On Richard Shusterman's Pragmatist Challenge to Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art
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Kalle Puolakka
Abstract
This article tries to show that Richard Shusterman's pragmatist challenge to Arthur Danto's philosophy of art fails. Three individual criticisms of Danto are extracted from Shusterman's texts, and they are all considered unsuccessful. First, I shall argue that Danto's theory allows much more room for aesthetic experience than Shusterman's criticism suggests. Second, essential to Danto's philosophy of art is the distinction between art and reality, and by framing that distinction in terms of Danto's understanding of philosophical problems, Danto's theory can be seen not to involve the sort of distinction between art and reality that Shusterman's “wrapper model”–criticism presumes. Third, it is argued that Shusterman's way of contesting Danto's philosophy of art by offering a different reading of Andy Warhol's Brillo Box than the one Shusterman presumes Danto to hold does not, eventually, manage to undermine the starting point of Danto's philosophy of art. The article ends by presenting a critical remark on Shusterman's pragmatist aesthetics drawn from Danto's theory.
© Philosophia Press 2008
Articles in the same Issue
- Evil Everywhere. The Ordinariness of Kantian Radical Evil
- What is Naturalism? Towards a Univocal Theory
- Wittgenstein and the Fate of Metaphysics
- Butler's Unduly Worry about Foucault. The Paradoxically Constituted and Constructed Body
- On the Performative and the Pragmatic. Performative vs. Pragmatic Self-Contradictions
- Philosophical Fiction and the Act of Fiction-Making
- On Richard Shusterman's Pragmatist Challenge to Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art
- Less is More, and More is Needed. Reply to Jan Faye
- Nothing but the Truth. A Reply to Søren Harnow Klausen
- John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer & Luca Pocci (eds.): A Sense of the Worlds. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy. New York & London: Routledge, 2007 (344 pp.)
Articles in the same Issue
- Evil Everywhere. The Ordinariness of Kantian Radical Evil
- What is Naturalism? Towards a Univocal Theory
- Wittgenstein and the Fate of Metaphysics
- Butler's Unduly Worry about Foucault. The Paradoxically Constituted and Constructed Body
- On the Performative and the Pragmatic. Performative vs. Pragmatic Self-Contradictions
- Philosophical Fiction and the Act of Fiction-Making
- On Richard Shusterman's Pragmatist Challenge to Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art
- Less is More, and More is Needed. Reply to Jan Faye
- Nothing but the Truth. A Reply to Søren Harnow Klausen
- John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer & Luca Pocci (eds.): A Sense of the Worlds. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy. New York & London: Routledge, 2007 (344 pp.)
