This volume brings together seventeen previously published articles by Noel Carroll, exploring all aspects of Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art. They cover Danto.

This essay is written as an introductory essay to celebrate the third edition of Arthur Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History, first printed in 1965. It raises questions about what it means to write an introduction given Danto’s own philosophical theses on history. What does it mean to write before a book but after the fact? The essay also pays special attention to the connections between Danto’s philosophy of history, philosophy of art, and the other areas of (...) his philosophy that he regards to be all of a piece. It considers the nature of analytical philosophy and its heyday in America in the postwar period, when, to some degree, it was used as an antidote to a ideology of history that had proved itself to be no more than an extreme perversion of some of the most influential claims in a philosophy of history developed in Germany around 1800. (shrink)

From the nineteen-eighties on, Arthur Danto was the most significant art critic and philosopher of art in world. This book provides a comprehensive, systematic view of his philosophy and criticism including his views in relation to not only painting and sculpture but to cinema and dance.

Arthur Danto’s recent book, Andy Warhol, leads the reader through the story of the iconic American’s artistic life highlighted by a philosophical commentary, a commentary that merges Danto’s aesthetic theory with the artist himself. Inspired by Warhol’s Brillo Box installation, art that in Danto’s eyes was indiscernible from the everyday boxes it represented, Danto developed a theory that is able to differentiate art from non-art by employing the body of conceptual art theory manifest in what he termed the ‘artworld’. (...) The strength of Danto’s theory is found in its ability to explain the art of the post-modern era. His body of work weaves philosophy, art history and art criticism together, merging his aesthetic philosophy with his extensive knowledge of the world of art. Danto’s essentialist theory of embodied meaning provides him with a critical tool that succeeds in explaining the currents of contemporary art, a task that many great thinkers of art history were unable to do. If Warhol inspired Danto to create a philosophy of art, it is appropriate that Danto write a tribute to Warhol that traces how Warhol brought philosophy into art. Danto’s account of ‘Warhol as philosopher’ positions him as a pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century art, effecting a sea change in how art was made and viewed. Warhol achieved this by conceiving of works that embodied the answers to a series of philosophical puzzles surrounding the nature of art. Warhol, as Danto describes him, manifests himself in his art because he had transformed himself, in a way, into an icon of the times. This pragmatist notion that art should undermine the dichotomies that exist between art and life would, by some accounts, position Warhol to be the philosopher that Danto claims him to be, for he dissolved the philosophical questions posted by late modern aesthetic thinkers by creating art that imploded the accepted notions of art at the time. One of Danto’s greatest contributions to aesthetics is his theory’s ability to distinguish art from non-art, recognizing that it is the artist’s intention that levels the sublimity of art into the commonplace, thereby transfiguring the everyday. However, acknowledging this achievement, I argue that Warhol’s philosophical contribution actually manifests itself in a manner different from that proposed by Danto. Danto maintains that the internal drive of art leads to the unfolding of art theoretical concepts that ineluctably shift the terrain of world of art. I would agree with Danto that Warhol, almost as Hegel viewed Napoleon as Geist on a horse, pushed forward the boundaries of art through the actualization of art’s internal drive. But I would disagree that the conceptual nature of art is one that unfolds merely as a relation of concepts that artists trace through a connection to the meaning of history they forge using their unmediated grasp of style. Rather, I would argue that the artist’s style is not bound so narrowly to the meanings they express. Through their aesthetic articulations, artists initiate a process of social interaction. This process employs the philosophical logic which Danto attributes to Warhol indirectly, and through it, it is able to transfigure the vocabulary of art—the concepts of the artworld—by superseding the language of modernism. Warhol’s philosophical contribution is seen in his mastery of both the medium of art and the underlying logic of the medium’s expression and reception. (shrink)

Arthur Danto's work has always affirmed a deep relationship between philosophy and art. These essays explore this relationship through a number of concrete cases in which either artists are driven by philosophical agendas or their art is seen as solving philosophical problems in visual terms. The essays cover a varied terrain, with subjects including Giotto's use of olfactory data in _The Raising of Lazarus; _chairs in art and chairs as art; Mel Bochner's Wittgenstein drawings; the work of (...) Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol, and Robert Irwin; Louis Kahn as "Archai-Tekt"; and visual truth in film. Also featured are a meditation on the battle of Gettysburg; and a celebration of the Japanese artist Shiko Munakata, an essay that is partly autobiographical. Arthur C. Danto is one of the most original and multitalented philosophers writing today, a thinker whose interests traverse the boundaries of traditional understandings of philosophy. Best known for his contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, Danto is also esteemed for his work in the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophical psychology, and action theory. These two volumes, each with an introduction by the author, contain essays spanning more than twenty-five years that have been selected to highlight the inseparability of philosophy and art in Danto's work. Together they present the thinking of Arthur C. Danto at his very best. (shrink)

