This outstanding student reference series offers a comprehensive and authoritative survey of philosophy as a whole. Written by today’s leading philosophers, each volume provides lucid and engaging coverage of the key figures, terms, topics, and problems of the field. Taken together, the volumes provide the ideal basis for course use, representing an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike. For the full list of series titles, please visit wiley.com.
This edition first published 2022
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Inc
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Jonathan Gilmore and Lydia Goehr to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
Registered Office
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
Editorial Office
111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty
The contents of this work are intended to further general scientific research, understanding, and discussion only and are not intended and should not be relied upon as recommending or promoting scientific method, diagnosis, or treatment by physicians for any particular patient. In view of ongoing research, equipment modifications, changes in governmental regulations, and the constant flow of information relating to the use of medicines, equipment, and devices, the reader is urged to review and evaluate the information provided in the package insert or instructions for each medicine, equipment, or device for, among other things, any changes in the instructions or indication of usage and for added warnings and precautions. While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gilmore, Jonathan, editor. | Goehr, Lydia, editor.
Title: A companion to Arthur C. Danto / edited by Jonathan Gilmore and Lydia Goehr.
Description: Frist edition. | Hoboken : John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2022. |
Series: Blackwell companions to philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021009894 (print) | LCCN 2021009895 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119154211 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119154228 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119154235 (epub) | ISBN 9781119154242 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Danto, Arthur C., 1924-2013--Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC B945.D364 C66 2022 (print) | LCC B945.D364 (ebook) | DDC 191--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009894
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009895
Cover image: © Photograph by D. James Dee
Cover design by Wiley
Set in 10/12.5pt PhotnalMTStd by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India.
JONATHAN GILMORE AND LYDIA GOEHR
This Companion was conceived following the death of Arthur Coleman Danto in 2013. Its long-standing gestation owes something to the process of commissioning articles, but more deeply reflects our desire, as its editors, to wait a while, to let his death be mourned and his influence be reflected upon. The volume stands apart from the already impressive collections of essays on Danto’s life and work, edited by Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (in 2013), by Mark Rollins (in 2012), and by Daniel Herwitz and Michael Kelly (in 2007). (The many contributions outside America to Danto scholarship should also be noted.) The contributors to the present volume, renowned scholars and emerging new voices, were tasked to offer short, essayistic interventions, suggestive of the style in which Danto himself excelled. As Danto borrowed the long-standing idea for his own philosophical outlook: style makes the person just as it renders unique an art work and a thought. The contributions to this volume have not been written therefore as parts of a systematic or unified whole, nor to cover every aspect of Danto’s extensive oeuvre. Instead, with an often-revisionary aim, they capture what the writers—with their unique perspectives—found most compelling. This collection thus truly serves as a companion to a thinker who much enjoyed the wit, eclecticism, variety, and tensions between alternate philosophical methods and traditions. It takes paths that Danto sometimes more tiptoed than trod with well-made steps: into, for example, architecture, dance, and film. Constructed and composed with the marvelous assistance and the refined critical perspectives of Jonathan Fine and Elizabeth Benn, the companion offers a contrapuntal accompaniment to reading Danto, but not, we insist, a substitute.
In his astonishingly capacious intellectual life, Danto wrote on violence in the works of George Sorel, Nietzsche, Sartre, Buddhism, action theory, the history of analytical philosophy, and the philosophies of language, perception, and mind. It was, however, his philosophies of history and art that, in his lifetime, were taken up the most vigorously. If one hears the name Danto, one responds: ah yes—his analytical theory of narrative/historical sentences and his Hegelian thesis for the end of art! And then–how possibly could one make the two stand together? His lifelong attempt to weave Anglo-American, analytical and so-described continental approaches to philosophical thinking, produced fascinating antagonisms, perfectly reflective of the post-War, Cold War, and East-West struggles of the early decades of his long career in the academy. Likewise, his voracious reading in social and cultural history allowed him to assume an overall humanistic perspective and range of views often at odds with the quarrels of self-proclaimed modernists and postmodernists.
