelings coming from the appreciation of pure form were celebrated by Bell and Fry, since their
“metaphysical hypothesis” claimed it put one in touch with “ultimate reality.” Bell said, “What is that which is
left when we have stripped a thing of all sensations, of all its significance as a means? What but that which
philosophers used to call ‘the thing in itself’ and now call ‘ultimate reality’.”

This debate between moralists and aesthetes continues to this day with, for instance, Noël Carroll supporting a
“Moderate Moralism” while Anderson and Dean support “Moderate Autonomism.” Autonomism wants aesthetic
value to be isolated from ethical value, whereas Moralism sees them as more intimately related.

Communication theorists generally compare art to a form of Language. Langer was less interested than the
above theorists in legislating what may be communicated, and was instead concerned to discriminate different
art languages, and the differences between art languages generally and verbal languages. She said, in brief, that
art conveyed emotions of various kinds, while verbal language conveyed thoughts, which was a point made by
Tolstoy too. But Langer spelled out the matter in far finer detail. Thus, she held that art languages were
“presentational” forms of expression, while verbal languages were “discursive”— with Poetry, an art form using
verbal language, combining both aspects, of course. Somewhat like Hospers and Bouwsma, Langer said that art
forms presented feelings because they were “morphologically similar” to them: an artwork, she held, shared the
same form as the feeling it symbolizes. This gave rise to the main differences between presentational and
discursive modes of communication: verbal languages had a vocabulary, a syntax, determinate meanings, and
the possibility of translation, but none of these were guaranteed for art languages, according to Langer. Art
languages revealed “what it is like” to experience something— they created “virtual experiences.”

The detailed ways in which this arises with different art forms Langer explained in her 1953 book Feeling and
Form. Scruton followed Langer in several ways, notably by remarking that the experience of each art form is sui
generis, that is, “each of its own kind.” He also spelled out the characteristics of a symbol in even more detail.
Discussions of questions specific to each art form have been pursued by many other writers; see, for instance,
Dickie, Sclafani, and Roblin, and the recent book by Gordon Graham.
8. Representation

Like the concept of Expression, the concept of Representation has been very thoroughly examined since the
professionalization of Philosophy in the twentieth century.

Isn’t representation just a matter of copying? If representation could be understood simply in terms of copying,
that would require “the innocent eye,” that is, one which did not incorporate any interpretation. E. H. Gombrich
was the first to point out that modes of representation are, by contrast, conventional, and therefore have a
cultural, socio-historical base. Thus perspective, which one might view as merely mechanical, is only a recent
way of representing space, and many photographs distort what we take to be reality— for instance, those from
the ground of tall buildings, which seem to make them incline inwards at the top.

Goodman, too, recognized that depiction was conventional; he likened it to denotation, that is, the relation
between a word and what it stands for. He also gave a more conclusive argument against copying being the basis
of representation. For that would make resemblance a type of representation, whereas if a resembles b, then b
resembles a— yet a dog does not represent its picture. In other words, Goodman is saying that resemblance
implies a symmetric relationship, but representation does not. As a result, Goodman made the point that
representation is not a craft but an art: we create pictures of things, achieving a view of those things by
representing them as this or as that. As a result, while one sees the objects depicted, the artist’s thoughts about
those objects may also be discerned, as with Sircello’s “artistic arts.” The plain idea that just objects are
represented in a picture was behind Richard Wollheim’s account of representational art in the first edition of his
book Art and Its Objects (1968). There, the paint in a picture was said to be “seen as” an object. But in the
book’s second edition, Wollheim augmented this account to allow for what is also “seen in” the work, which
includes such things as the thoughts of the artist.

There are philosophical questions of another kind, however, with respect to the representation of objects,
because of the problematic nature of fictions. There are three broad categories of object which might be
represented: individuals which exist, like Napoleon; types of thing which exist, like kangaroos; and things which
do not exist, like Mr. Pickwick, and unicorns. Goodman’s account of representation easily allowed for the first
two categories, since, if depictions are like names, the first two categories of painting compare, respectively,
with the relations between the proper name “Napoleon” and the person Napoleon, and the common name
“kangaroo” and the various kangaroos. Some philosophers would think that the third category was as easily
accommodated, but Goodman, being an Empiricist (and so concerned with the extensional world), was only
prepared to countenance existent objects. So for him pictures of fictions did not denote or represent anything;
instead, they were just patterns of various sorts. Pictures of unicorns were just shapes, for Goodman, which
meant that he saw the description “picture of a unicorn” as unarticulated into parts. What he preferred to call a
“unicorn-picture” was merely a design with certain named shapes within it. One needs to allow there are
“intensional” objects as well as extensional ones before one can construe “picture of a unicorn’ as parallel to
“picture of a kangaroo.” By contrast with Goodman, Scruton is one philosopher more happy with this kind of
construal. It is a construal generally more congenial to Idealists, and to Realists of various persuasions, than to
Empiricists.

The contrast between Empiricists and other types of philosopher also bears on other central matters to do with
fictions. Is a fictional story a lie about this world, or a truth about some other? Only if one believes there are
other worlds, in some kind of way, will one be able to see much beyond untruths in stories. A Realist will settle
for there being “fictional characters,” often enough, about which we know there are some determinate truths—
wasn’t Mr. Pickwick fat? But one difficulty then is knowing things about Mr. Pickwick other than what Dickens
tells us— was Mr. Pickwick fond of grapes, for instance? An Idealist will be more prepared to consider fictions
as just creatures of our imaginations. This style of analysis has been particularly prominent recently, with
Scruton essaying a general theory of the imagination in which statements like “Mr. Pickwick was fat” are
entertained in an “unasserted” fashion. One problem with this style of analysis is explaining how we can have
emotional relations with, and responses to, fictional entities. We noticed this kind of problem before, in Burke’s
description “delightful horror”: how can audiences get pleasure from tragedies and horror stories when, if those
same events were encountered in real life, they would surely be anything but pleasurable? On the other hand,
unless we believe that fictions are real, how can we, for instance, be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina? Colin
Radford, in 1975, wrote a celebrated paper on this matter which concluded that the “paradox of emotional
response to fiction” was unsolvable: adult emotional responses to fictions were “brute facts,” but they were still
incoherent and irrational, he said. Radford defended this conclusion in a series of further papers in what became
an extensive debate. Kendall Walton, in his 1990 book Mimesis and Make-Believe, pursued at length an
Idealist’s answer to Radford. At a play, for instance, Walton said the audience enters into a form of pretence with
the actors, not believing, but making believe that the portrayed events and emotions are real.
9. Art Objects

What kind of thing is a work of art? Goodman, Wollheim, Wolterstorff, and Margolis have been notable
contributors to the contemporary debate.

We must first distinguish the artwork from its notation or “recipe,” and from its various physical realizations.
Examples would be: some music, its score, and its performances; a drama, its script, and its performances; an
etching, its plate, and its prints; and a photograph, its negative, and its positives. The notations here are “digital”
in the first two cases, and “analogue” in the second two, since they involve discrete elements like notes and
words in the one case, and continuous elements like lines and color patches in the other. Realizations can also be
divided into two broad types, as these same examples illustrate: there are those that arise in time (performance
works) and those that arise in space (object works). Realizations are always physical entities. Sometimes there is
only one realization, as with architect-designed houses, couturier-designed dresses, and many paintings, and
Wollheim concluded that in these cases the artwork is entirely physical, consisting of that one, unique
realization. However, a number a copies were commonly made of paintings in the middle ages, and it is
theoretically possible to replicate even expensive clothing and houses.

Philosophical questions in this area arise mainly with respect to the ontological status of the idea which gets
executed. Wollheim brought in Charles Peirce’s distinction between types and tokens, as an answer to this: the
number of different tokens of letters (7), and different types of letter (5), in the string “ABACDEC,” indicates
the difference. Realizations are tokens, but ideas are types, that is, categories of objects. There is a normative
connection between them as Margolis and Nicholas Wolterstorff have explained, since the execution of ideas is
an essentially social enterprise.

That also explains how the need for a notation arises: one which would link not only the idea with its execution,
but also the various functionaries. Broadly, there are the creative persons who generate the ideas, which are
transmitted by means of a recipe to manufacturers who generate the material objects and performances. “Types
are created, particulars are made” it has been said, but the link is through the recipe. Schematically, two main
figures are associated with the production of many artworks: the architect and the builder, the couturier and the
dressmaker, the composer and the performer, the choreographer and the dancer, the script-writer and the actor,
and so forth. But a much fuller list of operatives is usually involved, as is very evident with the production of
films, and other similar large entertainments. Sometimes the director of a film is concerned to control all its
aspects, when we get the notion of an “auteur” who can be said to be the author of the work, but normally,
creativity and craft thread through the whole production process, since even those designated “originators” still
work within certain traditions, and no recipe can limit entirely the end product.