Arthur C. Danto did not live to witness the proliferation of AI in artistic creation. However, his philosophy of art offers key ideas about art that can provide an interesting perspective on artwork generated by artificial intelligence (AI). In this article, I analyze how his ideas about contemporary art, intention, interpretation, and authorship could be applied to the ongoing debate about AI and artistic creation. At the same time, it is also interesting to consider whether the incorporation of (...) AI into artistic creation marks a new chapter in the narrative, which seems to have reached its end, or if it represents a significant rupture with past artistic traditions. (shrink)

Arthur C. Danto's lucid introduction to the central topics of Western philosophical thought remains an unparalleled guide to problems in metaphysics and epistemology that have engaged philosophers for several millennia. Examining the work of Plato, Berkeley, Descartes, Hume, and Wittgenstein, Danto explores debates about empiricism, the mind/body problem, the nature of matter, and the status of language, consciousness, and scientific explanation. In a new preface to this edition he considers the current relationship between philosophy and the humanities.

In this acclaimed work, first published in 1986, world-renowned scholar Arthur C. Danto explored the inextricably linked but often misunderstood relationship between art and philosophy. In light of the book's impact -- especially the essay "The End of Art," which dramatically announced that art ended in the 1960s -- this enhanced edition includes a foreword by Jonathan Gilmore that discusses how scholarship has changed in response to it. Complete with a new bibliography of work on and influenced by (...) Danto's ideas, _The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art_ continues to be of interest to anyone who thinks seriously about art, as well as to philosophers, aestheticians, and art historians. (shrink)

Arthur Danto is one of the best Anglophone philosophers of art of the second half of the 20th century. His unique methodology of indiscernibility and provocative claim about the end of art have bee...

In this paper we examine the theory of historical explanation presented by Arthur Danto in his book, Analytical Philosophy of History (1965).Our thesis is that Danto is mistaken in his assertion that a phenomenon can be covered by a general law only insofar as we produce a description of it which contains no uneliminable particular designations of it. It is possible to cover such particular statements with general laws provided one can bridge the logical gap between the two (...) types of sentence with other statements which need not be redescriptions of the phenomenon but can be independently established premises for a deductive argument.We further show that some of the analogies which Danto attempts to make between deduction and narrative are mistaken because of errors in Danto's understanding of logical theory, specifically, Danto's notion that no predicate may appear in the conclusion of a deductive argument which is not antecedently contained in the premises and his claim that the same variable must be replaced by the same constants throughout an argument. (shrink)

Since the mid-1980s, Arthur C. Danto has been increasingly concerned with the implications of the demise of modernism. Out of the wake of modernist art, Danto discerns the emergence of a radically pluralistic art world. His essays illuminate this novel art world as well as the fate of criticism within it. As a result, Danto has crafted the most compelling philosophy of art criticism since Clement Greenberg. Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn analyze the constellation of philosophical and critical (...) elements in Danto's new- Hegelian art theory. In a provocative encounter, they employ themes from Kantian aesthetics to elucidate the continuing persistence of taste in shaping even this most sophisticated philosophy of art. (shrink)

The overall subject of the essays in _The Body/Body Problem_ is the traditional one of what our ultimate makeup is, as creatures with minds and bodies. The central thesis is that we are beings who represent—and misrepresent—actual and possible worlds. Addressing philosophical questions of mental representation, Danto presents his distinctive approach to some of the most enduring topics in philosophy. He is concerned with the nature of description, the status of the external world, action theory, the philosophy of (...) history, and the philosophical status of psychoanalytic explanation. Representation is a central concept in philosophy, says Danto, with differences among philosophers arising in the ways they account for how representations connect to the world or to the individuals possessing them, and how they connect with one another to form systems of beliefs, feelings, and attitudes. In these essays Danto's own voice, with his arguments and speculations, provides rich philosophical pleasures that will endure, to borrow from Santayana, "under whatever sky." Arthur C. Danto is one of the most original and multitalented philosophers writing today, a thinker whose interests traverse the boundaries of traditional understandings of philosophy. Best known for his contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, Danto is also esteemed for his work in the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophical psychology, and action theory. These two volumes, each with an introduction by the author, contain essays spanning more than twenty-five years that have been selected to highlight the inseparability of philosophy and art in Danto's work. Together they present the thinking of Arthur C. Danto at his very best. (shrink)

