진리란 통상 객관적 사태에 일치하는 사고나 진술을 뜻한다. 하지만 이러한 인식 중심의 협소한 진리 개념으로 포괄되지 않는 진리의 잉여적 의미들이 있다. 예술적 진리가 대표적이다. 문제는 진리의 잉여적 의미들이 너무 느슨한 개념으로 머물러 있다는 점이다. 본고는 하이데거에 의거하여 예술적 진리 개념을 엄격하게 재정립하고자 시도한다. 이를 위해 우선 표상주의적 진리일치설을 논박하고 일치의 의미를 존재자의 자기동일적 확증으로 되새긴다. 확증론의 가능근거는 존재자의 발견이 진술 진리에 우선한다는 개시진리론이다. 이에 따르면, 진리란 존재자가 그 자체에서 스스로를 드러냄이다. 이때 ‘그 자체에서’가 객관성을 뜻할 경우 진리는 객관적 일치가 된다. (...) 하지만 존재자의 본질 유형에 따라 존재자가 ‘그 자체에서’ 존재하는 방식이 달라지므로 진리의 양식도 다원적이 된다. 결과적으로 예술작품의 진리는 세계 개방, 대지와의 투쟁, 미의 표출로 특징지어진다. 이러한 결과는 샤피로가 제기한 고흐의 구두 논쟁에 새로운 대안을 제시한다. 예술작품의 진리가 객관적 일치가 아닌 한, 그 감상과 해석의 올바름의 기준도 실증적 사실관계에 달려있지 않다. 따라서 구두주인이 누구인가는 감상과 해석에 무관하다. (shrink)

This essay revisits Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes in order to raise the question of the dispute between art history and philosophy as a contest increasingly ceded to the claim of the expert and the hegemony of the museum as culture and as cult or coded signifier. Following a discussion of museum culture, I offer a hermeneutic and phenomenological reading of Heidegger’s ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ and conclude by (...) taking Heidegger’s discussion of the strife between earth and world to the site of the ancient temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae as an example of the insistent foreclosure of the ancient work of art and the conflicts of the pervasive efforts of modern conservation. (shrink)

Juliet Mitchell’s psychoanalytic account of sibling rivalry, fluctuating between narcissistic identification and fear of annihilation, also applies to Walter Benjamin’s model of true love in his reading of Goethe’s Elective Affinities. This model is found in the utopian novella “The Curious Tale of the Childhood Sweethearts,” inserted within Goethe’s novel. By reducing the relationship between the novella and its framing narrative to an opposition between truth and semblance, Benjamin replicates in his reading the specular logic that is love’s obstacle. (...) On the other hand, Freud’s analysis of an episode in Goethe’s autobiography can be said to retroactively operate what Mitchell calls “lateral castration,” for Freud compares the great writer to patients in analysis and thus establishes the necessary seriality that creates “space for one who is the same and different.” Still, and although elements of his own autobiography facilitate the construction of alternative scenarios, Freud exempts Goethe’s sisters from the position of rivals. Recognising “the sister” as earliest playmate, and object of hatred and narcissistic identification, like Mitchell does, might be the first step necessary for drawing a model of love for women as peers this side of utopia. (shrink)

Transcending the standard critique of the politically correct university, Marion Montgomery reveals the ancient sources of our educational chaos. There can be no reform, he insists, without a new openness to the truth of things, which marks the character and work of the good teacher.