Danto liked to recall his accidental introduction to questions in the philosophy of art, when, at the last minute, he was invited to speak at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association. The result was what was to become his enormously influential essay of 1964, “The Artworld.” The accidental character of his address regarded his engagement only with the philosophy of art, not with the arts themselves. Early on, he was a highly-accomplished and ambitious lithographer and printmaker, a period from which many works remain and have recently been exhibited (as readers will learn from his daughter Ginger Danto’s essay in this volume). After his death, an extraordinary number of those prints, plus paintings and drawings, were found covered in dust on the top of a cupboard in his apartment on Riverside Drive.
Why he turned from art-making to reflecting on art is of course a question that demands a more complex answer than his favored quip, that he did it “for the money.” To be sure, he found stability in his tenure as a professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. But it was as a theorist, critic, and commentator on the arts, writing for The Nation magazine, in which he discovered his métier and passion. Writing everyday with unwavering joy, he held to the belief that he had never had the same thought twice. A voracious reader of fiction, he showed how even a rigorous and perspicuous philosophical exposition can possess the style of a literary art. His most influential writings bear the impress of profound changes between the 1960s and the 1990s in art practice, the market, museums, audiences of art, and the role of critics and connoisseurs as guides and gatekeepers. But this body of work also responded to tumultuous changes in society at large in those decades, as we see in his reflections on human and civil rights, public values, dreams of democracy, racism, feminism, and censorship. Many of the essays here offer thoughtful commentaries on these more political and social issues. Danto’s engagement with living artists of his own day allowed him to breathe in the atmosphere to which he appealed as defining what art essentially is. He belonged very much to his century, in ways—following his philosophy of history—that time continues to tell.
Tiziana Andina is Professor of Philosophy at University of Turin, and author of Arthur Danto: Philosopher of Pop.
Frank Ankersmit is Emeritus Professor for Philosophy of History and Intellectual History at Groningen University. He writes on representation in the writing of history and in political and aesthetic representation.
Sondra Bacharach is an Associate Professor and Head of Programme in Philosophy at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Recent research about street art has appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics and The Monist.
Georg W. Bertram is Professor of Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin, and author of Hegels “Phänomenologie des Geistes.” Ein systematischer Kommentar and Art as Human Practice. An Aesthetics.
J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. Among his books are: The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury.
Peg Brand Weiser is Laureate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona and Emerita Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Indiana University. Editor of Beauty Matters and Beauty Unlimited, her most recent work focuses on the perception of athletes’ bodies and female agency.
Kyle Bukhari is a dance researcher, educator, and performer, and visiting faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.
Remei Capdevila-Werning, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, is author of Goodman for Architects and several essays in the philosophy of architecture, aesthetics, and preservation.
Taylor Carman is Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College, and author of Heidegger’s Analytic and Merleau-Ponty; and coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty.
Matilde Carrasco Barranco is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Theory of Arts in the University of Murcia (Spain). She works on the relation between aesthetics, and beauty, and contemporary art theory.
David Carrier taught philosophy in Pittsburgh and art history in Cleveland. He writes art criticism for Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic.
Noël Carroll teaches philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is the author most recently of Humour: A Very Short Introduction and Classics in the Western Philosophy of Art.
Sixto J. Castro, Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Valladolid, is author of En teoría, es arte, Filosofía del arte: El arte pensado, and Teología estética.
Ginger Danto, the youngest daughter of Arthur, is a writer and lives in North Florida.
David Davies is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. His books include Art as Performance; Aesthetics and Literature and Philosophy of the Performing Arts.
Whitney Davis is George and Helen Pardee Professor of History and Theory of Ancient and Modern Art at the University of California at Berkeley. His trilogy on visual culture is A General Theory of Visual Culture, Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Prehistory to Perspective, and Space, Time, and Depiction.
Marlies De Munck, philosopher and journalist, teaches at the University of Antwerp and the Royal Conservatory in Ghent. Her recent publications include: Why Chopin didn’t want to hear the rain; The Flight of the Nightingale: A Philosophical Plea for the Musician; Nearness: Art and Education after COVID-19; and I See Mountains as Mountains, once again.
Rachel Eisendrath, author of Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis and Gallery of Clouds, is Tow Associate Professor of English and chair of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at Barnard College.
Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, lectures now at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His most recent books are Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher and Images of History: Kant, Benjamin, Freedom, and the Human Subject.
Arturo Fontaine is a Chilean novelist and professor of philosophy at University Adolfo Ibáñez and University of Chile. His latest novel is La Vida Doble: A Novel.