Those rights are human rights which, in Professor Gewirth's phrase, “all persons equally have simply insofar as they are human.” His task is to demonstrate that there are human rights, and to demonstrate that such demonstration is necessary to the very existence of these rights. “That human rights exist…is a proposition whose truth depends upon the possibility, in principle, of constructing a body of moral justificatory argument from which that proposition follows as a logical consequence.” As philosophers we should no (...) doubt like to be able to prove the existence of human rights – prove that there are such rights in the event that the fool shall have said in his heart that there are none, even using his folly against him by showing his denial to entail its denial – but it is a bold claim that rights are things whose esse est demonstrari. (shrink)

Over a decade ago, Arthur Danto announced that art ended in the sixties. Ever since this declaration, he has been at the forefront of a radical critique of the nature of art in our time. After the End of Art presents Danto's first full-scale reformulation of his original insight, showing how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, he leads the way (...) to a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. Here we are engaged in a series of insightful and entertaining conversations on the most relevant aesthetic and philosophical issues of art, conducted by an especially acute observer of the art scene today.Originally delivered as the prestigious Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, these writings cover art history, pop art, "people's art," the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg--who helped make sense of modernism for viewers over two generations ago through an aesthetics-based criticism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition through the modern era of manifestos, Danto shows that it wasn't until the invention of Pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways of producing art, hinged on a narrative.Traditional notions of aesthetics can no longer apply to contemporary art, argues Danto. Instead he focuses on a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of contemporary art: that everything is possible. (shrink)

Arthur C. Danto's essays not only critique bodies of work but reflect upon art's conceptual evolution as well, drawing for the reader a kind of "philosophical map" indicating how art and the criteria for judging it has changed over the twentieth century. In _Unnatural Wonders_ the renowned critic finds himself at a point when contemporary art has become wholly pluralistic, even chaotic-with one medium as good as another-and when the moment for the "next thing" has already passed. So (...) the theorist goes in search of contemporary art's most exhilarating achievements, work that bridges the gap between art and life, which, he argues, is now the definitive art of our time. Danto considers the work of such young artists as John Currin and Renee Cox and older living masters including Gerhard Richter and Sol LeWitt. He discusses artists of the New York School, like Philip Guston and Joan Mitchell, and international talents, such as the South African William Kentridge. Danto conducts a frank analysis of Matthew Barney's _The Cremaster Cycle_, Damien Hirst's skeletons and anatomical models, and Barbara Kruger's tchotchke-ready slogans; finds the ghost of Henry James in the work of Barnett Newman; and muses on recent Whitney Biennials and art influenced by 9/11. He argues that aesthetic considerations no longer play a central role in the experience and critique of art. Instead art addresses us in our humanity, as men and women who seek meaning in the "unnatural wonders" of art, a meaning that philosophy and religion are unable to provide. (shrink)

Now in its third edition, _Narration and Knowledge_ is a classic work exploring the nature of historical knowledge and its reliance on narrative. Analytical philosopher Arthur C. Danto introduces the concept of "narrative sentences," in which an event is described with reference to later events and discusses why such sentences cannot be understood until the later event happens. Danto compares narrative and scientific explanation and explores the legitimacy of historical laws. He also argues that history is an autonomous and (...) humanist discipline incapable of being reduced to scientific descriptions. Lydia Goehr's new introduction illustrates Danto's main arguments by questioning her very role, first, as an introducer of a book that has not yet been read by readers and, second, as an interpreter of a book written forty years ago. Frank Ankersmit's conclusion revisits the initial impact of the publication of _Narration and Knowledge_ and considers its enduring legacy. (shrink)

Now in its third edition, _Narration and Knowledge_ is a classic work exploring the nature of historical knowledge and its reliance on narrative. Analytical philosopher Arthur C. Danto introduces the concept of "narrative sentences," in which an event is described with reference to later events and discusses why such sentences cannot be understood until the later event happens. Danto compares narrative and scientific explanation and explores the legitimacy of historical laws. He also argues that history is an autonomous and (...) humanist discipline incapable of being reduced to scientific descriptions. Lydia Goehr's new introduction illustrates Danto's main arguments by questioning her very role, first, as an introducer of a book that has not yet been read by readers and, second, as an interpreter of a book written forty years ago. Frank Ankersmit's conclusion revisits the initial impact of the publication of _Narration and Knowledge_ and considers its enduring legacy. (shrink)