It seems at least daring to speak of truth on the subject of art, when Plato, in the Sophiste, 234c, likens art to sophistry, in other words, to falsity and deformation. To be sure, this comparison is based on an exaggeration, because elsewhere Plato insists on the necessity of artistic reality: in the same Sophiste, 299e, he states that “life would be unlivable without art.” The importance thus given to art becomes obvious when we think that this same expression (...) is already used in the Apologie, 38a, with regard to philosophy, the activity that for a man conscious of his own existence is one of scrupulously examining his own life. This similarity in expression testifies to the conceptual and axiological similarity of two (but distinct) activities of the mind effected by Plato who, on a different level, as we have just seen, unhesitatingly condemns one of them, at least apparently; apparently, because basically Plato does not inveigh against art in general but against the art of his contemporaries, whom he openly accuses of accepting the postulate of verisimilitude by using artifice and acrobatics, with the sole end of pleasing the crowds by flattery. In other words, they substitute for the scarch for authenticity that of dexterity in creations conceived only for that effect, which means identifying this type of substitution of values with a prostitution of the artist himself with regard to his public. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Peter Lamarque TRUTH AND ART IN IRIS MURDOCH'S THE BLACK PRINCE "Art," writes Bradley Pearson, protagonist and narrator in The Black Prince, "is concerned not just primarily but absolutely with truth." Bradley Pearson is also concerned with truth. And understandably so, as he has just taken the rap, and been imprisoned, for a murder he claims he never committed. There are two rather different concerns here (...) with truth: there is the high-minded concern of the artist and there is the more pragmatic concern of the despised and falsely convicted man writing his "apologia." The careful juxtaposition of these two appeals to truth is a central theme in The Black Prince. The bulk of the novel purports to be a first-person narration of events in the later life of Bradley Pearson. Bradley is a writer who has been waiting patiently and silently for the inspiration, "the dark blaze," to produce a great work of art. This "dark blaze" eventually shows itself as the "black Eros," in a passionate but short-lived love affair with the youngJulian Baffin. Bradley is reflecting on these events from his prison cell, guided by his mentor and fellow prisoner, the "editor" P. Loxias (a witty reference to Apollo, god of truth). He sees his art and his love as stemming "from the same source" (p. 172) and, although sensitive to his shortcomings as an artist, he believes that through a divine inspiration he has attained a kind of Platonic tranquillity in the presence of truth and self-knowledge. However, through the device of "postscripts," purportedly written by other characters, we are presented with another picture of him rather different from his own. His former friends, more down to earth, though variously self-interested, depict him as a pitiful, even contemptible, charlatan lost in fantasy and delusion and a suitable case for psychoanalysis. What, then, is the real Bradley Pearson? Is he the pathetic, fantasy-ridden creature of the "postscripts"? Or is he, as he thinks, the great artist inspired by the gods and by Eros who has seen the revelation of truth? 209 2 1 0 Philosophy and Literature By forcing us to raise these questions about the novel, Iris Murdoch, I suggest, is inviting us to reflect on, and relate, two concerns we might have with truth in works of fiction. The first is with truth internal to the novel, truth-within-fiction, which informs us about the fictional characters and events. In The Black Prince, our attention is focused on unravelling and assessing the "truth" of Bradley's account. The second is with truth proper, as it might be revealed through fiction. This is truth not about the fictional world but about the non-fictional real world. It is often maintained that novels can instruct us in acquiring knowledge of the world. This, I suggest, is the type of truth that Bradley, so grandly and solemnly, and frequently, identifies with art. The nature of such truth is the main topic of this article. II What sense can we make of Bradley's repeated claims to the effect that "good art speaks truth" (p. xi)? One answer, reflecting an obvious feature of literary works, is that propositions about the world are often expressed, explicitly, within a fictional context; they might be uttered by one of the characters or directly by the author. The Black Prince offers many such propositions, some of which, on the nature of art, I shall be considering in detail. Examples are plentiful. Thus, Bradley remarks on marriage: "People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars. The human soul is not framed for continued proximity..." (p. 64). He meditates on love: "The foreverness of real love is one of the reasons why even unrequited love is a source of joy" (pp. 173-74) and discusses jealousy (p. 207). He also reflects on human consciousness and responsibility (p. 155) and on selfishness and goodness: "The burden of genuine goodness is instinctively appreciated as intolerable, and a desire for it would put out of focus the other and ordinary wishes by which one lives" (p. 149). Such explicit propositions carry us beyond the... (shrink)

The book can be roughly divided in two parts. The first four chapters criticize several previous systems of aesthetics, notably those of Cassirer, Croce, and their followers, and suggest an alternative based upon an interesting extension of the recently, much-discussed theory of direct perception as a "seeing-as." Hofstadter would use this model of interpretative-perception to explicate the nature of language as well. A cry will not be, thus, an "expression" of pain but rather present the pain directly; it would articulate (...) human existence in a certain way. Accepting, in addition, the idealistic theory of Categories, Language is understood by Hofstadter as the emergence of the self and the world into a meaningful and an intelligible existence. The next three chapters which, to my mind, make the weaker part of the book, distinguish three kinds of language and, hence, three kinds of truth. There is the truth of statement, which is explicated as the identity of the meant with the existent, the truth of things, which is the practical governance of things by the self's laws and ends, and the truth of spirit, being the synthesis of the former two, where the thing reaches a full realization of its own will of being. When the life-will brings itself to full realization, the thing is perfect, i.e., it is beautiful. It is unfortunate that in the development of these important and highly interesting ideas rhetoric often takes the place of philosophical rigor. The concluding chapter, exploring "the spiritual truth of art," gives a coherent application of the theory and combines a dialogue with several aestheticians, critics, and artists with an analysis of some crucial problems in aesthetics.—E. M. Z. (shrink)