The associated philosophical question concerns the nature of any creativity. There is not much mystery about the
making of particulars from some recipe, but much more needs to be said about the process of originating some
new idea. For creation is not just a matter of getting into an excited mental state— as in a “brainstorming”
session, for instance. That is a central part of the “creative process theory,” a form of which is to be found in the
work of Collingwood. It was in these terms that Collingwood distinguished the artist from the craftsperson,
namely with reference to what the artist was capable of generating just in his or her mind. But the major
difficulty with this kind of theory is that any novelty has to be judged externally in terms of the artist’s social
place amongst other workers in the field, as Jack Glickman has shown. Certainly, if it is to be an original idea,
the artist cannot know beforehand what the outcome of the creative process will be. But others might have had
the same idea before, and if the outcome was known already, then the idea thought up was not original in the
appropriate sense. Thus the artist will not be credited with ownership in such cases. Creation is not a process,
but a public achievement: it is a matter of breaking the tape ahead of others in a certain race.
10. References and Further Reading

Arnheim, R.1954, Art and Visual Perception. University of California Press, Berkeley.
A study of physiognomic properties from the viewpoint of gestalt psychology.
Beardsley, M.C. 1958, Aesthetics, Harcourt Brace, New York.
The classic mid-twentieth century text, with a detailed, practical study of the principles of art criticism.
Bell, C. 1914, Art, Chatto and Windus, London.
Manifesto for Formalism defending both his Aesthetic Hypothesis, and his Metaphysical Hypothesis.
Best, D. 1976, Philosophy and Human Movement, Allen and Unwin, London.
Applies aesthetic principles to Sport, and assesses its differences from Art.
Bourdieu, P. 1984, Distinction, trans. R.Nice, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Studies contemporary French taste empirically, with special attention to the place of the “disinterested”
class.
Carroll, N 1990, The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart, Routledge, London and New York.
Investigation into the form and aesthetics of horror film and fiction, including discussion of the paradox of
emotional response to fiction and the paradox of “horror-pleasure”.
Collingwood, R.G. 1958, The Principles of Art, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Argues for important theses about Creativity, Art versus Craft, and Self-Expression.
Cooper, D. E. (ed.) 1995, A Companion to Aesthetics, Blackwell, Oxford.
Short notes about many aspects of, and individuals in Art and aesthetic theory.
 Crawford, D.W. 1974, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
Commentary on Kant’s third critique.
Curtler, H. (ed.) 1983, What is Art? Haven, New York.
Collects a number of papers discussing Beardsley’s aesthetics.
Danto, A. C. 1981, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
Contains Danto’s developed views about the influence of art theory.
Davies, S. 1991, Definitions of Art, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Contains a thorough study of the respective worth of Beardsley’s, and Dickie’s recent definitions of art.
Dickie, G. 1974, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Dickie’s first book on his definition of Art.
Dickie, G. 1984, The Art Circle, Haven, New York.
Dickie’s later thoughts about his definition of Art.
Dickie, G. 1996, The Century of Taste, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Contains a useful discussion of Hutcheson, Hume, and Kant, and some of their contemporaries.
Dickie, G., Sclafani, R.R., and Roblin, R. (eds) 1989, Aesthetics a Critical Anthology, 2nd ed. St Martin’s
Press, New York.
Collection of papers on historic and contemporary Aesthetics, including ones on the individual arts.
Eagleton, T. 1990, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell, Oxford.
A study of Aesthetics from the eighteenth century onwards, from the point of view of a Marxist, with
particular attention to German thinkers.
Freeland, C. 2001, But Is it Art?, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Discusses why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy and art
theory.
Gaut, B. and Lopes, D.M. (eds) 2001, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, Routledge, London and New
York.
A series of short articles on most aspects of aesthetics, including discussions of the individual arts.
Gombrich, E.H. 1960, Art and Illusion, Pantheon Books, London.
Historical survey of techniques of pictorial representation, with philosophical commentary.
Goodman, N. 1968, Languages of Art, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis.
Discusses the nature of notations, and the possibility of fakes.
Graham, G. 1997, Philosophy of the Arts; an Introduction to Aesthetics, Routledge, London.
Has separate chapters on Music, Painting and Film, Poetry and Literature, and Architecture.
Hanfling, O. (ed.) 1992, Philosophical Aesthetics, Blackwell, Oxford.
Summary papers on the core issues in Aesthetics, prepared for the Open University.
Hauser, A.1982, The Sociology of Art, Chicago University Press, Chicago.
Major historical study of Art’s place in society over the ages.
Hjort, M. and Laver, S. (eds) 1997, Emotion and the Arts, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Papers on various aspects of art and emotion.
Hospers (ed) 1969, Introductory Readings in Aesthetics, Macmillan, New York.
Collection of major papers, including Stolnitz and Dickie on aesthetic attitudes, Hospers on Expression,
and Bell, Fry, Langer and Beardsley about their various theories.
Hospers, J. (ed.) 1971, Artistic Expression, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York.
Large collection of historical readings on Expression.
Kant, I. 1964, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J.C.Meredith, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
The original text of Kant’s third critique.
Iseminger, G. (ed.) 1992, Intention and Interpretation, Temple University Press, Philadelphia.
Contains papers by Hirsch, and Knapp and Michaels, amongst others, updating the debate over Intention.
Kelly, M. (ed.) 1998, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Four volumes not just on Philosophical Aesthetics, but also on historical, sociological, and biographical
aspects of Art and Aesthetics worldwide.
Langer, S. 1953, Feeling and Form, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Detailed study of the various art forms, and their different modes of expression.
Langer, S. 1957, Problems in Art, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Langer, S. 1957, Philosophy in a New Key, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Langer’s more theoretical writings.
Levinson, J. (ed.) 1998, Aesthetics and Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Contains papers by Carroll, and Anderson and Dean, amongst others, updating the debate over
aestheticism.
Manns, J.W. 1998, Aesthetics, M.E.Sharpe, Armonk.
Recent monograph covering the main topics in the subject.
 Margolis, J. (ed.) 1987, Philosophy Looks at the Arts, 3rd ed., Temple University Press, Philadelphia.
Central papers in recent Aesthetics, including many of the core readings discussed in the text.
Mothersill, M. 1984, Beauty Restored, Clarendon, Oxford.
Argues for a form of Aesthetic Realism, against Sibley, and with a discussion of Hume and Kant.
Richards, I. A. 1970, Poetries and Sciences, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Defends a subjectivist view of Art.
Scruton, R.1974, Art and Imagination, Methuen, London.
A sophisticated and very detailed theory of most of the major concepts in Aesthetics.
Sheppard, A. D. R. 1987, Aesthetics: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, Oxford University Press,
Oxford.
An introductory monograph on the whole subject.
Taylor, R. 1981, Beyond Art, Harvester, Brighton.
Defends the right of different classes to their own tastes.
Tolstoi, L. 1960, What is Art? Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis.
Tolstoi’s theory of Art and Aesthetics.
Walton, K.L. 1990, Mimesis as Make Believe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
A thorough view of many arts, motivated by the debate over emotional responses to fictions.
Wolff, J. 1993, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, 2nd ed., University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
On the debate between objective aesthetic value, and sociological relativism.
Wollheim, R. 1980, Art and its Objects, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
A philosophical study of the nature of art objects.
Wolterstorff, N. 1980, Works and Worlds of Art, Clarendon, Oxford.
A very comprehensive study.

http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_aesthetics.html

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and appreciation of art, beauty and good taste.
It has also been defined as "critical reflection on art, culture and nature". The word "aesthetics" derives from the
Greek "aisthetikos", meaning "of sense perception". Along with Ethics, aesthetics is part of axiology (the study
of values and value judgements).

In practise we distinguish between aesthetic judgements (the appreciation of any object, not necessarily an art
object) and artistic judgements (the appreciation or criticism of a work of art). Thus aesthetics is broader in
scope than the philosophy of art. It is also broader than the philosophy of beauty, in that it applies to any of the
responses we might expect works of art or entertainment to elicit, whether positive or negative.

Aestheticians ask questions like "What is a work of art?", "What makes a work of art successful?", "Why do we
find certain things beautiful?", "How can things of very different categories be considered equally beautiful?",
"Is there a connection between art and morality?", "Can art be a vehicle of truth?", "Are aesthetic judgements
objective statements or purely subjective expressions of personal attitudes?", "Can aesthetic judgements be
improved or trained?"

In very general terms, it examines what makes something beautiful, sublime, disgusting, fun, cute, silly,
entertaining, pretentious, discordant, harmonious, boring, humorous or tragic.

Aesthetic Judgements

Judgements of aesthetic value rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level, but they usually go beyond
that. Judgments of beauty are sensory, emotional, and intellectual all at once.

According to Immanuel Kant, beauty is objective and universal (i.e. certain things are beautiful to everyone).
But there is a second concept involved in a viewer's interpretation of beauty, that of taste, which is subjective
and varies according to class, cultural background and education.

In fact, it can be argued that all aesthetic judgements are culturally conditioned to some extent, and can change
over time (e.g. Victorians in Britain often saw African sculpture as ugly, but just a few decades later, Edwardian
audiences saw the same sculptures as being beautiful).
Judgments of aesthetic value can also become linked to judgements of economic, political or moral value (e.g.
we might judge an expensive car to be beautiful partly because it is desirable as a status symbol, or we might
judge it to be repulsive partly because it signifies for us over-consumption and offends our political or moral
values.)

Aestheticians question how aesthetic judgements can be unified across art forms (e.g. we can call a person, a
house, a symphony, a fragrance and a mathematical proof beautiful, but what characteristics do they share which
give them that status?)

It should also be borne in kind that the imprecision and ambiguity arising from the use of language in aesthetic
judgements can lead to much confusion (e.g. two completely different feelings derived from two different
people can be represented by an identical expression, and conversely a very similar response can be articulated
by very different language).

What is Art?

In recent years, the word “art” is roughly used as an abbreviation for creative art or fine art, where some skill is
being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the
audience towards consideration of the “finer” things. If the skill being used is more lowbrow or practical, the
word "craft" is often used instead of art. Similarly, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it
may be considered "design" (or "applied art"). Some have argued, though, that the difference between fine art
and applied art or crafts has more to do with value judgments made about the art than any clear definitional
difference.

Since the Dadaist art movement of the early 20th Century, it can no longer even be assumed that all art aims at
beauty. Some have argued that whatever art schools and museums and artists get away with should be
considered art, regardless of formal definitions (the so-called institutional definition of art).

Some commentators (including John Dewey) suggest that it is the process by which a work of art is created or
viewed that makes it art, not any inherent feature of an object or how well received it is by the institutions of the
art world (e.g. if a writer intended a piece to be a poem, it is one whether other poets acknowledge it or not,
whereas if exactly the same set of words was written by a journalist as notes, these would not constitute a
poem).

Others, including Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910), claim that what makes something art (or not) is how it is
experienced by its audience, not the intention of its creator.

Functionalists like Monroe Beardsley (1915 - 1985) argue that whether or not a piece counts as art depends on
what function it plays in a particular context (e.g. the same Greek vase may play a non-artistic function in one
context - carrying wine - and an artistic function in another context).

At the metaphysical and ontological level, when we watch, for example, a play being performed, are we judging
one work of art (the whole performance), or are we judging separately the writing of the play, the direction and
setting, the performances of the various actors, the costumes, etc? Similar considerations also apply to music,
painting, etc. Since the rise of conceptual art in the 20th Century, the problem is even more acute (e.g. what
exactly are we judging when we look at Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes?)

Aestheticians also question what the value of art is. Is art a means of gaining some kind of knowledge? Is it a
tool of education or indoctrination or enculturation? Is it perhaps just politics by other means? Does art give us
an insight into the human condition? Does it make us more moral? Can it uplift us spiritually? Might the value
of art for the artist be quite different than its value for the audience? Might the value of art to society be different
than its value to individuals?