Arthur C. Danto has long defended essentialism in the philosophy of art, yet he has been interpreted by many as a historicist. This essentialism/historicism conflict in the interpretation of his work reflects the same conflict both within his thought and, more importantly, within modern art itself. Danto's strategy for resolving this conflict involves, among other things, a Bildungsroman of modern art failing to discover its essence, an essentialist definition of art provided by philosophy which is indemnified (...) against history, and a thesis about the end of art once it has been defined. Is this strategy successful, or does it result, as I argue, in a philosophical disenfranchisement of art of precisely the type that Danto himself has criticized? (shrink)

Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Friedrich Nietzsche. When Danto's classic study was first published in 1965, many regarded Nietzsche as a brilliant but somewhat erratic thinker. Danto, however, presented a radically different picture, arguing that Nietzsche offered a systematic and coherent philosophy that anticipated many of the questions that define contemporary philosophy. Danto's clear and insightful commentaries helped canonize Nietzsche as a philosopher and continue to illuminate subtleties in Nietzsche's work (...) as well as his immense contributions to the philosophies of science, language, and logic. This new edition, which includes five additional essays, not only further enhances our understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy; it responds to the misunderstandings that continue to muddy his intellectual reputation. Even today, Nietzsche is seen as everything from a precursor of feminism and deconstruction to a prophetic writer and spokesperson for disgruntled teenage boys. As Danto points out in his preface, Nietzsche's writings have purportedly inspired recent acts of violence and school shootings. Danto counters these misreadings by elaborating an anti-Nietzschian philosophy from within Nietzsche's own philosophy "in the hope of disarming the rabid Nietzsche and neutralizing the vivid frightening images that have inspired sociopaths for over a century." The essays also consider specific works by Nietzsche, including _Human, All Too Human_ and _The Genealogy of Morals_, as well as the philosopher's artistic metaphysics and semantical nihilism. (shrink)

_A lively meditation on the nature of art by one of America's most celebrated art critics_ What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, _What Art Is _challenges the popular interpretation that art is an indefinable concept, instead bringing to light the properties that constitute universal meaning. Danto argues that despite varied approaches, a work of art is always defined (...) by two essential criteria: meaning and embodiment, as well as one additional criterion contributed by the viewer: interpretation. Danto crafts his argument in an accessible manner that engages with both philosophy and art across genres and eras, beginning with Plato’s definition of art in _The Republic_, and continuing through the progress of art as a series of discoveries, including such innovations as perspective, chiaroscuro, and physiognomy. Danto concludes with a fascinating discussion of Andy Warhol’s famous shipping cartons, which are visually indistinguishable from the everyday objects they represent. Throughout, Danto considers the contributions of philosophers including Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, and artists from Michelangelo and Poussin to Duchamp and Warhol, in this far-reaching examination of the interconnectivity and universality of aesthetic production. (shrink)

This essay constructs philosophical defenses against criticisms of my theory of the end of art. These have to do with the definition of art; the concept of artistic quality; the role of aesthetics; the relationship between philosophy and art; how to answer the question "But is it art?"; the difference between the end of art and "the death of painting"; historical imagination and the future; the method of using indiscernible counterparts, like Warhol's Brillo Box and the Brillo cartons it (...) resembles; the logic of imitation-and the differences between Hegel's views on the end of art and mine. These defenses amplify and fortify the thesis of the end of art as set forth in my After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1997). (shrink)

Arthur Danto's The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art is Danto's most recent, through-written monograph on the philosophy of art. An obvious question occasioned by its publication is: what is it intended to add to Danto's previous treatises on the philosophy of art, such as The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and After the End of Art? The simple answer, of course, is beauty. But, why, one asks, does Danto need to address (...) beauty? . . .Danto, it seems to me, needs to come to terms with beauty as a matter of theoretical damage control. beauty, narrowly conceived, has the potential to threaten the generality of Danto's theory of art. Therefore, Danto needs, so to speak, to contain it. (shrink)