How can the presence of truth in art be philosophically justified? A fundamental question that can be answered in the wisdom of Mullā Ṣadrā, one of the most important philosophers of Islam. The importance of the question of the relationship between art and truth arises from the state of art in the present era. In fact, the degradation of reason in front of feeling from the nineteenth century until today has made the field of arts devoid of any (...) representation of the truth and caused the importance and originality of finding pleasure or evoking feelings in the arts. Therefore, with a philosophical approach and relying on the descriptive-analytical method, at first, it described the fundamental of truth and delusion, the unity of the world, and the known, practical reason and the function of imagination in shaping intellectual concepts based on Mullā Ṣadrā’s views, and then with relying on those principles, he has examined the formation of truth-based works of art. The most important conclusion of the article is that art is not the only product of the feelings and taste of its creator; Rather, the artist, in his understanding of the truth, prepares the ground for its manifestation in the work of art. With this characteristic, art finds a form of rational knowledge, and symbolic and mystical arts are among the most important examples of this type of artistic creation. (shrink)

Suther contrasts Theodor Adorno’s idea of “truth” in the work of art with Martin Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art. Ultimately, the piece argues for a materialist aesthetics through Adorno’s account of modernism, suggesting that the “dissonance” intrinsic to modernist works of art activates the intellect of the beholder, disclosing the contradictions of capital.

Beginning from Klee’s statement on truth in self-portraiture that his faces are truer than real ones and Cézanne’s promise to tell us the truth in painting, we consider the origins of truth in art for the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. We discover that truth in perception, in life, and incarnate existence, as in art, originates from bodily movement. Similar to Heidegger’s argument in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” a truth happens between the work and (...) painter, between the work and viewer, and is not limited to the domain of language, but words and symbols mix together with colors and forms, as in the paintings of Klee. Similar to Husserl’s argument in “The Origin of Geometry,” the originary sense of art, like geometry, is an interweaving of world, intersubjectivity, speech, and writing that achieves a more “militant” truth than mere logical propositions. Truth is marked by its endurance, mobility, agility, subtlety, and depth. These interweavings mean there is no single origin of truth in art and life but a plurality of origins in movement, pleasures, and desires for the becoming of creation. (shrink)

A comprehensive review of Paul Horwich's _Truth_ and _Meaning_.

In this essay I consider the end-of-art thesis in its metaphysical and empirical versions. I show that both use the correspondence theory of truth as the basis for their conception of the history of art. As a counterpart to these theories I have chosen Patočka’s conception of the history of art. His theory is based also on the relationship between art and truth, but he conceives truth in the phenomenological sense of manifestation. In the rest of the (...) essay I seek to show the consequences Patočka’s conception has for the history of art. In the rst part, I set out to show Patocka’s critique of Hegel’s aesthetics as a system based on the correspondence theory of truth. In particular, I endeavour to explain his critique of some intrinsic problems of Hegel’s aesthetics, the general failure of Hegel’s system to achieve its goal, and, lastly, Hegel’s giving up on the meaning of the art in the present. I also seek to show that Danto’s version runs into the same problems and conclusions as Hegel’s. In the second part I discuss Patočka’s analysis of modern art and the aesthetic attitude, where he nds a hidden a nity between art and aletheia, which Hegel overlooked. e last part of the essay focuses on the consequences that the conception of the truth of art as aletheia have for the history of art. I conclude that art in such a conception represents an independent eld of the manifestation of being in history beside philosophy. Moreover, modern and contemporary art do not mean the end of art; rather, they have their place in art history based on aletheia, since they are more focused on the manifestation itself than on what is manifested. Unlike Hegel and Danto, therefore, Patočka retains the historical meaning of modern and contemporary art. His conception of the history of art, summed up under the idea of aletheia, has greater explanatory potential than Hegel’s and Danto’s conceptions, and it retains the historical meaning of modern and contemporary art. (shrink)