Aesthetic Universals

The contemporary American philosopher Denis Dutton (1944 - ) has identified seven universal signatures in
human aesthetics. Although there are possible exceptions and objections to many of them, they represent a
useful starting point for the consideration of aesthetics:

Expertise or Virtuosity (technical artistic skills are cultivated, recognized and admired)
 Non-Utilitarian Pleasure (people enjoy art for art's sake, and don't demand practical value of it)
Style (artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in recognizable styles)
Criticism (people make a point of judging, appreciating and interpreting works of art)
Imitation (with a few important exceptions (e.g. music, abstract painting), works of art simulate experiences
of the world)
Special Focus (art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience)
Imagination (artists and their audiences entertain hypothetical worlds in the theatre of the imagination)

History of Aesthetics

The Ancient Greek philosophers initially felt that aesthetically appealing objects were beautiful in and of
themselves. Plato felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony and unity among their parts.
Aristotle found that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry and definiteness.

According to Islam, human works of art are inherently flawed compared to the work of Allah, and to attempt to
depict in a realistic form any animal or person is insolence to Allah. This has had the effect of narrowing the
field of Muslim artistic possibility to such forms as mosaics, calligraphy, architecture and geometric and floral
patterns.

Indian art evolved with an emphasis on inducing special spiritual or philosophical states in the audience, or with
representing them symbolically.

As long as go as the 5th Century B.C., Chinese philosophers were already arguing about aesthetics. Confucius
(551 - 479 B.C.) emphasized the role of the arts and humanities (especially music and poetry) in broadening
human nature. His near contemporary Mozi (470 - 391 B.C.), however, argued that music and fine arts were
classist and wasteful, benefiting the rich but not the common people.

Western Medieval art (at least until the revival of classical ideals during the Renaissance) was highly religious in
focus, and was typically funded by the Church, powerful ecclesiastical individuals, or wealthy secular patrons. A
religiously uplifting message was considered more important than figurative accuracy or inspired composition.
The skills of the artisan were considered gifts from God for the sole purpose of disclosing God to mankind.

With the shift in Western philosophy from the late 17th Century onwards, German and British thinkers in
particular emphasized beauty as the key component of art and of the aesthetic experience, and saw art as
necessarily aiming at beauty. For Friedrich Schiller (1759 - 1805), aesthetic appreciation of beauty is the most
perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of human nature. Hegel held that art is the first stage in
which the absolute spirit is immediately manifest to sense-perception, and is thus an objective rather than a
subjective revelation of beauty. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic contemplation of beauty is the most free that the
pure intellect can be from the dictates of will.

British Intuitionists like the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671 - 1713) claimed that beauty is just the sensory
equivalent of moral goodness. More analytic theorists like Lord Kames (1696 - 1782), William Hogarth (1697 -
1764) and Edmund Burke hoped to reduce beauty to some list of attributes, while others like James Mill (1773 -
1836) and Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) strove to link beauty to some scientific theory of psychology or
biology.
In practise we distinguish between aesthetic judgements (the appreciation of any object, not necessarily an art
object) and artistic judgements (the appreciation or criticism of a work of art). Thus aesthetics is broader in
scope than the philosophy of art. It is also broader than the philosophy of beauty, in that it applies to any of the
responses we might expect works of art or entertainment to elicit, whether positive or negative.

Theory of art - At the broadest level, a theory of art aims to shed light on some aspect of the project of defining
art or to theorize about the structure of our concept of 'art' without providing classical definitions, namely
definitions formulated in terms of “necessary and sufficient” conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_art

1 Aesthetic response
2 Formalism
3 Institutional
4 Historical
5 Anti-essentialist
 6 Aesthetic creation
7 References

http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/clowney/Aesthetics/theories+of+art.htm
theories of art Attempts to understand the "essence" of art in terms of a single key concept, such as "expression"
or "representation".

ART AS REPRESENTATION

By "the representational theory" is meant here a historically persistent complex of views which see the chief, or
essential, role of the arts as imitating, or displaying or setting forth aspects of reality in the widest sense.

A typical representational account sees art as portraying the visible forms of nature, from a schematic cave
drawing of an animal to the evocation of an entire landscape in sun or storm. The particularity of individual
objects, scenes or persons may be emphasized, or the generic, the common, the essential. The scope of
representation can involve perspectives, slants on the world, ways of seeing the world--perhaps as created and
sustained by an all-good, fecund deity, or as grimly devoid of any divine presence or glory.

A representational artist may seek faithfulness to how things are. He or she may dwell selectively on the ugly
and defective, the unfulfilled; or on the ideal, the fully realized potential. The artist may see the ideal as reached
by extrapolating from the empirical, "correcting’ its deficiencies; or by contemplating the alleged idea or form to
which empirical objects approximate and aspire. As this suggests, a representational theory may derive its
account and evaluation of the arts from a metaphysic. Representational theories thus give the arts a distinctive
cognitive role. The artist opens our eyes to the world’s perceptual qualities and configurations, to its beauties,
uglinesses and horrors.

At the level of detailed philosophical analysis, what exactly it is to represent, although it may have seemed to us
an intuitively straightforward notion, is a problem of some complexity (see Wollheim, 1987, pp. 76ff.)

However we analyze it, it is very doubtful that representation possesses the explanatory power it would need in
order to yield a one-concept theory of art. Clearly, there is art that is not at all representational: music is seldom
and very inessentially representational; painting and sculpture can be abstract as well as figurative. Although in
prose a subject may often be important, in poetry its importance can be much reduced and the poem be
appreciated as an artifact in its own right rather than as a window on the non-art world. The work of
representing may seem insufficiently ambitious. As the re-presenting or imitating of what nature or God has
already created, it can at its best be technically notable, but must always be derivative and repetitious. The
beauties of art are very seldom transcriptions, into a medium, of preexisting natural beauties.

The representational theory, say its critics, must deflect attention from the work of art and its distinctive values,
to what is always other than itself. Artworks, however, call attention upon their own unique forms, lines, colors,
images, meanings, patterns of sound. What we encounter in them we have not encountered and cannot encounter
elsewhere in the world. Revelatory or not, an artwork does not become 'disposable' once we have extracted from
it a message, a way of looking, a perspective.

On the other hand, however, why may we not understand music as representing the life of feeling, the flowings
and checkings of vitality? Even abstract artists have often seen their work in revelatory terms, displaying hidden
laws of nature, or metaphysical ideas. Could we not claim that art is always a mimesis (a copying) of nature: if
not of nature's visible appearances, then of its fundamental energies and their endless transformations?

We could: but at a price. The concept of representation may be over-extended in a way that unhelpfully conceals
what would be better seen as distinct and different (even at times conflicting) aims of art. Even with a clearly
representational painting we may say. "The objects are represented in such a way as heightens their crucial
expressive qualities." Or again, we may say. "The forms of nature have no more than stimulated the artist to
create a new world." Often, too, we shall say, "The formal ordering of the artwork does not reproduce nature's
order; it has its own distinctive order--invented, not discovered."
ART AS EXPRESSION

Supposing we were to start again, this time putting expression at the center, some of our problems would
certainly be alleviated. Music expresses feelings, emotions, moods, their conflicts, triumphs, defeats, A painted
landscape may engage us as expressive of peace, melancholy or menace; so too a lyrical poem, a semi-abstract
sculpture, a scene or situation in drama. What is more, they may express highly particularized modes of feeling,
even new emotions. Romantic theorists and others down to our own day have indeed argued for expression
theories of art. In R.G, Collingwood's account, the artist struggles to clarify and articulate his initially unfocused
feeling. Coming to grasp it and to express it by way of the fashioning of an artwork constitutes a single task.

It is not only sensations, feelings, moods and emotions that may be expressed, but also attitudes, evaluations,
atmospheric qualities, expectation, disappointment, frustration, relief. tensings and relaxings ... : not only brief
bursts of lyrical feeling evoked by specific, intensely felt events, but also the inner quality of a whole life-world,
Even when art argues a case, its real interest is always to express the felt experience of arguing: and when it
depicts or describes, its concern is with the human affective analogues of the objects and events of the outside
world that make up its ostensible subject-matter. Its real subject is always the human subject.

But what exactly am I reporting when I say, "I find this phrase for clarinet poignantly expressive" or, "The
harmonic twist in the final cadence expresses foreboding"? Not necessarily that I am emotionally excited --I do
not need to be, in order to "read" the emotional quality — nor that I am necessarily directly sharing the artist's
emotions. I may certainly have reason to hope that my experience will be related to the artist's intentions, if
these are well realized in his work. It is the work of art itself that is the primary locus of relevant emotional
qualities, their development and transformations. The music is tender; the painting is tranquil. We seem driven
to say that, although, as works of art are not themselves sentient, we are well aware that there must be metaphor
in the claim.

A critic of the expression theory, however, will argue that, important though expression may be, there are other
factors no less essential to the creating and appreciating of art. Clive Bell, for instance (1914. p. 132), wrote, "If
art expresses anything, it expresses an emotion felt for pure form": and form must be our primary concern. Or
one may argue that the expressive qualities we value are those which steer clear of clichéd, stereotyped or trite
forms of feeling: innovative qualities, perhaps exclusive to a single work of art. But if we say that, we are
showing our allegiance to a criterion of creativity or originality, and not to expression alone.

FORMALIST THEORIES: "ORGANIC UNITY"

Art, it can be argued, is not a window upon the world: it is on the artwork itself that appreciative attention must
primarily be focused, particularly on its distinctive structure, its design, unity, form. Discrete episodes of
expressive intensity are not enough: "Does the work hang together?" is always a relevant and surely a vital
question, a question that shows the primacy of formal unity. Concepts of form and of unity applicable to works
of art have been developed over the centuries from suggestions first made by Plato and Aristotle.

We distinguish different kinds of wholes: some, like a pile of stones, are no more than loose aggregates; others,
like a plant or animal, are tightly integrated ("organic") complexes, where each part exists only to serve the
whole. A work of art is, characteristically, a complex (of notes, instrument timbres, brush-strokes, color patches,
words, images, speech rhythms, and so on) whose elements do not impinge on us as isolated units, but are
determined in their perceived qualities by the context of all the other elements and their relationships. The
character of the whole, as a function of the individual components and their interrelationships, in turn modifies,
controls these components as we perceive them. The spectator’s "synoptic"grasp of the unity will be quite vital:
the parts are not perceived as vignettes, cameos, musical miniatures (see Osborne, 1955; 1968).

