This paper is a talk that the late Richard Wollheim gave at Loughborough University in September 1998. It is published here with the permission of Loughborough University and Wollheim's literary executors. The paper begins by reflecting on modes of artistic evaluation, distinguishing evaluations of interest from evaluations of quality. The former, the subject of the paper, are relativized to works of art within particular art forms, and concern ‘the extent to which the methods and the resources of the (...) particular art to which the work belongs have been fruitfully exploited’. The essentialist view of art implicit in this account is recognized and defended, the view that there are necessary truths about each art form explained in terms of the medium used. An examination of drawing is offered, its techniques and achievements explored, with the principal focus on the ways that the media of drawing are utilized in the service of representing an object. The methods of delineation and form-drawing are highlighted: ‘form-drawing, like delineation, has to be understood through the co-operation between artist and spectator, and, in both cases, it is ultimately the hand of the artist that has to respond to the eye of the spectator’. (shrink)

Explains the difference between pictorial and linguistic meaning, examines the works of Titian, Poussin, Ingres, Manet, Picasso, and de Kooning, and discusses art's psychological impact.

Richard Wollheim's classic reflection on art considers central questions regarding expression, representation, style, the significance of the artist's intention and the essentially historical nature of art. Presented in a fresh series livery for the twenty-first century, with a specially commissioned preface written by Richard Eldridge, illuminating its continuing importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, Art and its Objects continues to be a perceptive and engaging introduction to the questions and philosophical issues raised by works of art and the part (...) they play in our culture and society. Wollheim's insights into theories of art, criticism, perception and the nature of aesthetic value make this one of the most influential works on aesthetics of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This book is based on the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1982. It offers a new approach to the philosophical understanding of a person, taking as fundamental the process of living as a person, and emphasising the continuity and development across time of an individual life.

Distinguished philosopher Richard Wollheim's rich and thought-provoking account of the emotions considers what emotions are, how they arise in our lives, and how standard and "moral" emotions differ.

What defines a work of art and determines the way in which we respond to it?

This book brings together Wollheim's broad and abiding concerns to illuminate human thought at its furthest reaches of introspection and expression.

What defines a work of art and determines the way in which we respond to it? This classic reflection was written with the belief that the nature of art has to be understood simultaneously from the artist's as well as the spectator's viewpoint.

Collected essays and lectures reflect the philosopher's belief in the relationship between art and the mind.

I offer two, complementary, accounts of the visual nature of representational picturing. One, in terms of six features of depiction, sets an explanatory task. The other, in terms of the experience to which depiction gives rise, promises to meet that need. Elsewhere I have offered an account of this experience that allows this promise to be fulfilled. I sketch that view, and defend it against Wollheim's claim that it cannot meet certain demands on a satisfactory account. I then turn (...) to Wollheim's own view, arguing that it suffers from crucial obscurities. These prevent it from meeting the explanatory commitments I describe, and are only exacerbated by the demands Wollheim himself imposes. (shrink)

[Richard Wollheim] Any experiential view of pictorial meaning will assign to each painting an appropriate experience through which its mean can be recovered. When the meaning is representational, what is the nature of the appropriate experience? If there is agreement that the experience is to be described as seeing-in, disagreement breaks out about how seeing-in is to be understood. This paper challenges two recent interpretations: one in terms of perceived resemblance, the other in terms of imagining seeing. Neither view (...) gives a correct account of how the spectator distributes his attention between the marked surface and the represented object. /// [Robert Hopkins] I offer two, complementary, accounts of the visual nature of representational picturing. One, in terms of six features of depiction, sets an explanatory task. The other, in terms of the experience to which depiction gives rise, promises to meet that need. Elsewhere I have offered an account of this experience that allows this promise to be fulfilled. I sketch that view, and defend it against Wollheim's claim that it cannot meet certain demands on a satisfactory account. I then turn to Wollheim's own view, arguing that it suffers from crucial obscurities. These prevent it from meeting the explanatory commitments I describe, and are only exacerbated by the demands Wollheim himself imposes. (shrink)

Richard Wollheim is one of the dominant figures in the philosophy of art, whose work has shown not only how paintings create their effects but why they remain important to us. His influential writings have focused on two core, interrelated questions: How do paintings depict? and how do they express feelings? In this collection of new essays a distinguished group of thinkers in the fields of art history and philosophical aesthetics offers a critical assessment of Wollheim's theory of (...) art. Among the themes under discussion are Wollheim's explanation of pictorial representation in terms of seeing-in, his views of artistic expression as a type of complex projection, and his notion of the internal spectator. In the final essay Wollheim himself responds to the contributors. This book will be eagerly sought out by all serious students of the theory of art, whether in departments of philosophy or art history. (shrink)