Jane Forsey teaches philosophy at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. She is the author of The Aesthetics of Design and coeditor (with Lars Aagaard-Mogensen) of two volumes of essays, On Taste and On the Ugly: Aesthetic Exchanges.
Michalle Gal is a senior faculty member in the Unit of History and Philosophy, Shenkar College. Her recent books are Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics: A Formalist Theory and Introduction to Theory of Design.
Jonathan Gilmore is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College. His most recent book is Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and Other Creatures of the Mind.
Lydia Goehr is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Her most recent book, dedicated to Arthur Danto, is Red Sea–Red Square–Red Thread: A Philosophical Detective Story.
Robert Gooding-Williams is the M. Moran Weston/Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies and Professor of Philosophy and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism, Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics and In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America.
Adrian Haddock is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling, following an Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Research Fellowship at the University of Leipzig. His most recent publication is “The Wonder of Signs,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
Garry Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College. His most recent book is Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood.
Espen Hammer is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. His most recent book is Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe.
Casey Haskins is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purchase College, State University of New York. His current book project is on the history of the debate over autonomy in modern aesthetic theory.
Daniel Herwitz is Fredric Huetwell Professor at the University of Michigan. He has written widely in aesthetics, culture and politics, including his early book, Making Theory/Constructing Art, which placed Danto’s philosophy and criticism within the avant-gardes of culture and science.
Gregg M. Horowitz is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pratt Institute. Previous publications on Arthur C. Danto include The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste, co-written with Tom Huhn.
F. M. Kamm, Henry Rutgers University Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University, is the author of works in ethical theory and practical ethics, most recently The Trolley Problem Mysteries and Almost Over: Aging, Dying, Dead.
Michael Kelly is Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, President of the Transdisciplinary Aesthetics Foundation; and author of A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art and of Iconoclasm in Aesthetics.
Karlheinz Lüdeking taught history and theory of art at the University of the Arts in Berlin until he retired in 2017.
Emma Stone Mackinnon is Assistant Professor of the History of Modern Political Thought at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Emmanuel College. Her work on political theory and the history of human rights has appeared in Political Theory and Humanity.
Bence Nanay is BOF Professor of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, Cambridge University. His books include Between Perception and Action, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception, Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction, and The Fragmented Mind.
Mark Rollins is Professor of Philosophy and in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program Program at Washington University in St. Louis. His publications include Mental Imagery: On the limits of Cognitive Science, Danto and His Critics, and “What Monet Meant: Intention and Attention in Understanding Art.”
Sam Rose teaches at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Art and Form and Interpreting Art.
Carol Rovane is Violin Family Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. In addition to articles spanning many areas of philosophy, she has authored two books: The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics and The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism.
Fred Rush is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and author of Irony and Idealism and On Architecture.
Sonia Sedivy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her recent work includes Beauty and the End of Art, Wittgenstein, Plurality and Perception and, as editor, Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy Kendall L. Walton.
Gary Shapiro is Tucker-Boatwright Professor of Humanities and Philosophy, Emeritus, at the University of Richmond. His writings include Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel; Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying; and Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics.
Sandra Shapshay is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College & the Graduate Center (CUNY); her recent publications include: “What is ‘the Monumental?”, “Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime,” and Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethical Thought: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare.
Richard Shusterman is Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities at Florida Atlantic University. His books include Pragmatist Aesthetics, Body Consciousness, and The Adventures of the Man in Gold: A Philosophical Tale, based on his work in performance art.
Brian Soucek is a philosopher of art and professor of law at the University of California, Davis. His recent articles on law and aesthetics, including “Aesthetic Judgment in Law” and “The Constitutional Irrelevance of Art,” are available at http://ssrn.com/author=1828782.
Sue Spaid is author of five books on art and ecology, including The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice: Between Work and World. Recent philosophical papers address urban farming, biodiversity, wellbeing, hydrological justice, degraded lands and stinky food's superpowers.
András Szántó writes on art and serves as a cultural strategy adviser to museums, cultural and educational institutions, and commercial enterprises worldwide; he is the author, most recently, of The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues.
Scott Walden’s research and practice in photography focuses on the intersection between the philosophies of art, mind, and language. He has received multiple grants and prizes for his work.