This paper makes the claim that in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger treats art as a primary phenomenon through which truth as unhiddenness is revealed at the locus of the work of art. Essays by Heidegger commentators John Bruin and Abraham Mansbach are rejected as inaccurate or insupportable because they do not recognize that for Heidegger art is an originating phenomenon; it is not a mode of representation , nor is the agency of “art” due to (...) the “work of art”. (shrink)

This paper discusses the question if there is any truth in art. Initially it poses the question whether artworks are just mere appearances or whether they have a special truth. In critical reflection on Heidegger’s conception of art as the “setting-itself-to-work of truth” this question is then elaborated and answered: The appearance character of artworks cannot be conceived as truth. What true artworks show, namely mere possibilities, is beyond truth, because it does not belong to (...) the real world. Artworks are not true; in their decentered order and their self-showing nature they are beautiful. (shrink)

We humans are a curious species. Of all the life forms that inhabit the earth, we alone strive to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. For thousands of years we understood the world through stories. Our ancestors told stories of how the world began, how our people originated and came to be at this place, and how those people across the river or beyond the mountains came to be where they are. Some stories were of animals (...) and plants in our neighborhood, and their powers to help us, feed us, or cure our ailments. But in the last few centuries, starting in Europe and spreading throughout the world, a new way of understanding began competing with storytelling as a means of comprehending our world. Science supplanted storytelling largely because it empowered us to transform the world in ways that were unimaginable to our ancestors. We understand the world scientifically by describing the world instead of by telling stories about it. The stories our ancestors told no longer explain the world, but are data within the world, part of the world that science describes. Our stories have become myths, cultural artifacts that may be interesting and a subject of study, but cannot possibly be true. Yet even in societies that have thoroughly embraced science as a means of understanding the world, myths remain a powerful force. Myth and science exist side by side, often creating confusion and conflict. (shrink)

Painting as an art: Wollheim and the subjective dimension -- Abstract art and transperceptual space: Wolheim, and beyond -- Truth in art: Heidegger against contextualism -- Space, place, and sculpture: Heidegger's pathways -- Vision in being: Merleau-Ponty and the depths of painting -- Subjectivity, the gaze, and the picture: developing Lacan -- Dimensions in time: Dufrenne's phenomenology of pictorial art -- Conclusion: a preface to post-analytic phenomenology.

Aesthetic alienation may be described as the paradoxical relationship whereby art and truth have come to be divorced from one another while nonetheless remaining entwined. J. M. Bernstein not only finds the separation of art and truth problematic, but also contends that we continue to experience art as sensuous and particular, thus complicating and challenging the cultural self-understanding of modernity. Bernstein focuses on the work of four key philosophers—Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno—and provides powerful new interpretations of their (...) views. Bernstein shows how each of the three post-Kantian aesthetics to construct a philosophical language that can criticize and displace the categorical assumption of modernity. He also examines in detail their responses to questions concerning the relations among art, philosophy, and politics in modern societies. (shrink)

In this essay, the author maintains that Gadamer’s affirmation of the relation among art, truth, and beauty is less a sign of conservatism or nostalgia than it is a key to his innovative and insightful examination of our experience of art. Gadamer’s approach to both the truth claim and the beauty of art flows from his association of the being of art with enactment (Vollzug). Yet, increasingly over the course of his writings, Gadamer appears to relinquishes talk of (...) art in this sense as a ,work‘ in favor of an emphasis on the kinship between art and the phenomenon of play. In light of this shift, it is argued that Gadamer’s conception of the truth claim and beauty of art may best be understood not as properties of a product or artifact, of something already enacted and thus complete in itself, but, instead, as nothing other than the very enacting of that freedom which he finds at the heart of human play. (shrink)

An epistemology of art has seemed problematic mainly because of arguments claiming that an essential element of a theory of knowledge, truth, has no place in aesthetic contexts. For, if it is objectively true that something is beautiful, it seems to follow that the predicate “is beautiful” expresses a property – a view asserted by Plato but denied by Hume and Kant. But then, if the belief that something is beautiful is not objectively true, we cannot be said to (...) know that something is beautiful and the path to an epistemology of art is effectively blocked. The article places the existence aesthetic properties in the proper context; presents a logically correct argument for the existence of such properties; identifies strategies for responding to this argument; explains why objections by Hume, Kant, and several other philosophers fail; and sketches a realization account of beauty influenced by Hogarth. (shrink)

