Arthur C. Danto

In this lively look at current debates in American philosophy, leading philosophers talk candidly about the changing character of their discipline. In the spirit of Emerson's The American Scholar, this book explores the identity of the American philosopher. Through informal conversations, the participants discuss the rise of post-analytic philosophy in America and its relations to European thought and to the American pragmatist tradition. They comment on their own intellectual development as well as each others' work, charting the course of American philosophy over the past few decades. Giovanna Borradori, in her substantial introduction, explains the history of the analytic movement in America and the home-grown reaction against it. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American philosophy was a socially engaged interdisciplinary enterprise. In transcendentalism and pragmatism, then the dominant currents in American thought, philosophy was connected to history, psychology, and public issues. But in the 1930s, the imported European movement of logical positivism redefined philosophical discourse in terms of mathematical logic and theory of language. Under the influence of this analytic view, American philosophy became a professionalized discipline, divorced from public debate and intellectual history and antagonistic to the other, more humanistic tradition of continental thought. The American Philosopher explores the opposition between analytic and continental thought and shows how recent American work has begun to bridge the gap between the two traditions. Through a reexamination of pragmatism, and through an attempt to understand philosophy in a more hermeneutical way, the participants narrow the distance between America's distinctly scientific philosophy and Europe's more literary approach. Moving beyond classical analytic philosophy, the participants confront each other on a number of topics. The logico-linguistic orientations of Quine and Davidson come up against the more discursive, interdisciplinary agendas of Rorty, Putnam, and Cavell. Nozick's theory of pluralist anarchism goes face-to-face with the aesthetic neo-foundationalism of Danto. And Kuhn's hypothesis of paradigm shifts is measured against MacIntyre's ethics of "virtues." Borradori's conversations offer an unconventional portrait of the way philosophers think about their work; scholars and students will not be its only beneficiaries, so will everyone who wonders about the current state of American philosophy.

American education in the arts and aesthetics has been harmed by the late 20th-century "hard-boundaried" approach, which overvalues specialization and discourages integrated, interdisciplinary approaches to understanding history, theory, and practice in all the arts. Detels analyzes this marginalization of the arts and aesthetics in American education and suggests that a widespread interdisciplinary integration of the arts is essential in order to provide students with necessary communication and interpretation skills the future.

Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century offers a unique and authoritative guide to modern responses to art. Featuring 48 essays on the most important twentieth century writers and thinkers and written by an international panel of expert contributors, it introduces readers to key approaches and analytical tools used in the study of contemporary art. It discusses writers such as Adorno, Barthes, Benjamin, Freud, Greenberg, Heuser, Kristeva, Merleau-Ponty, Pollock, Read and Sontag.

Feminist approaches to art are extremely influential and widely studied across a variety of disciplines, including art theory, cultural and visual studies, and philosophy. Gender and Aesthetics is an introduction to the major theories and thinkers within art and aesthetics from a philosophical perspective, carefully introducing and examining the role that gender plays in forming ideas about art. It is ideal for anyone coming to the topic for the first time.Organised thematically, the book introduces in clear language the most important topics within feminist aesthetics:* Why were there so few women painters?* Art, pleasure and beauty* Music, literature and painting* The role of gender in taste and food* What is art and who is an artist?* Disgust and the sublime.Each chapter discusses important topics and thinkers within art and examines the role gender plays in our understanding of them. These topics include creativity, genius and the appreciation of art, and thinkers from Plato, Kant, and Hume to Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Also included in the book are illustrations from Gaugin and Hogarth to Cindy Sherman and Nancy Spero to clarify and help introduce often difficult concepts. Each chapter concludes with a summary and further reading and there is an extensive annotated bibliography.Carolyn Korsmeyer's style is refreshing and accessible, making the book suitable for students of philosophy, gender studies, visual studies and art theory, as well as anyone interested in the impact of gender on theories of art.

Richard Eldridge's compact survey of philosophical theories of the nature and significance of art draws on materials from classical and contemporary philosophy as well as literary theory and art criticism. Eldridge explores the representational, expressive, and formal dimensions of art, and argues that works of art present their subject matter as creations of enduring cognitive, moral, and social interest. His accessible study will be of interest to students and anyone interested in the relationship between thought and art.

Politics has taken a cultural turn in America, and the arts are at the center of today's culture wars. In this book, some of our most prominent cultural critics explore the relationships between culture and politics as played out in the world of novels, television, museums, and even fashion. The authors -- John Simon, Greil Marcus, Arthur C. Danto, and other well-known commentators from across the political spectrum -- examine the arts in their relation to democracy and consider whether and how they serve one another.

The authors consider such topics as high and popular culture in democratic America; the relation of democracy to classical, jazz, and folk music; and the artistic potential of the most democratic of all arts, the movies. All of the essays are as entertaining as they are thoughtful.

With its roots in popular sentiment, democracy will forever be entwined with art, a force that powerfully molds popular taste. Democracy and the Arts speaks elegantly to that relationship and reminds readers of its enduring importance.