In the unities that, on this theory, the arts seek to provide, our efforts towards synoptic perceptual grasp are
neither defeated nor gratified on the instant. The very intricacy of an artwork’s structure can challenge and
stimulate our perceptive powers, making its appreciation both a strenuous and a rewarding activity. Not only do
works of art achieve formal unity in individually different ways within a single type of art form (such as sonata
form); but these generic forms themselves are constantly open to creative revision. It is not enough (nor indeed
necessary) that the unifying principles be rationally intelligible: but they must be perceivable in the work —
audible, visible, or, in literature, discernible in the meaning and sustainable interpretations of the actual text.

Why should we attach high value to formal unities of this kind? Basically, because of the quality of
consciousness they make possible. Where the items of a complex lend themselves to perception because of their
thematic interconnections, as do those of a successful work of art, we are enabled to synthesize a far greater
totality than in any other context. Whereas consciousness can often be attenuated, meager, sluggish, here it is at
its most active and zestful. Again, as finite beings, we are necessarily always vulnerable to the threat of
diminished personal integration, of being fragmented--as we are, finally and literally, in death. We are seldom
further from that state of lost personal unity than when we are rapt in enjoyment of a well-integrated work of
fine art. Elements of experience normally disparate and distanced are brought into a vivid relation, and our
experience is given new unity.

The temporal arts, although presenting motifs, brief melodies, rhythms, phrases of poetry which constantly pass
into silence, effect a partial transcendence of that evanescence in time, precisely on account of their formal
structuring whereby early notes (or images) are retained, remain active, ingredient in the total experience,
recalled even as a movement (or poem) comes to its close. Something parallel happens in spatial art also, where
the mutual connectedness and formal contribution of every represented object overcome the normal mutual
"indifference" of objects in space.

Can formalism, then, constitute a single all-sufficient theory of art? Defenders have not wanted to deny that art
can perform additional functions --to instruct, represent, express: but none of these is the essence of art. Even so,
there are many cases where one may justifiably question whether a work’s formal structure is so decisively the
essential thing that its other features must be given subordinate place. The formal structure of a work of art may
be valued for its controlling, its focusing, of the work's unique expressive qualities--for which we ultimately
treasure it. In other cases we may say that the expressive and the formal properties are co-equally important.
There are putative works of art --including, notably, some later twentieth-century art--whose structure is so
remote from traditional instances of "configurational unity", that the claim that their form is their essential
feature, qua artwork, becomes drastically attenuated. Other critics have argued that the theory has most
plausibility with regard to complex works of art, but has little power to illuminate in the case of simple ones,
where the concepts of synthesizing, interconnecting, mutual modifying gain no hold. Or is simplicity always
deceptive, illusory, in significant works of art?

Even more elusive is precision in defining the "formal unity" that is thought proper to works of art and to them
only. Too loose definitions may extend to the unity of a living organism, the features of a face or a mathematical
formal system; too narrow definitions will demand that in a fine work of art, nothing could be altered but for the
worse (Alberti, 1988 [1486]), or that to damage any part is to destroy the character of the whole. In fact, some
incomplete or fragmentary works testify, rather, to the resilience of their overall character.

Notoriously, there can be no once-and-for-all pinning down of necessary and sufficient conditions for the
formally satisfying or the aesthetically "right". Often, like Wittgenstein on designing a door, we can do no more
than say, "Higher, higher. . . there, thank God!" (Wittgenstein, 1966, p. 13, variant n. 3).

ART AS CREATION

Representation theorists and expression theorists do, of course, allow that art can be innovative--reworking
nature's materials in a "new" nature, or drastically modifying life experiences in the fashioning of expressive art.
The formalist or organic unity theory makes the artist’s innovative role more central: the unities of art are
nowhere paralleled in nature. But why not, then, make quite explicit the work of the artist as the creation of the
new? Creation is surely well suited to be the leading concept in a theory of art. And it has indeed been made
central by a variety of theorists and artists. To some, "Creative imagination" is that power by which, in a display
of freedom that echoes the divine prerogative of Creation ex nihilo, we summon up to actuality possible
worlds--worlds that God has not created but has, as it were, left for us to create.

Obvious implications follow for artistic practice and for criticism. Art should be freed from dependence on
appearances. The development towards abstraction in the visual arts can be proclaimed as a "purifying away" of
objective reference. Originality and individuality become criteria of high merit. We may particularly value
indications of the creative process within an artwork itself: the growth of a musical subject from fragments in
the earliest moments of a piece, the progressive incorporation of material that at first seems alien.

So: does "creation" yield a complete theory of art? When I try to develop such a one-concept theory, I find that
my concept of creation has to undergo progressive enrichment, if I am to accommodate within it the full freight
of meaning and criteria of value it would require for this role: it must mean new and aesthetically valuable,
rewarding. Even for the God of Genesis, after the work of creation (in the narrower sense of making, calling into
being) there remained a question of evaluating what had been done: a question favorably answered, "Behold, it
was very good. For the human artist, the possibility surely exists that he make something from (nearly) nothing,
but . . . behold, it is very bad--unless we pack into the concept, from the start, that an artifact counts as a creation
only if it has artistic merit. Novelty is not enough: an object can be original, in the sense of a perceptually
distinct, unique addition to the beings already in the world, and yet be unrewarding to contemplate, fail to
sustain attention.

Among products of high creativity we must include some scientific theories, mathematical calculi and theorems,
philosophical systems. But they are not art. However creative my daydreams, they are not art, either: they are
not worked in a medium, intersubjective, shared. Conversely, not every movement, style or period in art sets a
high evaluation on the particularized and original. We should also be cautious in accepting that ideal of
"purifying" art from all dependence on natural appearances. To purify can be to attenuate, if it means to cut
oneself off from any allusion to the world beyond the canvas. Such allusion can add immensely to the wealth of
meanings in a work of art.

Even if we reject a theology of man as co-creator with God--perhaps particularly if we reject it--the creation
theme rightly spotlights the artist's distinctive dignity. Artistic imagination continues, intensifies, perfects and on
occasion transfigures nature's own doings. It is not merely a fanciful metaphor to speak of the artist as bringing
into being "what nature has not created, and awaits creation".

DEVELOPING TRADITIONS

Emphasizing the freestanding character of works of art as created objects encourages us to see them as
autonomous, independent and self-explanatory. For countless individual works of art, that statement needs
correction, however. We shall not understand or appreciate them without at least an outline knowledge of the
tradition in which they stand, the genre to which they belong--and thus some understanding of whether they
simply continue or modify or rebel against tradition and genre as so far developed. Indeed, it is tempting for an
aesthetician, who despairs of any of the unified theories of art to fulfill their promise, to abandon all such
theorizing and urge instead that we take those ongoing developing traditions, genres and media (and the
complex actual vocabulary or criticism) as the basic data for reflection on the arts in all their diversity. Further,
we have only to consider some twentieth-century movements in art (Dada, conceptual art, ready-mades. for
instance) to realize that none of the favored unifying categories or key concepts is in the least likely to
illuminate their nature and role.

THE INSTITUTIONAL THEORY

One strategy for coping with these last-mentioned issues (and with other problems too) is that of the
"institutional theory of art". In a strong form it takes the unifying factor to be not the possession of common
perceptual ("manifest") features by artworks, but the conferral on certain objects, by representatives of the
"artworld", of the status of "candidate for appreciation"as works of art (Dickie, 1985, p. 34). The artworld is
thought of, roughly, as the set of art critics, organizers of exhibitions, owners of galleries and others with
relevant experience and authority. It may, however, provide me with little illumination, when bewildered before
an object like Duchamp's Fountain (a ready-made urinal) or Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII (a rectangle of bricks),
to be told that the artworld representatives have indeed conferred art status upon it. I cannot prevent myself
asking by what criteria, on account of what features (manifest, once more), has this status been conferred?
Either we must look for an answer that will render needless the artworld's conferral--that is, by appeal to reasons
or to criteria for their decisions, reasons which may be made open and public and applied by all. Or, if no
disclosable reasons are relevant, the artworld's decisions, in being detached from any of the characteristics
which we may look for or become aware of in contemplating a putative work of art, cannot be defended from
arbitrariness or waywardness (see Wollheim, 1987, ch. 1).

Being deemed a work of art, given space in a gallery, publication by a reputable publisher, performance by a
respected orchestra, imply judgments that the work will reward the attention solicited for it. But, again, we have
a legitimate interest in knowing the features of the work that have led to its selection and promotion.

A later version of the institutional theory drops the notion of conferral, and claims that a work of art is to be
understood as an artifact made for presentation to an "artworld public" (Dickie, 1989). The artworld becomes
the totality of "frameworks for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an art-world public", a public
prepared to understand such objects. But what this leaves altogether unclarified is the point and value of these
activities.

It may be said that we need a theory that can be of help with those recent putative art objects that have not been
held to have any aesthetic qualities. But objects that fail to meet any criteria for aesthetic interest or excellence
are no less a problem to an institutional theory if it accepts the challenge of explaining why the artworld’s
representatives confer art status on them, or of explaining the point of presenting these works to an
"understanding" public.

ART AS PLAY

Various other concepts have been proposed as bases on which to construct theories of art. The concept of play is
one such. That aesthetic activity is a kind of play was a seminal claim of Kant. The concept appears in several
contexts in his aesthetic writing. A judgment of taste arises in a "free play" of imagination and understanding,
where a perceptual complex is grasped and synthesized, and we are aware of order and purposiveness, but
without the application of classificatory concepts. To Kant, art can be described as play, "i.e. an occupation. . .
agreeable on its own account" (Kant, 1961 [1790], §§9, 43). Gratuitousness, spontaneity and freedom are
emphasized; the aesthetic objects are a delight to explore and rewarding to contemplate. In Friedrich Schiller's
writing on aesthetic education, a concept of play is central and highly elaborated. In rough outline: we can locate
a zone between, on the one hand, feeling and desire in their immediacy, and, on the other, the domain of
abstract, impersonal, formal reason. In that (aesthetic) zone, the "play impulse" and its products draw upon both
the sensuous and the rational, and intimately connect or fuse them. In this way, the otherwise conflictful
elements of human nature are brought into unity.