Accessible and elegant teachings from a well-loved and revered woman Zen teacher. “The truth and joy of this life is that we cannot change things as they are.” The import of those words can be found beautifully expressed in the work of the woman who spoke them, Katherine Thanas (1927–2012)—in her art, in her writing, and especially in her Zen teaching. Fearlessly direct and endlessly curious, Katherine’s understanding of Zen was inseparable from her affinity for the arts. She was (...) an MFA student studying painting with Richard Diebenkorn, the preeminent Californian abstract painter, when she met Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, in the sixties. Soon thereafter she decided to drop painting to dedicate herself to Zen, which she did for the last forty years of her life. In these essential teachings taken from her dharma talks—which make up her only book—her love of art and literature shine through in her elegant prose and her vast references, from poets William Stafford and Naomi Shihab Nye to the Zen teachings of Dogen and Robert Aitken. Ranging on subjects from the practice of zazen to the meaning of life, Katherine urges us to “develop an insatiable appetite for inner awareness, to become proficient with this mind.” This slim volume is an important contribution by a well-loved and revered teacher. (shrink)

This paper discusses the question if there is any truth in art. Initially it poses the question whether artworks are just mere appearances or whether they have a special truth. In critical reflection on Heidegger’s conception of art as the “setting-itself-to-work of truth” this question is then elaborated and answered: The appearance character of artworks cannot be conceived as truth. What true artworks show, namely mere possibilities, is beyond truth, because it does not belong to (...) the real world. Artworks are not true; in their decentered order and their self-showing nature they are beautiful. (shrink)

I FORMS AND PROBLEMS OF CULTURE INTEGRATION AND METHODS OF THEIR STUDY I. Culture Integration And Culture Unity — A Dark Problem Is every culture an ...

This paper is concerned with monumental art in Slovakia before and after the fall of Communism in 1989. Generally, art in public spaces is important, because it influences the knowledge and feelings the people who use this space have about the past and the present, and thus influences the shared social construction of who we are as a social group. In this article we concentrate on the period of Communism and the formal and iconographic aspects that were essential to art (...) at that time. We also look at the political use of art—the ways in which explicit and implicit meanings and ideas were communicated through art to the general public. We touch also on the present situation regarding the perception of “Communist art”. In the final section we discuss the state of affairs of the last twenty years of chaotic freedom in the post-socialist era. On the one hand, since there is no real cultural politics or conception for artworks in public spaces at the level of the state many artworks simply disappear, often without public discussion, and on the other hand, some actors use their political power to build monuments that promote their private political views. (shrink)

The book develops the current hermeneutic discourse concerning the notions of beauty and Being. It includes a discussion of melancholic beauty and its interconnection with the act of art’s creation. According to M. Hołda, the writings of both authors demonstrate a treatment of beauty based on ancient Greek thought, especially from the times of Plato and Aristotle. Gadamer reaffirms the intimate relationship between beauty and Being, which is also revealed in Woolf’s literary work. ---------------------- Received: 08/04/2022. Reviewed: 13/05/2022. Accepted: 14/06/2022.

With the concept of the open work, Umberto Eco addressed the poetics to which art turned with modernism. In the article the author analyzes the notion of the open work, the references relevant to this concept and the relations of this concept to similar concepts introduced by other scholars such as Roland Barthes. Scholars discussing the openness of art were deriving primarily from Paul Valéry, and they distanced themselves from the myth of the artist as a genius and from the (...) concept of art as a vehicle for communication to transmit the truth and instead emphasized the performative character of art. Art on this track aimed at poetic use of its own media. The author argues that Eco’s definition of the open work comprises different dimensions of openness, i.e. the semantic and formal openness of the works of art, as well as the notion addresses the perceptual openness of the world. The author examines how the concept of the openness of art placed stress on the relevance of interpretation instead of the author’s intention and how it was part of a broader debate on interpretation and weak thought. By establishing autonomous poetic situations and exploring the means of art, art began performing philosophical discussions about itself, wherein, as the author argues, the notion of the open work is linked to the notions of the end or the death of art and denotes the dissolution of art into philosophy. Other sorts of dissolution of art which mean the death of art regard the dissolution of art into culture in a broader sense and its subordination to propagandist or political goals, which means art loses its autonomy. Finally, the author questions participatory art as a potential contemporary successor of the open work and argues that this mode of art, though it actively involves the participant, remains semantically closed. (shrink)

