The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto

by Randall E. Auxier (Editor), Lewis Edwin Hahn (Editor)

Arthur Danto is the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and the most influential philosopher of art in the last half century. As an art critic for The Nation for 25 years and frequent contributor to other widely read outlets such as the New York Review of Books , Danto also has become one of the most respected public intellectuals of his generation. He is the author of some two dozen important books, along with hundreds of articles and reviews which have been the center of both controversy and discussion. In this volume Danto offers his intellectual autobiography and responds to essays by 27 of the keenest critics of his thought from the worlds of philosophy and the arts. The book includes 16 pages of color art reproductions. Danto is the author dozens of books on art, philosophy, the philosophy of art, and art criticism. He is a rare philosopher who is also a public intellectual.

Genres: Philosophy

816 pages, Hardcover

First published April 3, 2012

Reviews

[Jon Stout · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a collection of essays commenting on the philosophy of Arthur Danto, who was my dissertation advisor, along with responses from Danto to each of the essays. It also contains an “Intellectual Autobiography” by Danto, and gives an overview of his work, including much background and biographical information. While I didn’t complete my dissertation, this volume gives much information I wish I had while I was working on it. I found Danto to be the most receptive and supportive of my professors at Columbia, in an environment not particularly welcoming to grad students.

Danto was both an artist and a philosopher. He liked to point out that in his first year as an assistant professor, he earned as much money from his block print art as he did from his teaching. He later made his reputation as a philosopher of art and as an art critic for The Nation magazine. He always considered himself to be an “analytic philosopher,” putting himself in the Anglo-American tradition as opposed to the European. But philosophy of art was not what one most expected of an analytic philosopher, nor were Danto’s books on Nietzsche, on Sartre and on eastern religions. Danto was a deeply and widely educated man, going through an early phase of fascination with Zen Buddhism, and living for extensive periods in France and Italy, as well as travelling throughout the world.

Danto conceived of his academic career as creating a complete “philosophical system” in the analytic conception, consisting of five parts. Early in his career he wrote a philosophy of history, a philosophy of knowledge and a philosophy of action. In the process of developing a philosophy of art, he became enthralled by an artistic problem which diverted his thinking and led his career into the “artworld.” In 1964 he saw Andy Warhol’s exhibit of Brillo Box, and the philosophical question arose for him of how one distinguishes Warhol’s Brillo Box from the Brillo boxes found at the grocery store. Though they are perceptibly indistinguishable, the former is art while the latter is not, so the question “What is art?” is raised. The philosophy of art phase of Danto’s system ballooned into a whole career by itself.

Danto never finished the last piece of his system, a philosophy of mind, but his thinking was summarized in a book called The Body/Body Problem: Selected Essays, which I want to read (I have read a half dozen of Danto’s books). The premise, from what I infer, is that what is traditionally regarded as the Mind/Body problem should be rephrased as the Body/Body Problem. As a naturalist, Danto rejects the notion of a separate mental substance, distinct from matter, ala Descartes, which accounts for our subjective mental experience. Instead he holds that mental phenomena can be accounted for by the representational (language-making, self-referential) capacities of our material bodies. Therefore, the Body/Body problem.

There was much detail which I wish I had available when I was in graduate school (there was no internet in those days, and library searches did not turn up very much philosophical small-talk or gossip). For example Danto mentions in passing what he considered to be the basic goal of the Platonic dialogues: they were to make an attempt to define a central concept (“justice” or “love” or “knowledge”) through a discussion which at least revealed a couple of necessary conditions for the concept to apply. Thus Plato’s Theaetetus reaches the conclusion that knowledge is “justified, true belief.” Danto, in parallel fashion, defines art as “embodied meanings” (in a book with that title). I won’t try to explain here what that means. Those definitions are not the last word, but they are a down payment on the job of philosophy.

Another tidbit I picked up is that Danto is an “essentialist,” that is that he agrees with Plato that it is possible to define basic concepts. In this he disagrees with Wittgenstein (otherwise an important influence on Danto) that concepts are based on “family resemblances,” in which individual members of a family might resemble each other in different ways, but in which there is no single characteristic (essence, necessary condition) that all members of a family must have. These seemingly elementary insights help give a concrete idea of what philosophy is all about.

I found it a delight to read Danto, even though occasionally he, or more often one of his commentators, goes into weeds which are stuffy and picayune. Danto is a wonderful stylist, so his writing is almost always a pleasure to read. He is also cosmopolitan and adventurous. A few years ago, my friend David Seiple (one of the book’s commentators) and I attended the memorial service for Professor Danto at Columbia’s Morningside Campus. This book makes me feel as if he were still with us.