INEXHAUSTIBILITY AND DENSITY OF MEANING

"The heresy of paraphrase" is a familiar phrase expressing the fact that a significant work of literary art cannot
be reduced to a summary of its plot or "message". No more can a painting be reduced to an inventory of the
objects it represents. From a single metaphor up to a complex art work, inexhaustibility of interpretation is a
mark of authentic art. The coexistence of multiple levels or layers of meaning gives a sense of richness and
"depth". There is also a kind of aesthetic transcendence, where the expressive quality, say, of a passage of music,
far surpasses in gravity or poignancy the unconvincing human situation (say, an operatic plot) to which it
ostensibly refers, or where a deceptively commonplace still-life has a resonance beyond the reach of analysis.

In each of the arts there occurs the fullest possible assimilation of its symbolic materials and other constituents.
In poetry the sound and the rhythm matter as well as the sense; in a painting the picture plane and the traces of
brush-strokes, as well as the represented depth. The notes of a chord are heard each as continuing a "horizontal"
line of music, as well as "vertically" as constituting a chord, with its distinctive harmonic quality, and as moving
towards or away from some moment of tension; and, again, as a composite of the timbres of the individual
instruments that are playing it. Together, such features furnish the basic materials for yet another--and a
promising--communicational theory of art.

KEY CONCEPTS AND THEIR INTERRELATIONS

Supposing that none of the germinal concepts of the theories considered above can function by itself as sole key
concept generating a complete unitary theory of art, we should not be left with an unrelated plurality of notions.
Some of the most interesting work in aesthetics lies in exploring the interconnections among these concepts.
Resisting the temptation to extend some preferred concept so as to cover the whole field, we can remain
sensitive to aesthetically important creative and appreciative tensions between them. Representational artworks
are sometimes judged to fall below, or to rise to, expressiveness: my appreciation of sculpture may develop from
the easier beauties of representation to those of three-dimensional formal structures.

A theory must do justice to the fact that certain media and materials lend themselves to our doing several
significantly different things simultaneously in and through them. It is a happy contingency that we can at once
represent and express and construct new configurational unities in and through the skilled handling of paints,
inks or crayons, carved wood or chiseled stone. Some of our appraisals of artworks draw explicitly on these
multiple possibilities, challenges and tensions. For instance, we marvel at a composer’s success in managing a
demanding and potentially cramping form, while yet attaining a high degree of expressiveness and inventiveness
within it; or at a novelist who represents a wide range of human activity and experience, and whose work
thoroughly assimilates it, with unimpaired unity.
Some writers have seen the history of theorizing about the arts as a gradual realization that works of art are to be
properly appreciated as "objects in their own right". Other concerns--with truth to human nature and experience
outside art, with moral or political or religious impact--are to be relegated to the inessential. If, however,
representational art fashions an image of human life, it cannot be of indifference whether in particular cases it is
an adequate, defensible image or a grotesquely reduced parody. This question can obviously be raised only
where a work, or an oeuvre, does set out to characterize human experience as such, the human life-world rather
than a selected fragment. Major works of art do typically attempt something close to this. Art can be one main
source of a culture’s view of itself, its members and their world. We cannot properly rule out a moral scrutiny
and appraisal as irrelevant to such works, even though we should be equally misguided to judge any works of art
solely by their moral quality.

Furthermore, in its exploration of the widest range of human experience, art cannot fail to be particularly
concerned with the boundaries and limits of experience, where the expressible begins to yield to the
inexpressible. To attach high importance to these is not to demand of art that it labor in defense of particular
religions or particular beliefs, but only that, where some approach to a comprehensive image of the life-world is
attempted, neither the seeming bounds of that world, nor the peculiar ability of the arts to bring them to vivid
awareness in a transcending movement of the mind, be ignored.

THE STATUS OF THEORIES OF ART

Philosophy tries to be as self-conscious as possible about its own practice and aims: it is bound to raise the
question of the status of what we have been calling theories of the arts. Are these, in fact, definitions of "art"? Or
are they better seen as philosophical analyses of concepts used in discourse about art? Or are they theories
proper--systematic, explanatory accounts? Is their function descriptive, or prescriptive as well?

The multifariousness of the arts, their traditions, developing genres, idioms and media, their self-transcending
nisus, make definition an unrealistic, perhaps even undesirable, goal. To seek it obstinately results in
oversimplication and distortion. But it is equally important for the writer on aesthetics not to lurch too far in the
opposite direction, stressing complexity and difference, and prematurely to give up any attempt to see an
intelligible structure of relationships among the phenomena of the arts.

A substantial amount of theorizing about the arts involves conceptual and linguistic analysis. The analyses of the
concepts of representation, expression and form are all crucial and all contested. Aesthetics involves analyses
also of the role of the artist’s intention and imagination, of the nature of metaphor, symbolism, beauty, sublimity,
and the whole range of critical discourse. Nevertheless, the philosophical study of art is analysis not only of
discourse, but (no less legitimately) of description, of phenomenology, of the appreciative experiences which
largely prompt the discourse. Although the philosopher must be respectful of the art critic’s expertise, that does
not mean that he or she must be altogether dependent on the critic to speak or write before the philosopher may
break his silence. Philosophers of art must reserve the right to find a body of criticism, or a critical theory,
incomplete or even confused. They must themselves function as critics--for instance, in their choices of what
they see as revealing examples or counter-examples from the arts by which to examine and test critical theories.
And when an avant-garde innovator proposes some objects as artworks--objects which, if admitted to the
category, would overturn an otherwise very broadly based theoretical understanding of the arts --it should not be
taken for granted that theory should immediately and necessarily capitulate.

The aspiration to produce a unitary theory, even if it fails to result in one, remains legitimate and often fruitful.
We may enhance our understanding of art by seeing how much work a given key concept can do for us, and
finding where it ceases to be as illuminating as some alternative concept. If we are forced towards a theory with
several fundamental concepts rather than one, the phenomena in their complexity may well be better understood,
and the interrelations and tensions within and among the key concepts may illuminate the inner dynamics of
creation.

If, in my theorizing, I am one-sidedly neglectful of some major function or feature of art, I am very unlikely to
do appreciative justice to manifestations of it in individual works of art. I may need a theoretical reminder, even
if it in turn exaggerates, that there is more to the arts than I have been allowing. A normative role certainly
cannot be denied to aesthetic theory. For example: although we are most unlikely to find a complete and
adequate theory in Clive Bell’s account of "significant form", that account helped to make possible the shift in
sensibility needed for acceptance of post-impressionist painting--a shift from excessive concern with certain
sorts of represented subject to much greater concern with plastic and painterly values and with formal
relationships in general.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alberti, LB.: De Re Aedificatoria (Florence: 1486); trans. I. Rykwert, N. Leach and K. Taverner (Cambridge,
Mass, and London: MIT Press, 1988).

Beardsley, M.C.: Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958).

Bell, C.: Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914). Chariton, W.: Aesthetics (London: Hutchinson,1970).

Collingwood, R.G.: The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938).

Dickie, G.: Art and the Aesthetic (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1974).

Dickie, G.: The Art Circle (New York: 1985).

Dufrenne, M.: Phenomenologie de l’experience esthetique (Paris: 1953); trans. ES. Casey, A.A.

Anderson, W. Domingo and L. Jacobson, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1973).

Kant, I.: Kritik der Urteilskraft (Berlin: 1790); trans. J.C. Meredith, Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1961). Part I of the work is Kant's "Critique of Aesthetic Judgement", to which section numbers refer.

Osborne, H.: Aesthetics and Criticism (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955).

Osborne, H.: Aesthetics and Art Theory (London: Lougman, 1968).

Schiller, F.: Briefe über die äesthetische Erziehung des Menschen (1794/95); ed. and trans., with intro., E.M.
Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

Sharpe,R.A.: Contemporary Aesthetics (Brighton: Harvester. 1983).

Tilghman, B.R.: But is it Art? (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1984).

Wittgenstein, L.: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. C. Barrett
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1966).

Wollheim, R.: Art and its Objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

Wollheim, R.: Painting as an Art (Princeton, NJ, and London: Thames & Hudson, 1987).

http://retiary.org/art_theories/theories_of_art.html

art theory

http://www.art.northwestern.edu/
http://www.theartstory.org/section_critics.htm
https://www.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/future-students/undergraduate-degrees/art-theory
The Bachelor of Art Theory is designed specifically for aspiring thinkers, producers, curators, innovators and
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This program champions creative inquiry and recognises that great ideas make things happen and change the
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This program will help you imagine creative possibilities and futures. From experimentation and risk-taking to
investigating cultural, social, political and economic contexts, the BAT will develop your skills and knowledge
in order to produce incisive ideas and communicate them powerfully. Our focus on dynamic creative inquiry
will give you the capacity to think experimentally, critically and independently.

The BAT is a three-year program grounded in art and design thinking with specialities in: contemporary art and
design concepts; contemporary publishing and curatorial studies; and contexts for creative practices.

The program, is taught by leading experts from transdisciplinary backgrounds and offers the most dynamic and
intensive experience of its kind in Australia.

You will become familiar with the most challenging experimental art and design of the recent past and present.
In understanding the conceptual and practical contexts for these practices, you will be better equipped to tackle
future challenges. Graduates will be attuned to diverse modes of global practice and inquiry, media literacies
and critical thinking in a rapidly changing world.

The degree offers the flexibility to develop transdisciplinary pathways to prepare you for the convergence of
creative and critical fields in today’s art industries. For example, the BAT offers a pathway into the Master of
Curating and Cultural Leadership, a combination of degrees that provide a set of skills to support the creative
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In addition, the degree can be combined with a Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Laws or Bachelor of Social
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Program Structure

Contemporary Art and Design Thinking

This major considers ways of thinking about contemporary art and design practices, including experimentalism,
art history, aesthetics, visual culture, critical theory and creative methodologies. Focusing on creative research,
this major will introduce you to ways of investigating and articulating contemporary art and design.

Publishing and Curatorial Studies

This major will develop research skills in the areas of curation, contemporary art writing and publishing. It
focuses on the history and future of curatorial studies and publishing and writing environments.

Contexts for Creative Practice

This major will foster an environment for the integration of thinking and making. It will provide you with the
skills to identify, research, analyse and evaluate art, media and design practices. Contemporary approaches to art
and design will be explored by engaging diverse processes and by using open-ended frameworks and methods.

