Art and Indiscernibility: Arthur C. Danto and the Dynamics of Analytic Philosophy

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
John Erik Hmiel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
History And Criticism ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Metaphysical Grounding ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
English Speaking World

Arthur C. Danto was one of the most influential and prolific philosophers of art of the second half of the twentieth century. More particularly, his encounter with the art of Andy Warhol in 1964 became a crucial moment that would catapult his lifelong attempt to spell out the theoretical conditions of contemporary art, and the implications those conditions held for art history and criticism. In this article, however, I show that Danto was in fact primed for his encounter with Warhol by the newly emerging identity of Anglo-American analytic philosophy at mid-century. Using unpublished archival material, I show that Danto's fundamental insights in his first two major essays in the philosophy of art, “The Artworld” (1964) and “Artworks and Real Things” (1973), were in place at least two years before his chance meeting with Warhol's artwork. In making this more modest historical claim, however, I argue that Danto was part of a broader generation of philosophers who were attempting to work through some of the fundamental problems raised by the naturalist tradition of American thought since the late nineteenth century, problems that became central to the emerging identity of analytic philosophy in its early stages. Among the most pressing of these problems was how values functioned in a naturalistic universe absent theological or metaphysical grounding. Drawing from this philosophical space, Danto's account of art deeply influenced the direction of Anglo-American philosophy of art during the second half of the twentieth century. In the process, he became one of the most significant theorists of contemporary art in the English-speaking world.

The Project for a New Anglo Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Constituent Elements

This chapter sketches a synoptic intellectual history of the attempt to unify the constituent elements of the “Anglo-world” into a single globe-spanning community, and to harness its purported world-historical potential as an agent of order and justice. Since the late nineteenth century numerous commentators have preached the benefits of unity, though they have often disagreed on the institutional form it should assume. These are projects for the creation of a new Anglo century. The first two sections of the chapter explore overlapping elements of the fin de siècle Anglo-world discourse. The third section traces the echoes of debates over the future relationship between the empire and the United States through the twentieth century, discussing the interlacing articulation of imperial-commonwealth, Anglo-American, democratic unionist, and world federalist projects. The final section discusses contemporary accounts of Anglo-world supremacy.

scholarly journals Hegel’s Revival in Analytic Philosophy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willem A. deVries
Keyword(s):  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Conceptual Structure ◽  
Proper Treatment ◽  
John Mcdowell ◽  
Wilfrid Sellars ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Anglo American

Analytic philosophy is rediscovering Hegel. This chapter examines a particularly strong thread of new analytic Hegelianism, sometimes called ‘Pittsburgh Hegelianism’, which began with the work of Wilfrid Sellars. In trying to bring Anglo-American philosophy from its empiricist phase into a more sophisticated, corrected Kantianism, Sellars moved in substantially Hegelian directions. Sellars’s work has been extended and revised by his Pittsburgh colleagues John McDowell and Robert B. Brandom. The sociality and historicity of reason, the proper treatment of space and time, conceptual holism, inferentialism, the reality of conceptual structure, the structure of experience, and the nature of normativity are the central concerns of Pittsburgh Hegelianism.

Translating Domesticity in Chinese History and Historiography

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (4) ◽  
pp. 1278-1289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth LaCouture
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Gender History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American

Abstract This article examines knowledge about “domesticity” in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and argues against the naturalization of Euro-American historiographical frameworks around “domesticity.” “Domesticity” was not a Chinese concept: although Confucianism had long connected the household to the state through ideology and prescriptive practices, Anglo-American ideas about “domesticity” were translated into Chinese first by way of Japan in the late nineteenth century, and second by way of American missionary educators in the twentieth century. “Domesticity” did not translate easily into Chinese, however; neither the ideology nor its pedagogical practices ever became popular in China. The history of translating “domesticity” into Chinese thus reveals that Euro-American historiographical terms that were once thought to be universal map poorly onto other places and suggests that we need more inclusive frames for comparative gender history.

