Tag: Readymades

  • 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…

  • Three Lectures in Aesthetics

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ Three lectures from this semester’s upper-division course in Aesthetics [PHI 320] at Missouri State University.  My topics include: Formalism; Clive Bell; The Wittgenstein-inspired view that ‘art’ cannot be defined; Morris Weitz; Maurice Mandelbaum; Relational Definitions; and The Institutional Theory of Art. Following the video lecture links are the three sets…

  • Art and Intention

    by Carter Gillies We can stipulate that only things done with intention count as art, and surely many examples can be found where specific intentions lead specifically to art results. The question is whether all art necessarily relies on intention or even whether the intentions an artist has necessarily produce the end result of the…

  • 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…