Bachelor of Art Theory (Honours)

Upon completion of the Bachelor of Art Theory (or an equivalent recognised program either at UNSW or
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Detailed information regarding the Bachelor of Art Theory (Honours) is available from the UNSW Handbook.
Career Opportunities

The creative and cultural industries are key drivers of growth in the contemporary global economy. Our
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The Bachelor of Art Theory offers students the opportunity to prepare intellectually and practically to work in
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Careers for Bachelor of Art Theory graduates include:

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Philosophy of art
Art, philosophy of. Art, philosophy of, the study of the nature of art, including such concepts as interpretation,
representation and expression, and form. It is closely related to aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty and
taste.
https://global.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-art
ArtArt, philosophy of, the study of the nature of art, including such concepts as interpretation, representation
and expression, and form. It is closely related to aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty and taste.
1-14-2016

Art, philosophy of, the study of the nature of art, including such concepts as interpretation, representation and
expression, and form. It is closely related to aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty and taste.
Distinguishing characteristics

The philosophy of art is distinguished from art criticism, which is concerned with the analysis and evaluation of
particular works of art. Critical activity may be primarily historical, as when a lecture is given on the
conventions of the Elizabethan theatre in order to explain some of the devices used in Shakespeare’s plays. It
may be primarily analytical, as when a certain passage of poetry is separated into its elements and its meaning or
import explained in relation to other passages and other poems in the tradition. Or it may be primarily
evaluative, as when reasons are given for saying that the work of art in question is good or bad, or better or
worse than another one. Sometimes it is not a single work of art but an entire class of works in a certain style or
genre (such as pastoral poems or Baroque music) that is being elucidated, and sometimes it is the art of an entire
period (such as Romantic). But in every case, the aim of art criticism is to achieve an increased understanding or
enjoyment of the work (or classes of works) of art, and its statements are designed to achieve this end.

The test of the success of art criticism with a given person is: has this essay or book of art criticism increased his
understanding or enhanced his appreciation of the work of art in question? Art criticism is particularly helpful
and often necessary for works of art that are more than usually difficult, so that the average person would be
unable adequately to understand or enjoy them if left to himself.

The task of the philosopher of art is more fundamental than that of the art critic in that the critic’s
pronouncements presuppose answers to the questions set by the philosopher of art. The critic says that a given
work of music is expressive, but the philosopher of art asks what is meant by saying that a work of art is
expressive and how one determines whether it is. In speaking and writing about art, the critic presupposes that
he is dealing with clear concepts, the attainment of which is the task of the philosopher of art.

The task of the philosopher of art is not to heighten understanding and appreciation of works of art but to
provide conceptual foundations for the critic by (1) examining the basic concepts underlying the critic’s
activities to enable him to speak and write more intelligibly about the arts, and by (2) arriving at true
conclusions about art, aesthetic value, expression, and the other concepts that the critic employs.

Upon what does the philosopher of art direct his attention? “Art,” is the ready answer, but what is art and what
distinguishes it from all other things? The theorists who have attempted to answer this question are many, and
their answers differ greatly. But there is one feature that virtually all of them have in common: a work of art is a
human-made thing, an artifact, as distinguished from an object in nature. A sunset may be beautiful, but it is not
a work of art. A piece of driftwood may have aesthetic qualities, but it is not a work of art since it was not made
by a human. On the other hand, a piece of wood that has been carved to look like driftwood is not an object of
nature but of art, even though the appearance of the two may be exactly the same. This distinction was
challenged in the 20th century by artists who declared that objets trouvés (“found objects”) are works of art,
since the artist’s perception of them as such makes them so, even if the objects were not human-made and were
not modified in any way (except by exhibition) from their natural state.

Nevertheless, according to the simplest and widest definition, art is anything that is human-made. Within the
scope of this definition, not only paintings and sculptures but also buildings, furniture, automobiles, cities, and
garbage dumps are all works of art: every change that human activity has wrought upon the face of nature is art,
be it good or bad, beautiful or ugly, beneficial or destructive.

The ordinary usage of the term is clearly less wide. In daily life when works of art are spoken of, the intention is
to denote a much narrower range of objects—namely, those responded to aesthetically. Among the things in this
narrower range, a distinction, although not a precise one, is made between fine and useful art. Fine art consists
of those works designed to produce an aesthetic response or that (regardless of design) function as objects of
aesthetic appreciation (such as paintings, sculptures, poems, musical compositions)—those human-made things
that are enjoyed for their own sake rather than as means to something else. Useful art has both an aesthetic and a
utilitarian dimension: automobiles, glass tumblers, woven baskets, desk lamps, and a host of other handmade or
manufactured objects have a primarily useful function and are made for that purpose, but they also have an
aesthetic dimension: they can be enjoyed as objects of beauty, so much so that a person often buys one brand of
car rather than another for aesthetic reasons even more than for mechanical reasons (of which he may know
nothing). A borderline case is architecture: many buildings are useful objects the aesthetic function of which is
marginal, and other buildings are primarily objects of beauty the utility of which is incidental or no longer
existent (Greek temples were once places of worship, but today their value is entirely aesthetic). The test in
practice is not how they were intended by their creators, but how they function in present-day experience. Many
great works of painting and sculpture, for example, were created to glorify a deity and not, insofar as can be
ascertained, for an aesthetic purpose (to be enjoyed simply in the contemplation of them for their own sake). It
should be added, however, that many artists were undoubtedly concerned to satisfy their aesthetic capabilities in
the creation of their work, since they were highly perfectionistic as artists, but in their time there was no such
discipline as aesthetics in which they could articulate their goals; in any case, they chose to create “for the
greater glory of God” by producing works that were also worthwhile to contemplate for their own sake.

This aesthetic sense of the word “art,” whether applied to fine art or useful art, is the one most employed by the
majority of critics and philosophers of art today. There are two other senses of “art,” however, that are still
narrower, and, to avoid confusion, their use should be noted: (1) Sometimes the term “art” is restricted to the
visual arts alone or to some of the visual arts. But as philosophers of art use the term (and as it is used here), art
is not limited to visual art; music and drama and poetry are as much arts as are painting, sculpture, and
architecture. (2) Sometimes the term “art” is used in a persuasive sense, to include only those works considered
good art. “That’s not art!” exclaims the viewer at an art gallery as he examines a painting he dislikes. But if the
term “art” is to be used without confusion, it must be possible for there to be bad art as well as good art. The
viewer, then, is not really denying that the work in question is art (it is a human-made object presented to be
contemplated for its own sake) but only that it is worthwhile.

The word “art” is also ambiguous in another way: it is sometimes used to designate the activity of creating a
work of art, as in the slogan “Art is expression”; but it is more often used to designate the product of that
process, the completed artwork or artifact itself, as in the remark “Art is a source of great enjoyment to me.”
There will be occasion later to remark on this ambiguity.

Countless proffered definitions of “art” are not definitions at all but theories about the nature of art that
presuppose that the ability to identify certain things in the world as works of art already exists. Most of them are
highly unsatisfactory even as theories. “Art is an exploration of reality through a sensuous presentation”—but in
what way is it an exploration? Is it always concerned with reality (how is music concerned with reality, for
example)? “Art is a re-creation of reality”—but is all art re-creation, even music? (It would seem likely that
music is the creation of something, namely, a new set of tonal relationships, but not that it is the re-creation of
anything at all.) “Art is an expression of feeling through a medium”—but is it always an expression (see below
Art as expression) and is it always feeling that is expressed? And so on. It appears more certain that
Shakespeare’s King Lear is a work of art than that these theories are true. All that seems to be required for
identifying something as a work of art in the wide sense is that it be not a natural object but something made or
transformed by a human being, and all that is required for identifying it as art (not as good art but as art) in the
narrower sense is that it function aesthetically in human experience, either wholly (fine art) or in part (useful
art); it is not even necessary, as has been shown, that it be intended by its creator to function in this way.

http://www.uark.edu/campus-resources/rlee/partsp07/whyphilart.html

What is Philosophy?

Philosophy, as I define it, is the "critical examination of pivotal concepts and beliefs." Critical examination
involves looking at matters with a questioning attitude. Look for reasons for opinions and beliefs. Look for
reasons against them. Attempt to construct (or find) arguments for positions -- and also against -- positions.
Reject or revise positions/beliefs/theories accordingly. Question what things mean. but don't simply ask
questions and leave it at that. Attempt to answer those questions. And look (critically) at whether those answers
are satisfactory.

One can critically examine lots of opinions without it amounting to philosophy. One can explore whether
there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. One can examine views a about who would be the best candidate
for president of the United States in the next election. One can look critically at the long term health affects of
"trans fats." One can look critically at whether Christ and the Disciples at Emmaeus was painted by Vermeer.
But such critical examination is not philosophy (although it uses the same tools and can both lead to and benefit
from philosophical examination).

Philosophy is the critical examination of pivotal concepts and beliefs. Before we get to the “pivotal”
qualification, let's look at what concepts and beliefs are. As I am using the term “concept” (philosophers of
psychology would have to be more precise) it is anything picked out by a noun phrase. So “hat” is a concept;
“money” is a concept; “planet” is a concept; “art” is a concept; so is “eating,” “knowledge,” “person,”
“elephant,” and “poetry.”

By “belief,” for our purposes here (again a philosopher who focused on such matters would have to be more
careful), I mean something that is or may be believed. It is something picked out by a declarative sentence.
Examples of beliefs are: “The Yankees will win the World Series this year,” “There are more than five people in
this room, "Today is Tuesday," "Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday and "A guitar is a stringed instrument."

Again, critical examination of the concepts and beliefs I have mentioned is not always philosophy. I have
said philosophy is the critical examination of pivotal concepts and beliefs. A rough synonym for "pivotal" in this
context is "fundamental." A pivotal concept or belief -- again roughly speaking -- is concept or belief that a lot
of other concepts and beliefs depend on. Often these are more general concepts and beliefs. “Hat” is a concept
an if you're going to follow some rule that you must (or must not) wear a hat at some religious ceremony, it can
important to know what a hat is. Or if your spouse tells you to go out and buy a hat. But in the grand scheme of
things (and much of philosophy is concerned with the grand scheme of things) not much depends on whether
something is a hat.