RESUMO A definição de arte desenvolvida por Arthur Danto pressupõe que algo é uma obra de arte por ser o correlato de uma interpretação, inscrita em uma rede de significações históricas, teóricas e sociais, que lhe atribui o estatuto de obra de arte. Trata-se de uma definição essencialista que, no entanto, não se funda em algo que é percebido no objeto, mas no objeto percebido como arte. Levando em consideração que o conceito de “interpretação” é um dos pontos cardinais (...) da definição de arte de Danto, aprofundo neste artigo uma investigação específica sobre o assunto. Argumento que o modo como o autor o desenvolve comporta uma ambiguidade, isto é, que há uma confusão entre dois sentidos de interpretação nos textos dantianos, e que seu papel fundamental na definição de arte é inseparável da contextualização histórico-social possibilitada pelo mundo da arte. ABSTRACT Arthur Danto’s definition of art claims that something is a work of art because it is the subject of an interpretation that is inscribed in a network of historical, theoretical and social meanings, which is responsible for assigning the status of artwork. It is an essentialist definition which however, is not based on something that is perceived in the object, but on the object being perceived as art. In this paper, I develop a specific investigation about the concept of “interpretation”, taking into account that it is one of the cardinal points in Danto’s definition of art. I argue that the author develops this subject in an ambiguous way, in other words, that there is confusion between two different meanings of interpretation in his texts, and that its fundamental role in the definition of art is inseparable from the historical and social contextualization guaranteed by the artworld. (shrink)

A sympathetic and systematic reconstruction of Sartre's philosophy, explaining its relation to other major philosophical theories. Among the themes elucidated are the relation between reality and our representation of it; the parities between language and consciousness; the relationship between the world as it may be and as we structure it in our interventions as engaged beings; the conceptual interdependence of the self and others; and the connections between factual beliefs and systems of value.--Adapted from book jacket.

This essay takes Arthur Danto’s end-of-art thesis as a case in point of a substantive philosophy of history. Such philosophy explains the direction that art has taken and why that direction could not have been different. Danto never scrutinized the philosophy of history that his end-of-art thesis presumes. I aim to do that by drawing a distinction between what I refer to as the common view of history and the philosophical view of history, and by arguing (...) that we need the latter if we want to properly assess the plausibility of the end-of-art thesis. (shrink)

This article intends to critically envisage limits and values of philosophy of art of Arthur Danto and to point out the main problems of the theory of supstitutional representation, when placed within wider theoretical frame of traditional aesthetics, such as the notion of meaning in the philosophy of art of Arthur Danto. The article focuses on the notions of exteral and interal representation and denotation of non-existent and existent entities substituted by representation. This article intends to (...) question the validity of Danto?s position. Ovaj tekst pokusava da kriticki sagleda domete i vrednosti filozofije umetnosti Artura Dantoa i da istakne osnovne probleme sa kojima supstituciona teorija reprezentacije mora da se suoci, kada se ona zastupa u sirem teorijskom okviru tradicionalne estetike, kakav je pojam znacenja u filozofiji umetnosti Artura Dantoa. Posebnu paznju tekst usmerava na pojmove eksteralne i interalne reprezentacije i denotacije nepostojecih i postojecih entiteta, koji se reprezentacijom supstituiraju. Autor nastoji pokazati da je stav koji Danto zastupa apsurdan. (shrink)

RESUMO O artigo, em um primeiro momento, reconstrói a separação realizada por Arthur Danto entre Estética e Filosofia da Arte. Essa separação se encontra no fundamento da ontologia dantiana e distancia sua tentativa de definir arte dos argumentos da tradição estética sobre a beleza e o gosto. A partir dessa reconstrução, dou um segundo passo e analiso como Arthur Danto discute com a experiência estética, do modo como é compreendida, principalmente, após Kant, e quais são as suas críticas (...) e propostas para repensar a relação entre público e arte. ABSTRACT The article, at first, retraces the detachment made by Arthur Danto between Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art. This detachment lies on the foundation of Danto’s ontology and differentiates its attempt to define art from the traditional aesthetics arguments on beauty and taste. From this reconstruction, I take a second step where I analyze how Arthur Danto discusses with aesthetic experience, the way it is understood, especially, after Kant, and what are his criticisms and proposals to rethink the relation between public and art. (shrink)

To discern the indiscernibles is the main purpose of Danto’s philosophy of art. Influenced by analytical philosophy, Zen Buddhism, and symbolism, three ways of discernment can be identified in Danto’s text: the external discernment, the internal discernment, and the middle discernment, which, roughly speaking, mean a discernment by means of examining the object, self-reflection or enlightenment, and the relation between experience and expression, in Danto’s terms, the aboutness and embodiment, respectively. However, neither analytic philosophy and its external (...) discernment nor Zen and its internal discernment can distinguish the indiscernible indeed, only symbolism and its middle discernment have the potential to do so. Unfortunately, Danto was so indulged in analytical philosophy and Zen that he could not see this promise from symbolism. (shrink)