Philosophers are increasingly coming to recognize the importance of Freudian theory for the understanding of the mind. The picture Freud presents of the mind's growth and organization holds implications not just for such perennial questions as the relation of mind and body, the nature of memory and personal identity, the interplay of cognitive and affective processes in reasoning and acting, but also for the very way in which these questions are conceived and an interpretation of the mind is sought. This (...) volume of essays, by some of today's leading philosophers, explores all these topics, as well as the methods, results and status of the theory itself, while two 'classical' discussions by Wittgenstein and Sartre are also included. A number of the contributions – those by Donald Davidson, W. D. Hart, Jim Hopkins, Adam Morton, David Pears and Richard Wollheim – have not been published before, and a very useful bibliography is provided. It is an anthology that will be vital to anyone interested in Freudian theory and, more generally, in philosophical psychology. (shrink)

It is a daunting task to tell the story of the lives emotions lead, how they are rooted in the deeper folds of the person’s psyche and wax and wane over a lifetime. Wollheim’s book is at times a daring attempt to cast an analytic philosopher in the role of narrator of this fascinating but hard to follow story. Two related story lines run through his book. One repeatedly criticizes contemporary philosophers for turning a blind eye to the psychological (...) reality and developmental nature of desire and emotion. The other, containing the book’s main project, develops an account of the characteristic history of an emotion from its origins in a satisfied or frustrated desire, to the formation of an attitude that lies at the core of an emotion, and finally to the fantasized critic in moral emotions such as shame and guilt. How we rate the success of the project depends in no small part on how we assess the relation between these two themes. (shrink)

I have told elsewhere the story of my first meeting with Freddie Ayer, but I shall re-tell it. It made a great impact on me, though, I believe, none on him. Certainly at no point in our friendship did he ever bring it up. It was mid or late 1946. I was an undergraduate at Balliol, having returned from three years in the army, and I was reading for Part II of the History Schools. Most of my friends, most of (...) my intellectual friends, were reading philosophy, and there was a necessity, which I already sensed, for my returning to Oxford once again to follow in their footsteps. This happened later in the autumn of 1947. Post-war Oxford was a very different place from the Firbankian hothouse of wartime Oxford, at least as I knew it. We were all said to be ‘more mature’, but within the confines of austerity, we were determined to enjoy ourselves. Oxford was not, in the famous words that Max Beerbohm put into the mouth of Mrs Humphrey Ward, ‘wholly serious’. (shrink)

Whether the word ‘passion’, as indicating the suffering or affection from without of a soul, is by now no more than a dead metaphor, surviving from an antique conception of the mind; whether, indeed, there is any way open to us of determining the passivity or otherwise of our inner life, apart, that is, from how it strikes us, from how we are prompted to describe it, are not questions that I can take up this evening. It is enough for (...) my purpose that for much of the time our feelings, our emotions, our inclinations are as fluctuating or as imperious as if they were not totally under our control. We are elated: we are dejected: we get angry, and then our anger gives place to a feeling of absurdity: we remain in love with someone who is lost to us but whom we cannot renounce: we are interested in something, and suddenly we are bored, or frightened that we will be bored: we see a stranger, someone who is nothing to us, who is poor or crippled, and we feel guilt: someone does something wrong or foolish, and we are unaccountably transported by laughter, by ‘sudden glory’ as Hobbes called it, knowing what it was about, and then, as unaccountably, we are thrown down. Man is, in Montaigne's famous phrase, une chose ondoyante, a creature of inner change and fickleness. (shrink)

Whether the word ‘passion’, as indicating the suffering or affection from without of a soul, is by now no more than a dead metaphor, surviving from an antique conception of the mind; whether, indeed, there is any way open to us of determining the passivity or otherwise of our inner life, apart, that is, from how it strikes us, from how we are prompted to describe it, are not questions that I can take up this evening. It is enough for (...) my purpose that for much of the time our feelings, our emotions, our inclinations are as fluctuating or as imperious as if they were not totally under our control. We are elated: we are dejected: we get angry, and then our anger gives place to a feeling of absurdity: we remain in love with someone who is lost to us but whom we cannot renounce: we are interested in something, and suddenly we are bored, or frightened that we will be bored: we see a stranger, someone who is nothing to us, who is poor or crippled, and we feel guilt: someone does something wrong or foolish, and we are unaccountably transported by laughter, by ‘sudden glory’ as Hobbes called it, knowing what it was about, and then, as unaccountably, we are thrown down. Man is, in Montaigne's famous phrase, une chose ondoyante, a creature of inner change and fickleness. (shrink)