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.
Introduction: Five Pieces for Arthur Danto (1924–2013) In memoriam
LYDIA GOEHR, DANIEL HERWITZ, FRED RUSH, MICHAEL KELLY, AND JONATHAN GILMORE
Life with Art
Lydia Goehr
Arthur Danto once told me that having been born on the first day of the year (the year was 1924) he felt obliged to do something important. When I asked him what I should then do having been born on January 10th, he replied, “obviously not as much as me.” He did do something important. He stands as one of the four giants of the Anglo-American tradition, with Stanley Cavell, Nelson Goodman, and Richard Wollheim, who together rearticulated the terms for how philosophers should think about the arts as part of a broad philosophical vision each had of the world. Danto held his so-described “analytical philosophy of art” as “of a piece” with his analytical philosophies of history, action, and knowledge. Before achieving world renown for his philosophy of art, he was much admired as a philosopher in these other domains. At first, when writing on art, he intended to write a work titled The Analytical Philosophy of Art to match several of his previous books. But very quickly he found himself turning away from this bland title to one indicative of the transfiguration in his thought that would allow him to escape some of the restrictions of a philosophy to which, however, he remained lifelong devoted. He found a way to enhance analytical philosophy, to bring it to life by engaging in a mode of description, in perfectly crafted and entirely illuminating detours, that would result in his being recognized as the leading philosophical critic of the art, most especially of his own times. With similar conviction, he imported themes he variously drew from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Sartre – he wrote monographs devoted to the latter two – and from a Zen Buddhism whose teachings he experienced at Columbia University. Of his more than thirty books and hundreds of articles and art-critical pieces, his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace marked a turning point in the philosophy of art and in the life of a man whose nickname happened also to be Art. Although he never wanted philosophically to overcome the gap between art and life – everything about his thought was aimed at preserving the difference – he lived his life in the pathways of art with a transformative joy and optimism. He turned what others experienced as nightmares – and there were plenty in the twentieth century to choose from – into dreams for a better human condition liberated from the political and speculative tyrannies of a world that, in different ways, he regarded over, ended, and out of date.
When I first met Arthur, it was on a bus in Sweden, over thirty years ago. The bus was transporting a whole host of eminent philosophers to a conference on the theme of intentionality. Why I was on the bus is irrelevant to the story. But pertinent was the fact that I had just begun my studies in the philosophy of music and finding myself sitting “next to Arthur Danto” gave me the chance to describe the paper I was writing on the relevance of Kripke’s thought to music. Arthur listened with the utmost charity, although little, he later told me, inspired him. But he also told me that he never forgot this encounter. Getting to know him later, I realized that he forgot few persons, that nearly every meeting was special to him in some way. He found something