Arthur C. Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History has a Kantian ambition: to state the conditions that make historical knowledge possible and to show “the unhappy destiny” that attends attempts to extend modes of representation beyond these conditions. Even though Danto’s book fails to achieve this ambition, it succeeds in making a number of important—if neglected—suggestions in the course of its attempt. One concerns the significance of the progressive tense for our thinking about human agency. Another concerns the way (...) agency can impact negatively on the possibility of foreknowledge. (shrink)

The striking title The End of Art managed to draw attention to the philosophical work of Arthur Danto. However, the lack of a systematic development which could support this thesis made him face harsh criticism. However, strong foundations for his statements can be deduced from his writings. In this paper, I analyse how to understand the thesis of the ‘end of art’. It should be approached not as a monolitical notion but as a complex concept that combines three different (...) senses: 1) the ‘end of art’ in the Hegelian sense: the conversion of art into philosophy, 2) the ‘end of art’ in the historiographical sense: as the end to the narratives of the history of art, and 3) the ‘end of art’ as the beginning of a new period in history, where Danto’s philosophy of art would be fully valid. (shrink)

“'Ontological Mislocations', Modes of Conciousness and History: Indiscernibles, Displacement and Horizons of Possibility in the Philosophy of Arthur Danto”. In this article my purpose is to trace the links between three key elements in Arthur Danto’s philosophy: first, the capital consideration, for philosophical purposes, of human beings as ens representans , departing from the elucidation of a type of cognitive episode that Danto called “basic”. Secondly,I am concerned with the recurring appeal to a plane of consciousness (...) that supports a dual characterization in terms of the pair inside/outside and enables alogical space that is characteristic of philosophy as a reflective mode. Finally, I will treat a form of cognitive failure that Danto considered fundamental to the philosophical perspective, which leads to a specific type of restructuring of our ordinary system of beliefs. What I contend is that in Danto’s philosophical system these three elements become intelligible from the postulation of an effectual background that the author calls “objective historical structure”, which is characterized in terms of the horizons of possibility and impossibility that it delineates. These figures of historical-temporal possibility and impossibility constitute the matrix of historicity itself and also contribute decisively to shaping the permanent nucleus of dantean philosophical concerns. (shrink)

Arthur Danto numbers among the few contemporary philosophers whose writing is really a pleasure to read. Although rarely recognized, the source of that pleasure is Danto’s humor. His philosophical writing is consistently comic. Of course, the humor is obviously not of the knee-slapping variety. Yet it is pervasively playful.Danto will introduce a thought experiment and then explore it in several directions. Unlike many other contemporary philosophers, he is not stingy in laying out his examples. Whereas it is customary for (...) most other philosophers to sharpen their thought experiments like arrows in order to hit their target while carrying no wasted verbiage, Danto elaborates his, often.. (shrink)

This article, which appeared in the Library of Living Philosophers series, is a thought experiment that imagines Danto’s analytical framework reaching well beyond what he had called the “drab” state of philosophy in the early 2000s. It describes, in minimalist terms, what he saw as the fundamental project of all philosophy -- regardless of the specific theoretical content any particular philosopher might put forth. It discusses his central (and still underdeveloped) notion of representation, and his quasi-Hegelian view of (...) how art theory has been altered by its own recently emerging self-consciousness. It draws out the implications of his Argument from Intelligibility, which informs Danto’s interest in human self-consciousness, in autonomy, and (somewhat speculatively) in “spirit.”. (shrink)

Through a comparison between Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art and Kantian aesthetic reflection, this article identifies the place from which Danto can underestimate the aesthetic experience and its alleged irrelevance in relation to art. I argue, first, that this position of Danto is crossed by some internal contradictions in his thought. Furthermore, based on the comparison with Kant, I examine the thesis of the “end of the history of art” advanced by Danto, considering in particular two aspects. I (...) argue: (a) that Danto surreptitiously or parasitically uses in his critical activity a notion of aesthetic experience which his philosophical argument, and in particular his “aesthetic of meanings”, cannot legitimize; (b) that his thesis relating to the end of art history is symptomatic of a wider problem, which involves our forms of life, and which finds a particularly significant statement in Friedrich von Hayek’s neoliberal thought. The attempt at a neoliberal anthropology of homo œconomicus implies the tendency to absorb within it the very meaning of the experience that has long been at the center of aesthetic and artistic experience. This totalizing colonization of human forms of life appropriates some exemplary characteristics of aesthetic and artistic experience, perverting them, starting with the presumed generation of spontaneous orders, which we know are framed in an ideological horizon that is anything but obvious or natural. My thesis is that Danto’s idea of a post-historical art is one of the symptoms of this condition. (shrink)