This book, the first comprehensive study in English of Heidegger's philosophy of art, starts in the mid-1930s with Heidegger's discussion of the Greek temple and his Hegelian declaration that a great artwork gathers together an entire culture in affirmative celebration of its foundational 'truth', and that, by this criterion, art in modernity is 'dead'. His subsequent work on Hölderlin, whom he later identified as the decisive influence on his mature philosophy, led him into a passionate engagement with the art (...) of Rilke, Ce;zanne, Klee and Zen Buddhism, liberating him not only from the overly restrictive conception of art of the mid-1930s but also from the disastrous politics of the period. Drawing on material hitherto unknown in the anglophone world, Young establishes a new account of Heidegger's philosophy of art and shows that his famous essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art' is its beginning, not its end. (shrink)

Despite Hegel’s effusive praise for art as one of the ways humans express truth, art by his description is both essentially limited and at perpetual risk of ending. This hybrid assessment is apparent first in Hegel’s account of art’s development, which shows art culminating in classical sculpture’s perfect unity but then, unable to depict Christianity’s interiority, evolving into religion, surrendering to division, or dissipating into prose. It is also evident in his ranking of artistic genres from architecture to poetry (...) according to their ability to help humans produce themselves both individually and collectively: the more adequately art depicts human self-understanding, the more it risks ceasing to be art. Nevertheless, art’s myriad endings do not exhaust its potential. Art that makes us alive to the unity and interdependence at the heart of reality continues to express the Idea and so achieves Hegel’s ambitions for its role in human life. (shrink)

In theOrigin of the work of art, Heidegger claimed that the work of art opens to us thetruth of Being, the opening of the world. Two problematics arise from this. First, his idea of “world-disclosure” evoked a sense ofeverydayness(which captures, for me, the idea of credulism in perception). Second, the senses oftruth,Being, andworldare metaphysically condensed. Hence the question: how then could the “truth of Being” or the “world” that artworks reveal be experienced? Among other ways (mimesis, imagination, perception, etc.) (...) by which artworks are experienced, I choose to examine perception since it confirms this idea ofeverydayness. The questions that confront us to this effect are: can perception lead us into, to encounter, this world opened by artworks? Does the nervous/visual system suffice to enter into that world in which the artist invites us? This is where Richir becomes important. In response to the first problem, he shows that the “perception” (experience) of artworks is beyond mereeverydaynesssince artworks open for us a world that “never was” and “never will be” (i.e., “virtuality” and not a veridical sense ofeverydaynessas captured in the perceptive act that is object-related). This is because the material stuff or object given in perception is neutralized by thephantasiato become what Richir callsSache. ThisSacheis in itself a phenomenon that is disclosed in artworks. In response to the second problem, Richir shows how artworks cannot disclose just metaphysical categories ofBeing, truth, or world. The disclosure has to be phenomenological, corporeal, and affective. He therefore proposes another mode of “perception” beyondmere perceptionin a revolutionary interpretation of the husserlian “perceptive”phantasia.With this, he shows how the aforementioned metaphysical condensations are liveable in experience. I concretize this with an illustration from the theater. Finally, I suggest participation as a phenomenological approach that can make both Heidegger’s and Richir’s intuitions meaningful. (shrink)

The question "what is art?" is often said to be venerable and vexing. In fact, the following answer to the question should be obvious: (R) item x is a work of art if and only if x is a work in practice P and P is one of the arts. Yet (R) has appeared so far from obvious that nobody has given it a moment's thought. The trouble is not that anyone might seriously deny the truth of (R), but (...) rather that they will find it uninformative. After all, the vexing question is pressed upon us by radical changes in art of the avant-garde, and (R) offers no resources to address these changes. With that in mind, here is the case for (R). The challenges posed by the avant-garde are real enough and they need to be addressed, but the vexing question is the wrong question to ask to address them. It does not follow that the question has no good answer. On the contrary, (R) is all the answer we need, if we do not need an answer that addresses the challenges posed by the avant-garde. Moreover, (R) points to a question that we do need answered. So, not only is it true but, in addition, (R) is as informative as we need. (shrink)

Like many 19th c. thinkers, Kierkegaard embraces a cognitivist view of art. He thinks works of art matter because they can teach us in important ways. This chapter defends two striking features of Kierkegaard’s version of this theory. First, works of art do not teach “directly” by telling us truths and offering us evidence. Instead, they educate us “indirect-ly” by helping us make our own discoveries. Second, the fact that art does not teach in a straightforward manner is no defect. (...) On the contrary, it is precisely because art teaches indirectly that it teaches better than philosophy and science do. (shrink)