Contrast hat with person. Now you and I are pretty good (although not perfect) at determining what is a
person and what is not (maybe better than we are at figuring out what is a hat and what is instead a scarf or cap).
But of course there important issues where this is in question. Some (but not all) of the debate about the morality
of abortion involves the question of whether a fetus is a person. The question also arises at the end of life when a
human body is lying in a bed kept biologically alive by machine and tests indicate that there is no brain activity.
And one can imagine other circumstances (extraterrestrial visitors) where the importance of the extent of the
concept would be obvious. But the concept is important even in cases where we have no doubt that something is
a person. I (and you, I hope) think it would be wrong to kill a person for no good reason without that person's
consent. You, I hope, have no doubt that I am a person. So, you probably think it wrong to kill me without my
consent for no good reason. Of course some of you think that consent (although pivotal concept) is irrelevant
here. Some of you might think it would be wrong to kill me even if you did have “good reason” (although there
is another concept needing exploration). Some of you might think that whether I am a person is irrelevant here
and what is relevant is that I am a living thing (although I wonder whether you would refrain from killing a
living bacterium, scallion, or mosquito). And what is it for something to be wrong (“wrongness” -- you guessed
it -- a pivotal concept)? And what is it to kill (ditto)?

Now there is no sharp line between pivotal concepts and non-pivotal concepts. It is surely a matter of
degree. It still makes sense to speak of some concepts as pivotal. Here are some concepts I think of as pivotal:
cause, knowledge, God, mind, value, material object, freedom, beauty, and art.
 What about pivotal beliefs? Not all beliefs involving pivotal concepts will be pivotal beliefs. Did my cat
cause the lamp to fall over? “Cause” is a pivotal concept, but this is not a pivotal belief. Not much (although not
nothing) depends upon it. Whether everything that happens has a cause, however, is a pivotal belief. Other
pivotal beliefs: “There is a God who created us and loves us,” “Knowledge is justified true belief,” “Something
that is not beautiful is not art,” “Killing persons is wrong,” “Human beings have free will,” “We cannot know
anything about anything we have not experienced,” “Democracy is the only justifiable political system.”
“Mental phenomena are simply functions of the brain.” “The only things that ultimately exist as things that are
explanable in terms of physics.” The only things that art art are things which are beautiful in some way.

Now I don't believe in all these “beliefs,” but each one is such that much depends on whether it is true.

One might think that since we are asking about concepts and beliefs, philosophy is about what people think.
And in a sense it is. But the philosopher as such is not concerned with whether people as a matter of fact believe
something. We'll leave that to the pollsters or the psychologists or sociologists. The question is whether the
belief is true. That cannot be determined by poll (unless the belief is about sociological matters, such as whether
in the United States in 1967 the Beatles were more popular than Jesus). So typically “social science”
investigation will not be directly pertinent to philosophical exploration.

Often philosophers do “analysis” and attempt to understand certain pivotal concepts in terms of others. So a
philosopher may propose that knowledge is justified belief, that causation is constant correlation, or that art is
the expression of emotion.

One thing philosophers do, then, is to critically examine such views. A broad, coherent view about a matter
could be called a “theory.” Philosophers come up with theories about pivotal matters. (There are also theories
about pivotal matters, and theories that are best tested by scientific method.) Philosophers also critically
examine theories which have been proposed by other philosophers.

As philosophers we spend a lot of time looking at views that are false. It is important when a philosophical
view is false to understand why it is false. This is part of what is involved in critical examination.
Philosophy of X

Like an other discipline philosophy has branches. The three main branches of philosophy are metaphysics --
the study of the nature of reality, epistemology -- the study of nature of knowledge, and axiology -- the study of
the nature of value. Logic, which is often taught in philosophy departments, is in part a branch of mathematics,
in part a tool which philosophers use in their work, in part an aspect of epistemology (in that it is a study of the
nature of good reasons, reasons which may lead to knowledge) and in part an aspect of axiology (in that
involves an exploration of the nature of good reasons).

In addition to those branches there are often taught in philosophy departments courses with titles of the
form “philosophy of X.” Philosophy of science explores the nature of science and philosophical questions that
arise in, and at the foundation of, science. Philosophy of religion explores philosophical questions that arise in,
and at the foundation of, religion. Philosophy of art, naturally, explores philosophical questions that arise in, and
at the foundation of, art.
Questions Addressed by Philosophy of Art

So what are the philosophical questions that arise in, and at the foundation of, art? Here are several:

What kind of thing is a work of art?

Are all works the same kind of thing?
Is art essentially connected with emotion?
What distinguishes things that are artworks from things that are not?
Must an artwork be about something?
How is art like, and unlike, language?
Under what conditions, if any, can things which are not made by humans still be art?
If an artwork glorifies something immoral, can it still be good?
Is there some special aesthetic emotion that is felt when one experiences works of art?
For an artwork to represent something (a person, a mythological creature, an abstract idea), what is
necessary?
Does one need any special skills in order to be an artist?
Techniques of Philosophy: Distinctions and Arguments

One things philosophers do is to make distinctions. So, for example, Collingwood distinguishes what he
calls "art-proper" from other things such as "magical art," "craft," "amusement," and so on. An important
distinction at the center of the field is between "art" and "aesthetics." Aesthetics, as this term is currently
understood, involves certain kinds of judgements ("aesthetic judgments") about things, often, but not always,
involving beauty. One can make aesthetic judgments about things which are not art, such as sunsets and hands.
Philosophy of art, on the other hand, concerns philosophical questions about the nature of art, not all of which
involve an aesthetic appreciation, certainly not beauty.

I mentioned already that philosophers use logic as a tool. This is because philosophers are concerned to
make and criticize arguments. As philosophers use the term "argument" it is a defense of a position. An
argument has conclusion, a statement which is argued for. An argument also has premises, which are claims
which are appealed to in defense of the conclusion. It is also usually useful to isolate the form or structure of an
argument, which helps to make clear how the premises are supposed to support the conclusion.

Here's an example of an argument:

If all works of arts are physical objects, then destruction of that physical object destroys the work of art.
A good poem is a work of art.
Destruction of pieces of paper (and computer disks etc.) does not destroy the poem which is written on the
piece of paper.
Therefore, not all works of art are physical objects.

Some of you might immediately think "of course!" Others may be ready to object. Both groups of people,
however, should ask whether this is a good argument. Has a good reason been given for the stated conclusion?
And this question can be broken down into two questions: First, are all the premises true? Second, is the
structure of the argument such that if the premises were true, the conclusion would then have to (or at least
probably) be true? I have made this case a bit easier by laying out the argument with explicit premises and an
explicit conclusion. Usually in books and articles the arguments won't be laid out quite so clearly. One will have
to tease out what the premises are.

For this particular argument it may be difficult to lay out the form precisely. And, furthermore, in trying to
do so, one might find oneself having to puzzle about what it means to say a work is art is something (viz., a
physical object). (Bill Clinton may be the one who gets into the book of quotations, but philosophers are often in
a position to say "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is.") And one might find that premise 3 is not all that
clear either. For example, what is included in the "et cetera?" Are all human beings presumed to be destroyed? If
a poem can be stored on a computer disk, can't it be stored in a brain? (Fahrenheit 451, anyone?)

And then if we do reject the conclusion, and admit that not all works of art are physical objects, then what
belief do we put in its place? Are some works of art (paintings, maybe) physical objects, and others (poems,
symphonies) not? Or are no works of art physical objects? And if that, what are they?
Why Do Philosophy of Art?

So, why do philosophy of art? Well, while I feel philosophy is valuable in general, I actually don't think it is
requisite that everyone do philosophy of art. While art and beauty are pivotal concepts, it is not important that
everyone understand about them. Some people want to understand. All power to them. But someone who cares
about art, someone who does art, ought to try to understand.

Socrates was an important philosopher early in the development of western civilization. (He died in 399
B.C.E.) Socrates made a practice of questioning all sorts of people whom others might consider wise. He
questions politicians, military generals, priests, law professors (or what was roughly equivalent to that in their
society), and poets. In each case he'd find people with strong beliefs who thought they understood what they
were doing. In each case by the end of the discussion with Socrates they would realize that they don't understand
what they are doing. Generals didn't understand what courage was. Priests didn't understand what piety was.
Politicians didn't understand what justice was. And so on.

Spiders make webs. It is not important that they understand what they are doing. They do it (and generally
do it quite well; the ones who didn't haven't passed on their genes to subsequent generations). Bees make honey.
They don't need to understand. Water runs downhill. It doesn't understand what it is doing. And people too do
things they don't understand and don't need to understand. I walk. I haven't taken courses in kinesiology. But if
someone specializes in some field or wishes to be an expert, she or he should understand what it is she or he is
doing. And this involves critically examinating pivotal concepts and beliefs that arise in, or at the foundation, of
that field. If, therefore, one wishes to be an artist (not as a causual hobby, but as master), or if one intends to
teach art to others, one should have an understanding of what art is, how it relates to emotions, and so on.
Richard Lee, rlee@uark.edu, last modified: 16 January 2008

http://web.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361_r1.html
"Art, Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Art "

by Arthur C. Danto

Humanities, Vol. 4, No. 1 (February 1983), pp. 1-2

#1. Not very many years ago, aesthetics - understood as the philosophy of art - was regarded as the dim,
retarded offspring of two glamorous parents, its discipline and its subject. Philosophy in the twentieth century
had become professionalized and technical, its methods formal, and its analytical aims the discovery of the most
fundamental structures of thought, language, logic and science. Philosophical questions about art seemed
peripheral and its answers cloudy - far too cloudy for those caught up in the reinvention of painting and music
and literature to find much help in the dated, faded reflections of the aesthetician. And students with a primary
interest in art who may have registered for courses in this condescendingly tolerated specialty found themselves
confronting a perplexingly irrelevant literature. In 1954, the philosopher John Passmore published a paper with
the accurate title "The Dreariness of Aesthetics," and it must have been just about then that the wit and painter
Barnett Newman delivered one of his most quoted sayings: "Aesthetics is for art what ornithology is for the
birds" - a sneer whose edge is blunted today by the fact that the vulgarism it echoes has faded from usage.