Throughout his lengthy career Arthur Danto made significant and original contributions to action theory, historical narrative, and epistemology. He became best known however for his work as an art critic in the Nation, Artnews and elsewhere, and for his philosophical publications on art theory, beginning with his early (1964) article “The Artworld.” In fact, Danto’s views on art are emblematic of his overall philosophy: he managed to reconcile conflicting philosophical sensibilities without short-schrifting them. He appreciates both Hegel and (...) postmodernism, but his own philosophy is a good deal less radical than most postmodernisms in that he denies that philosophy is a radically historicist enterprise. (shrink)

Arthur Danto's philosophical writing is replete with literary references. Philosophy is purely a conceptual enterprise, aimed at solving problems about the natures of things precisely where no empirical information is available to settle what they are. Danto chose the philosophy of literature, and in particular the relations between literature and philosophy, as the topic of his 1983 APA Presidential Address. Danto describes “the bottom‐line view of philosophy” that undertakes to develop only via impersonal theses (...) and arguments, and that requires “the suppression of voice” as “abstract, distorted, and surrealistic” in being too severed from our actual experiences as historical and embodied beings. Philosophy, at least as a matter of its defining ambitions and at the highest reach of its achievements, is, in Danto's perception, essentially written for the sake of transfiguration; its very life is lost when its texts are “flattened into papers”. (shrink)

La philosophie de l’art de Danto se réclame expressément d’une conception à la fois historiciste et essentialiste ; elle se concentre sur la question des « indiscernables ». Le pop art, avec Warhol, joue à cet égard le rôle d’un experimentum crucis. Le présent essai s’efforce de mettre en lumière la complexité et les ambiguïtés des analyses et des positions défendues par Danto, en proposant une interprétation de l’« indiscernabilité » qui prend à revers les démarcations postulées. On y soutient (...) l’idée d’un continuum qui en constitue en réalité l’arrière-plan à la fois culturel et économique. (shrink)

This chapter presents the meeting points and conflicts between Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art and George Dickie’s avowedly succeeding theory. Its focus is on the internalist-externalist debate on the ontology of the artwork as created and perceived within the artworld. It shows that both Danto and Dickie developed anti-formalist theories, that contributed to the demise of aesthetic modernism. Inverting the formalist distinction between internal and external properties of the artwork, they classified the sensuous properties of the artwork as (...) secondary in its essence and identity. Accordingly, Danto and Dickie’s definitions of art emerged from the challenge “to be consistent with art appearing in every possible way.” Both negated the Neo-Wittgensteinians’s proposal to forgo the project of defining art and found the then-new pluralism to be revealing of the essence of art, directing philosophy to art’s nonexhibited infrastructure – beyond the reach of the eye. Across from this, the chapter presents their opposing ideas as revealed through different analyses of the concept of the “artworld”: as an intellectual sphere by Danto versus an institutional one by Dickie. Danto’s internalist/intentionalist ontology begins with the mental and stretches to its embodying material. Opposing it, Dickie’s externalist ontology points to social practices as constituting the artwork, which is attributed with the status of “arthood” by agents in its social sphere. Accordingly, I claim, Danto’s ontology is more versatile than Dickie’s. -/- . (shrink)

The concepts of embodiment and medium lie at the core of Arthur Danto's philosophy. As Danto underlines in Connections to the World, one speaks of embodiment when describing a state in which two objects with different properties constitute a single object, as the mind and body together constitute the human being. Humans are basically entes rapresentantes as their representative ability, their ability to process thoughts and incorporate them in language and, ultimately, their willingness to produce and enjoy (...) art, are key elements to their nature. The chapter explores, drawing on Danto's account of embodiment, how some of the properties that are attributed to a representation depend on how it is embodied. Danto deals with the visual arts in a particular way, although he always believed that his philosophy of art was essentialist and universally applicable to any form of art. (shrink)

