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The Disenfranchisement of Philosophical Aesthetics
- Journal of the History of Ideas
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 64, Number 4, October 2003
- pp. 581-597
- 10.1353/jhi.2004.0003
- Article
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Beginning with the current discontent felt by prominent aesthetic theorists over the marginalization of their field within philosophy, this paper seeks to find an explanation for the discipline's apparent neglect. A meta-aesthetic examination of approaches to the study of art and of concurrent historical trends in the art world itself reveals that a methodological emphasis on the ontology of art objects and the conditions for their perception has created a gulf between art and human life that renders it unimportant to central philosophical concerns. The disenfranchisement of the field, I argue, is thus due to factors internal to the discipline itself.