#2. I have always had a passionate interest in art and a logical passion for philosophy, but nothing in my
experience with either conflicted with the general dismal appraisal of aesthetics, and I am certain I should never
have gotten involved with it had I not visited a singular exhibition at what was then the Stable Gallery on East
74th Street in New York in 1964. Andy Warhol had filled the space with piles of Brillo boxes, similar to if
somewhat sturdier than those brashly stenciled cartons stacked in the storerooms of supermarkets wherever soap
pads are sold. I was familiar of course with the exploitation of emblems of popular and commercial labels by the
pop artists, and Warhol's portraits of Campbell's soup cans were legendary. But as someone who came to artistic
age in the heroic period of Abstract Expressionism, when decisions for or against The Image were fraught with
an almost religious agony, the crass and casual use of tacky images by the new artists seemed irreverent and
juvenile. But the Warhol show raised a question which was intoxicating and immediately philosophical, namely
why were his boxes works of art while the almost indistinguishable utilitarian cartons were merely containers
for soap pads? Certainly the minor observable differences could not ground as grand a distinction as that
between Art and Reality! [For examples of Warhol's art, click here.]

#3. A philosophical question arises whenever we have two objects which seem in every relevant particular to be
alike, but which belong to importantly different philosophical categories. Descartes for example supposed his
experience while dreaming could be indistinguishable from his experience awake, so that no internal criterion
could divide delusion from knowledge. Wittgenstein noted that there is nothing to distinguish someone's raising
his arm from someone's arm going up, though the distinction between even the simplest action and a mere
bodily movement seems fundamental to the way we think of our freedom. Kant sought a criterion for moral
action in the fact that it is done from principles rather than simply in conformity with those principles, even
though outward behavior might be indistinguishable between the two. In all these cases one must seek the
differences outside the juxtaposed and puzzling examples, and this is no less the case when seeking to account
for the differences between works of art and mere real things which happen exactly to resemble them.

#4. This problem could have been raised at any time, and not just with the somewhat minimal sorts of works one
might suspect the Brillo Boxes to be. It was always conceivable that exact counterparts to the most prized and
revered works of art could have come about in ways inconsistent with their being works at all, though no
observable differences could be found. I have imagined cases in which an artist dumps a lot of paint in a
centrifuge she then spins, just "to see what happens" - and what happens is that it all splats against the wall in an
array of splotches that cannot be told by the unaided eye from The Legend of the True Cross, by Piero della
Francesca. Or an anarchist plants /p. 2 dynamite in the marble quarry, and the explosion results in a lot of lumps
of marble which by a statistical miracle combine into a pile which looks like The Leaning Tower at Pisa. Or the
forces of nature act through millennnia on a large piece of rock until something not to be told apart from the
Apollo Belvedere results.

#5. Nor are these imaginary possibilities restricted to painting, sculpture, and architecture. There are the famous
chimpanzees who, typing at random, knocked out all the plays of Shakespeare. But Wordsworth sought to make
poetry out of the most commonplace language, while Auden invented a style of reading poetry which was
indistinguishable from ordinary talking - so for all anyone could tell, Moliere's M. Jourdain could have been
speaking poetry rather than prose all his life. John Cage has made the division between music and noise
problematic, leaving it possible that sets of sounds from the street could be music, while other sets which we
would spontaneously suppose music happen not to be, just because of the circumstances of their production.
And it takes little effort to imagine a dance in which the dancers do ordinary things in the ordinary ways; a
dance could consist in someone sitting reading a book. I once saw Baryshnikov break into a football player's run
on stage, and I thought it altogether wonderful. True, it may seem difficult to suppose art could have begun with
these puzzling works - but it cannot be forgotten that when philosophy first noticed art it was in connection with
the possibility of deception.

#6. Now the "dreariness of aesthetics" was diagnosed as due to the effort of philosophers to find a definition of
art, and a number of philosophical critics, much under the influence of Wittgenstein, contended that such a
definition was neither possible nor necessary. It was not possible because the class of art works seemed radically
open, so much so that no set of conditions could be imagined which would be necessary and sufficient for
something to be a member. Luckily, there was no need for a definition, since we seem to have had no difficulty
in picking out the works of art without benefit of one. And indeed something like this may very well have
appeared true until the Warhol boxes came along. For if something is a work of art while something apparently
exactly like it is not, it is extremely unlikely we could be certain we could pick the art work out even with a
definition. Perhaps we really have no such skill at all. Still, to the degree that there is a difference, some theory
is needed to account for it, and the problem of finding such a theory becomes central and urgent. Nor is this
merely a matter of abstract concern to philosophers, for it is in response to a question which arose within the
world of art itself. Philosophers of the tradition, to the degree that they had thought about art at all, thought
chiefly about the art of their own time: Plato, about the illusionistic sculptures of his contemporaries; Kant,
about the tasteful objects of the Enlightenment; Nietzsche, about Wagnerian opera; the Wittgensteinians, about
the extraordinary proliferation of styles in the twentieth century, when a whole period of art history appeared to
last about six months. But the Warhol boxes, though clearly of their time, raised the most general question about
art that can be raised, as though the most radical possibilities had at last been realized. It was, in fact, as though
art had brought the question of its own identity to consciousness at last.

#7. However this identity is to be articulated, it is clear that it cannot be based upon anything works of art have
in common with their counterparts. One prominent theorist, for example, regards paintings as very complex
perceptual objects. So they are, but since objects can be imagined perfectly congruent with those which are not
art works, these must have equivalent complexity at the level of perception. After all, the problem arose in the
first place because no perceptual difference could be imagined finally relevant. But neither can possession of so-
called "aesthetic qualities' serve, since it would be strange if a work of art were beautiful but something exactly
like it though not a work of art were not. In fact it has been a major effort of the philosophy of art to de-
aestheticize the concept of art. It was Marcel Duchamp, a far deeper artist than Warhol, who presented as
"readymades" objects chosen for their lack of aesthetic qualities - grooming combs, hat racks, and, notoriously,
pieces of lavatory plumbing. "Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided," Duchamp wrote of his most
controversial work, Fountain, of 1917. It was precisely Duchamp's great effort to make it clear that art is an
intellectual activity, a conceptual enterprise and not merely something to which the senses and the feelings come
into play. And this must be true of all art, even that most bent upon gratifying the eye or ear, and not just for
those works which are regarded as especially "philosophical," like Raphael's School of Athens or Mann's The
Magic Mountain. Were someone to choreograph Plato's Republic, that would not, simply because of its exalted
content, be more philosophical than Coppelia or Petrouchka. In fact these might be more philosophical,
employing as they do real dancers imitating dancing dolls imitating real dancers!

#8. Where are the components for a theory of art to be found? I think a first step may be made in recognizing
that works of art are representations, not necessarily in the old sense of resembling their subjects, but in the
more extended sense that it is always legitimate to ask what they are about. Warhol's boxes were clearly about
something, had a content and a meaning, made a statement, even were metaphors of a sort. In a curious way
they made some kind of statement about art, and incorporated into their identity the question of what that
identity is - and it was Heidegger who proposed that it is a part of the essence of being a human that the question
of what one is part of what one is. But nothing remotely like this could be true of a mere soap box. Dances, too,
are representational, not simply in the way in which a pair of dancers may dance the dance the characters dance
in the action they imitate, but in the same wide sense in which even the most resolutely abstract art has a
pictorial dimension.

#9. The Problem of Indiscernible Counterparts follows from the representationalistic character of works of art.
Imagine a sentence written down, and then a set of marks which looks just like the written sentence, but is
simply a set of marks. The first set has a whole lot of properties the second set lacks: it is in a language, has a
syntax and grammar, says something. And its causes will be quite distinct in kind from those which explain
mere marks. The structure then of works of art will have to be different from the structure of objects which
merely resemble them.

#10. Now of course not all representational things are works of art, so the definition has only begun. I shall not
take the next steps here. All I have wished to show is the way that the philosophy of art has deep questions to
consider, questions of representation and reality, of structure, truth, and meaning. In considering these things, it
moves from the periphery to the center of philosophy, and in so doing it curiously incorporates the two things
that give rise to it. For when art attains the level of self-consciousness it has come to attain in our era, the
distinction between art and philosophy becomes as problematic as the distinction between reality and art. And
the degree to which the appreciation of art becomes a matter of applied philosophy can hardly be overestimated.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

What does Danto understand as "philosophy"?

Danto says that "a philosophical question arises whenever we have two objects which seem in every relevant
particular to be alike, but which belong to importantly different philosophical categories" (#3), and he goes on to
give several examples of this puzzle from classical philosophers. Can you think of additional examples of this
puzzle from your own experiences? In practice, how do you distinguish those seemingly identical objects?
Danto gives several examples in which an ordinary object might be perceptually indistinguishable from a
work of art. What criteria can you think of to distinguish the art works? Can you use the same criteria for all the
various genres of art? Is there an "essence" of art that can be found in all of them? If so, what is that "essence"?
If not, what else seems to explain why we consider the works in question here to be works of "art"?
Why have some philosophers, including Wittgenstein, believed that it was impossible to specify "necessary
and sufficient" conditions for "art"? Are there problems in trying to understand art without being able to specify
such "necessary and sufficient" conditions?
Danto considers proposals by other theorists for the essential characteristic(s) of all art (i.e., its necessary and
sufficient conditions). What are those proposals, and why does Danto consider them inadequate?
According to Danto, W.H. Auden's poetry "is indistinguishable from ordinary talking." Find some of his
poetry by searching on the Web. Do you agree with Danto? If you disagree, on what basis do you believe they
are "distinguishable from ordinary talking"?
Raphael's School of Athens is cited by Danto as an example of a work "regarded as especially
'philosophical.'" Look at the on-line images of this work by clicking here. Why would someone consider
Raphael's work "philosophical"?
Duchamp's first "readymade" was "Bicycle Wheel". Find this image on-line by searching the Web. Does this
work "lack aesthetic qualities"? Is our appreciation of this work an "intellectual activity" and not an "aesthetic"
one? Has Duchamp proved his point with this work that "Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided"?
Danto suggests that a starting point for a theory of art recognizes that works of art are "representations." What
does he mean by this? What does he not mean by this? Why is this sense of "representation," alone, inadequate
to completely account for what we mean by art?
What does Danto mean by "The Problem of Indiscernible Counterparts"?
Why does Danto believe that "the distinction between art and philosophy" is "problematic"?

WRITING BY ARTHUR C. DANTO (Selected)

After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992.

Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989,
1997.

Encounters & Reflections; Art in the Historical Present. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990.
Mysticism and Morality: Oriental Thought and Moral Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Narration and Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996.

"The Artworld," The Journal of Philosophy 61, October 15, 1964.

The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

The State of the Art. New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1987.

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Philosophers_of_art

http://tfreeman.net/Philosophy/330.html