Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Arthur Danto

  • Three Constraints on the Philosophy of Art

    by Daniel A. Kaufman _____ Preliminary Remarks After a brief hiatus in the last century, the search for a definition of ‘art’ has resumed with great vigour. Wittgensteinians may bemoan this as intellectual atavism, an anachronistic longing for “essences,” but I am inclined to think that the revival of the question of ‘art’ ’s definition…

  • Four Lectures on danto

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ The complete lecture notes and video for my unit on Danto, in my upper-division Aesthetics course, PHI 320. Danto 1 ____ In my view Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace represents the most sophisticated, best effort to define ‘art’ in what I have called “the New Wave” in the Philosophy of…

  • Interpretation and the “Investigative” Concept of Criticism

    by Daniel A. Kaufman **In light of my recent Course Notes on Danto’s theory of interpretation, I thought readers might be interested in my own critique of his theory.  The following paper originally appeared in Angelaki, Volume 17, Issue 1, Page 3-12, March 2012** §1 My subject is the popular view in (mainly Analytic) philosophy…

  • Course Notes: Arthur Danto on “Surface” and “Deep” Interpretation

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ Before the coronavirus turned everything upside-down, the students in my upper-division Aesthetics course and I were working through Arthur Danto’s theory of interpretation, so as eventually to bring it into tension with Susan Sontag’s take in her famous essay, “Against Interpretation,” on which I wrote in the early days of…