Book Title: Philosophy and the Arts: A Textbook with Readings
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Book Description: Intended for advanced undergraduates, this textbook presents and explains five core topics in philosophy of art. Roughly half the text is a set of edited excerpts that range from antiquity to the early twentieth century. Among philosophers, Plato and Immanuel Kant receive the most attention. However, the editorial stance is that philosophers are not the exclusive source of philosophy of art. Most chapters contain excerpts from artists writing about their art form, such as Alfred Stieglitz, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Each reading is prefaced by an extended introduction that provides historical and philosophical contextual. Except for a segment on Eduard Hanslick's musical formalism, the emphasis is on visual art and literature. There are numerous illustrations and examples.
Contents
Book Information
Book Description
This book is an introduction to some influential theories in philosophy of art. It combines excerpts of historically important texts from European and American culture with explanations of the key ideas in those texts. The most recent of these texts dates from 1929.
The overall organization is topical. Five topics have been selected. The chapters are relatively independent of one another and can be approached in any order.
Here are the topics of the five chapters.
- What was the basic idea that was originally identified to explain the value of fine art?
- Does artistic genius explain creativity and originality in the arts?
- Are the arts of value as the expression of human emotion?
- Do the arts have a special kind of value, aesthetic value?
- Do the arts have cognitive value? That is, do the arts teach us anything about the world?
Each chapter has two components: source documents and introductory explanations.
Here are the main figures whose writings are excerpted in each chapter:
- Aristotle, Giorgio Vasari, Charles Batteux, Alfred Stieglitz
- Immanuel Kant, Virginia Woolf, David Hume
- John Keats, Leo Tolstoy, T.S. Eliot
- Eduard Hanslick, Clive Bell, Edward Bullough
- Plato, Immanuel Kant
License
Philosophy and the Arts: A Textbook with Readings Copyright © 2025 by Theodore Gracyk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Subject
Philosophy
Metadata
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Philosophy and the Arts: A Textbook with Readings Copyright © 2025 by Theodore Gracyk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.