Introduction

1990 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Marvin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Social History ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Special Importance ◽  
Relative Term ◽  
Anglo American

New technologies is a historically relative term. We are not the first generation to wonder at the rapid and extraordinary shifts in the dimension of the world and the human relationships it contains as a result of new forms of communication, or to be surprised by the changes those shifts occasion in the regular pattern of our lives. If our own experience is unique in detail, its structure is characteristically modern. It starts with the invention of the telegraph, the first of the electrical communications machines, as significant a break with the past as printing before it. In a historical sense, the computer is no more than an instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory, and all the communications inventions in between have simply been elaborations on the telegraph’s original work. In the long transformation that begins with the first application of electricity to communication, the last quarter of the nineteenth century has a special importance for students of modern media history. Five proto-mass media of the twentieth century were invented during this period: the telephone, phonograph, electric light, wireless, and cinema. This period is not the usual starting point for the social history of Anglo-American electric media, which is generally assumed to begin only with the institutional birth of film and broadcasting and the development of large audiences in the twentieth century. The present study modestly attempts to push back those beginnings to the late nineteenth century, when Anglo-American culture was fascinated by the communicative possibilities of the telegraph, the telephone, and the incandescent lamp—choices that may come as a surprise to contemporary sensibilities focused on twentieth-century mass media. For media historians, the phenomenon of twentieth-century electronic mass media lies like a great whale across the terrain of our intellectual concern. Asked to explain what sort of phenomenon it is, most of us will unhesitatingly point to the hundreds of millions of radio and television sets that are bought by consumers and promoted by vast industries. This artifactual notion is pervasive and not much debated, for it seems simple, obvious, and convenient.

Can Rahner Bridge the Linguistic Divide?

Horizons ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-239
Author(s):  
Robert Masson
Keyword(s):  
Religious Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Extensive Discussion ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Linguistic Divide ◽  
English Speaking World

AbstractDespite the extensive discussion about theological discourse in both the English-speaking world and in Europe, there have been few serious and extended attempts to relate Anglo-American philosophy and theology to Karl Rahner's “transcendental” perspective. Because of their difference in perspective each has much to offer the other. It is reasonable to hope that in bridging the gap between the two, we might make some progress in the still more formidable task of developing a Christian theology which would enable us to emerge from our linguistic ghettos to offer a more credible response to contemporary secular culture. The article warns, however, that the search for points of affinity between these two casts of mind can easily lead to a distortion of one perspective or the other, rather than to a genuine confrontation and dialogue. An examination of an attempt to find such points of affinity provides the occasion for disclosing Rahner's possible contribution to the discussion of religious language, while also demonstrating the limitations of any approach which seeks points of similarity without at the same time noting the fundamental difference between his perspective and that of some who represent Anglo-American thinking.

Dreamworlds of Race

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Racial Domination ◽  
Anglo American

Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. This book explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order. Focusing on a quartet of extraordinary figures, the book shows how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest to secure global supremacy. Yet even as they dreamt of an Anglo-dominated world, the unionists disagreed over the meaning of race, the legitimacy of imperialism, the nature of political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification. The racial dreamworld was an object of competing claims and fantasies. Exploring speculative fiction as well as more conventional forms of political writing, the author reads unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, and juxtaposes them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire. Tracing how intellectual elites promoted an ambitious project of political and racial unification between Britain and the United States, the book analyzes ideas of empire and world order that reverberate to this day.

Jewish Philosophy in an Analytic Age

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Jewish Philosophy ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Treasure Chest

Since the classical period, Jewish scholars have drawn on developments in philosophy to enrich our understanding of Judaism. This methodology reached its pinnacle in the medieval period with figures like Maimonides and continued into the modern period with the likes of Levinas. The explosion of Anglo-American/analytic philosophy in the twentieth century means that there is now a treasure chest of material, largely unexplored by Jewish philosophy, with which to explore, analyze, and develop the Jewish tradition. This book gathers together a number of analytic philosophers and invites them to turn their training to an investigation of Jewish texts, traditions, and/or thinkers, in order to showcase what Jewish philosophy might look like in an analytic age.

Blackness, Imperialism, and Nationalism in Dominican Children's Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Stacy Ann Creech
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young People ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Specific Construction

From pre-Columbian times through to the twentieth century, Dominican children's literature has struggled to define itself due to pressures from outside forces such as imperialism and colonialism. This paper examines the socio-political contexts within Dominican history that determined the kind of literature available to children, which almost exclusively depicted a specific construction of indigeneity, European or Anglo-American characters and settings, in an effort to efface the country's African roots. After the Educational Reform of 1993 was instituted, however, there has been a promising change in the field, as Dominican writers are engaged in producing literature for young people that includes more accurate representations of Blackness and multiculturalism.

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

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