Arthur C. Danto

The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense

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 Warhols Brillo Box and the Brillo cartons it resembles; the logic of imitation—and the differences between Hegels 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).

Analytical philosophy of knowledge

Preface 1. Knowledge claims 2. Direct knowledge 3. Being mistaken 4. Knowledge and belief 5. Adequate evidence and rules 6. Knowledge and understanding 7. Quests for certainty 8. The refutation of scepticism 9. Experience and existence 10. Language and the world 11. Truth Index.

Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art

Dieter Roths kalliphobia, to attach to what has been epidemic in avant-garde circles since the early twentieth century the needed clinical term, employs the idiom of threat for something which in any context but that of art would be an occasion for rejoicing. Who would say that it “threatens” to be a beautiful day except an umbrella salesman—or that ones daughter “threatens” to turn into a beautiful young woman, unless one fears the jealousy of the gods? In most contexts of human life, we would speak of the promise rather than the threat of beauty, so kalliphobia calls for diagnosis, since kalliphilia, to give it its antonym, is what one might think of as the aesthetic default condition for humans, connected with fortune and happiness, life at its best, and a world worth living in. How can beauty, since Renaissance times assumed to be the point and purpose of the visual arts, have become artistically contraindicated to the point of phobia in our own era?

Action, Knowledge, and Representation

In this paper I seek to decompose the concept of basic actions in such a way that its philosophical components crystallize about one pole, and its scientific ones about the other. No doubt the scientific components will have a philosophical importance, but it will differ considerably from the philosophical importance basic actions themselves were originally believed to have. The latter derived from the pivotal role basic actions were cast to play in a massive restructuring of the mind-body relationship along lines which promised to re-unite bodies with minds and ourselves with both: to restore to an ontological unity what had been sundered by cartesian dialysis. That counter-cartesian program I now believe to have failed definitively, and its collapse, which I mean to demonstrate, entails the demolition of the concept of basic actions, at least so far as its hopeful philosophical significance is concerned. I hasten to mute this dour assessment, however: Descartes does not survive altogether the confounding of his rivals, only his distinctions do. But this does not compel us to follow him in housing the terms of the distinction in logically alien substances.

Comment on Gewirth Constructing an Epistemology of Human Rights: a Pseudo Problem?

Those rights are human rights which, in Professor Gewirths 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 .

Metaphor and Cognition

Discussing diction in Poetics,Aristotle writes: “the greatest thing by far is to be master of metaphor”, which is “the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius.”1 Even if genius means something considerably less than it came to mean in romantic times, if Aristotle is at all right here then making metaphors cannot form part of ordinary linguistic competence, if only because we do acquire from others our knowledge of language — it is a paradigm of something taught and learnt. Moreover, it is widely accepted that linguistic competence entails a symmetrical capacity to form and to understand sentences, where no such symmetry is implied in metaphoring activities, in which you presumably do not have to be marked by genius to grasp metaphors once made. I suppose it must be roughly parallel to humor, in that making jokes is a gift of a certain order whereas getting jokes is ordinarily not. Still, there is evidently room for education, as Aristotle’s discussion in the Rhetoric, Book III, suggests, where he lays down a number of principles that might be thought of as refining metaphorical talent, or as the principles of criticism, as if making metaphors were parallel in certain ways to the exercise of taste. We learn the differences between good metaphors and bad ones, or between inappropriate and appropriate ones: it is almost like a discourse among makers of haiku poetry. But this again has little to do with linguistic competence: it is, rather, more a matter of verbal etiquette, or learning how to modulate metaphors in order to achieve desired effects, something the rhetorician is anxious to learn. Aristotle says that metaphors, like epithets, must be “fitting” — he explicitly uses the analogy of the kinds of clothing it is fit for one to wear; and it is instructive to think out why, to use his example, a young man’s crimson cloak would not suit an old man, as though costume itself were metaphorical, or nearly so.