While Hegel’s influence on Arthur Danto has been examined in relation to specific parts of his thought, an overall analysis of said influence is still wanting. In this article, I analyze the presence of Hegelian influence in Danto’s complete thought from three perspectives: (1) Danto’s acceptance of Hegelian assumptions when it comes to the conception of history, narrative realism and historical progress, which allows him to combine timeless essentialism with historicism, (2) the cognitive aspect of art and the conception (...) of art as an embodied symbol, as well as the historical quality of said embodiment, and (3) the assumption that art’s trajectory coincides with the Hegelian prophecy that art will give way to philosophy, on which Danto’s “end of art” thesis is based. This examination not only illuminates the interrelation between the different parts of Dantian philosophy, but also reveals its systematic character. (shrink)

The response given to C.G. Hempel’s well-known challenge by Arthur Danto in his Analytical Philosophy of History of 1965 – that deductive-nomological and narrative explanations are logically compatible yet employ incommensurable schemata – is here investigated from a historical perspective. It is shown that the developmental trajectory that emerges from an analysis of Danto’s previous writings – including not only a forgotten paper of 1958 but also his PhD dissertation of 1952 – contains distinctive step-changes with publications of (...) 1953 and 1956 still prior to that of 1958–59 which enabled his subsequent discovery of narrative sentences. It is also argued that Danto’s developmental trajectory runs contrary to that presumed by some prominent commentators. Analytical History of Philosophy was not the midpoint of his ascent from mainstream philosopher of science to high priest of postmodern aesthetics, but represents a reasoned retreat from his early historical idealism. (shrink)

This chapter explores Pop Art's significance for Arthur Danto's philosophy of art. It looks at the views of British curator Lawrence Alloway, Danto's immediate predecessor at the Nation. In 1974, Alloway defined the core of Pop Art as “essentially, an art about [emphasis mine] signs and sign‐systems”. Danto characterized artworks as the kinds of things that prompt philosophizing, a point that proves especially helpful when attempting to discern art‐cars, art‐cheese, art‐billboards, and art‐photographs from mere things. By (...) 1973, Danto was already grappling with issues inspired by Pop Art's many conundrums. The more artists adopted imagery and formats familiar to commercial art, the more philosophers needed models to discern, for example, James Rosenquist's billboard‐size paintings publicizing pasta, lipstick, cars, and the like, from his actual roadside billboards, hand‐painted between 1957 and 1960. (shrink)

In this opening essay, Ginger Danto remembers her father's early life and time travelling in France and Italy, as well as his art‐making—in particular his woodcuts.

Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace is a new theory of art, seeking to catch the flavour and essence of its contemporary phenomenology. It is obliged, however, to pit itself in toto against aesthetic philosophy, leaning on the derivatives from deuteropraxis and institutional definition while committing itself to a concept of arthood extracted from exoteric ideas, which are held to comprise the artworks’ individuation and identity. This paper examines the principal notions in support of his contentions and contrasts (...) them to the chief principles of aesthetic philosophy. In this juxtaposition, it transpires that conviction eludes Danto, as his suppression of aesthetic criteria yields unsuspected aporias from a disconjugate amalgam of inherence, ontology, epistemology and concept integration. Thus the leap from “mere real things” to the plateau of arthood is never accomplished, as it falters at the step where a perceiving subject has a stake in, and the power of authorisation, of this co... (shrink)

The main aim of the present essay is to explore Arthur C. Danto’s passionate confrontation with German philosophy. As will emerge, it is neither an analysis planned according to a precise chronological order, nor a rigidly systematic investigation. In a succession of irreverent betrayals, syncretistic appropriations and courageous afterthoughts, Danto will proceed rather backwards, going from Nietzsche to Hegel and from Hegel to Kant. In doing so – during his long and tireless philosophical r...

Arthur Danto's philosophy of film is contained almost entirely in a single, rich, but unruly essay, “Moving Pictures”, chock full of examples but digressive to the point of distraction. Danto's method is to address senses in which pictures generally may be said to be “moving” and to determine in which sense, indicative only of it, might film be said to be so. Danto dismisses out‐of‐hand communal viewing as a basis for understanding film on a purely theatrical (...) model. Danto's discussion of photography as a basis for film begins with a brief contrast with painting, the art that provides the hub of his general account of the ontology of art. The conclusion of “Moving Pictures” suggests that it is not so much making plain the reflexive nature of filmic representation that matters, but rather the exploitation of that structure in terms of the filmmaker's sensibility. (shrink)