Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding. Philosophy’s Artful Conversation is a timely and searching examination of theory’s role in the arts and humanities today. Expanding the insights of his earlier book, Elegy for Theory, and drawing on the diverse thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. H. von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Rodowick provides a blueprint of what he calls a “philosophy of the humanities.” In a surprising and illuminating turn, he views the historical emergence of theory through the lens of film theory, arguing that aesthetics, literary studies, and cinema studies cannot be separated where questions of theory are concerned. These discourses comprise a conceptual whole, providing an overarching model of critique that resembles, in embryonic form, what a new philosophy of the humanities might look like. Rodowick offers original readings of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, bringing forward unexamined points of contact between two thinkers who associate philosophical expression with film and the arts. A major contribution to cross-disciplinary intellectual history, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation reveals the many threads connecting the arts and humanities with the history of philosophy.

This book brings together for the first time fourteen recent interviews with some of the most important names in contemporary philosophy. Covering a wide range of issues from law to logic and metaphysics to literature, the interviews provide a fascinating introduction to some of the most influential thinkers of the day, and offer a rare opportunity for readers to learn about their views through the relaxed format of conversation.

Is art a form of communication? If so, what does art express or represent? How should we interpret the meaning of works created by more than one artist? Is art an adaptation, via natural selection? In what ways is art similar to—and different from—language? Art as Communication: Aesthetics, Evolution, and Signaling employs information theory, the theory of evolution, and the newly developed sender-receiver model of communication to reason about art, aesthetic behavior, and its communicative nature. Shawn Simpson considers whether art, from a biological point of view, is the province of only humans or whether animals might reasonably be said to create art. Examining the work of evolutionary biologists, art theorists, linguists, and philosophers—including Charles Darwin, Stephen Davies, H. Paul Grice, and others—he addresses how well different theories of communication explain meaning and expression in art and argues that art is much more continuous with other forms of communication than previously thought.

This book makes a case for cultural naturalism as a basis for a philosophy of art education. It argues for a holistic approach that avoids hard boundaries between artistic disciplines in the educational context, applying cultural naturalism to challenges that are topical for the whole art(s) education field, including challenges related to ecology, social justice, and technological transformation of culture. The book is written in the form of a conditional argument that considers the consequences of cultural naturalism for today’s philosophical problem-solving in art(s) education. It contains a systematic and historical analysis of cultural naturalism that support the philosophical reflection of educators and other scholars operative in this field. The result is a late modern reading of Deweyan cultural naturalism that highlights the continuance of key philosophical ideas from the modern to present discourses. The key topics discussed are of particular interest to present-day art(s) educators: ecological sustainability, social justice, and technological transformation of culture. In addition, this book provides an example of pragmatist argumentation, suggesting an alternative to analytical and post-philosophical approaches.

A comprehensive survey of the many different forms of design argument for the existence of God.

This book provides all the tools necessary to read and understand Plato's Phaedrus in the original Greek.

This book fills a gap in the literature of 21st century international visual arts education by providing a structured approach to understanding the benefits of Philosophical Realism in art education, an approach that has received little international attention until now. The framework as presented provides a powerful interface between research and practical reconceptualisations of critical issues and practice in the domains of art, design, and education that involve implications for curriculum in visual arts, teaching and learning, cognitive development, and creativity. The book extends understanding of Philosophical Realism in its practical application to teaching practice in visual arts in the way it relates to the fields of art, design, and education. Researchers, teacher educators and specialist art teachers are informed about how Philosophical Realism provides insights into art, design, and education. These insights vary from clearer knowledge about art to the examination of beliefs and assumptions about the art object. Readers learn how cognitive reflection, and social and practical reasoning in the classroom help cultivate students’ artistic performances, and understand how constraints function in students’ reasoning at different ages/stages of education.

Aesthetic experience has had a long and contentious history in the Western intellectual tradition. Following Kant and Hegel, a human’s interaction with nature or art frequently has been conceptualized as separate from issues of practical activity or moral value. This book examines how art can be seen as a way of moral cultivation. Scott Stroud uses the thought of the American pragmatist John Dewey to argue that art and the aesthetic have a close connection to morality. Dewey gives us a way to reconceptualize our ideas of ends, means, and experience so as to locate the moral value of aesthetic experience in the experience of absorption itself, as well as in the experience of reflective attention evoked by an art object.

Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding. Philosophy’s Artful Conversation is a timely and searching examination of theory’s role in the arts and humanities today. Expanding the insights of his earlier book, Elegy for Theory, and drawing on the diverse thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. H. von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Rodowick provides a blueprint of what he calls a “philosophy of the humanities.” In a surprising and illuminating turn, he views the historical emergence of theory through the lens of film theory, arguing that aesthetics, literary studies, and cinema studies cannot be separated where questions of theory are concerned. These discourses comprise a conceptual whole, providing an overarching model of critique that resembles, in embryonic form, what a new philosophy of the humanities might look like. Rodowick offers original readings of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, bringing forward unexamined points of contact between two thinkers who associate philosophical expression with film and the arts. A major contribution to cross-disciplinary intellectual history, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation reveals the many threads connecting the arts and humanities with the history of philosophy.