Title:
An introduction to the philosophy of art
Author:
Eldridge, Richard Thomas, 1953- author.
ISBN:
9781107041691
9781107614444
Personal Author:
Edition:
2nd edition.
Physical Description:
xii, 312 page ; 25 cm.
Series:
Cambridge introductions to philosophy
General Note:
Formerly CIP.
Contents:
1.The situation and tasks of the philosophy of art -- Who needs a theory of art? -- Philosophy as articulation -- Art as a natural social practice -- Action, gesture, and expressive freedom -- Schiller on art, life, and modernity -- Identification versus elucidation -- What may we hope for from the philosophy of art? -- 2.Representation, imitation, and resemblance -- Representation and aboutness -- Aristotle on imitation -- Visual depiction, resemblance, and game-playing -- Contemporary theories of depiction -- Representing as natural, human, world-responsive activity -- Distinctive functions of artistic representation -- 3.Beauty and form -- Beauty, absorption, and pleasure -- Kant on natural and artistic beauty -- General versus individual form -- Beardsley's theory of individual form -- Criticisms of formalist-aesthetic theories of art -- Defenses of the aesthetic interest of art -- 4.Expression --
Feelings about subject matters in life: Wordsworth, Tolstoy, and Collingwood -- What is expressed in art? Hegel versus Danto -- How is artistic expression achieved? -- Collingwood's psychodynamic theory -- Physiognomic similarity theories -- "Working-through" theories -- Emotions and contemporary psychology -- Why does artistic expression matter? -- 5.Originality and imagination -- Genius and the pursuit of the new: Kant -- Hegel's criticisms of subjectivism -- Why originality matters: Adorno on free meaning-making -- Criticisms of the pursuit of originality: postmodernism and feminism -- Originality and imagination within common life -- Creativity: Scruton and Coleridge on artistic imagination -- 6.Understanding art -- Six strategies for understanding art -- The natures of thought and action: Hegel, Baxandall, and others -- Pluralism and constraint in interpretation: Abrams, Fish, and Derrida --
The special importance of the elucidation of formal-semantic elements -- Nehamas and Felski on what calls for elucidatory interpretation -- The possibility of agreement in understanding -- 7.Identifying and evaluating art -- Why we go on arguing about which works are good -- Subjectivism and the sociology of taste: Smith and Bourdieu -- Dickie's institutional theory -- Historical and narrative identifications: Levinson and Carroll -- Objectivism: Mothersill and Savile -- Hume on feeling and judgment -- Kant on feeling and judgment -- Personal and/versus discussable: Isenberg, Scruton, and Cohen on taste -- 8.Art and emotion -- Some varieties of emotional response -- The paradox of fiction -- Hume on tragedy: denying (1) -- Making-believe and quasi-emotions: Walton, Levinson, and Feagin -- Robinson on affective appraisals: denying (3) -- Danto and Cohen on powers of attentive involvement -- Aristotle on catharsis --
Artistic making and the "working through" of emotion -- 9.Art and morality -- Some controversial cases: Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Finley, and others -- Autonomism and experimentalism -- Moralism and the clarification of thought and feeling -- Clarificationism and responding to complexity -- Art, propaganda, advertising, and cliche -- Ethical understanding and working through puzzlement -- 10.Art and society: some contemporary practices of art -- The reproduction of social life vis-a-vis "infinite satisfaction" -- Art and modernity: Schiller and others -- Lukacs, Marcuse, and Adorno -- Structuralism and structural opposition in social life: Levi Strauss and Althusser -- Foster's postmodern sociocultural criticism -- Avant-gardism and contemporary art -- Can artistic beauty still matter? What about fun? -- Art and social aspiration -- Some contemporary practices of art: primitivism, vernacularism, avant-gardism, and constructivism --
11.Epilogue: the evidence of things not seen.