[ebooks] Unfaithful by Owen McCafferty at Arts-Photography

Review

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. First-Rate Contribution to the Philosophy of ArtBy Thomas LeddyMargolis; in my view; is one of the top three or four American philosophers working today. (Actually; although I doubt anyone would agree with me: I see him as the most important thinker in aesthetics/philosophy of art living today.) Perhaps his strongest area is in the philosophy of art; although he has done notable work in a number of other philosophical fields. I doubt that anyone has read all of his works: he is amazingly prolific. The Arts and the Definition of the Human can be seen broadly as a critique of the Kantian tradition in aesthetics from a Hegelian perspective. This book is not for the beginner in philosophy. You need to know a lot about the history of philosophy; for example to get many of the references. Even for a graduate student; it can be tough going at times; and I recommend rereading most paragraphs at least once. I find just about everything Margolis has to say wise and perceptive; although I sometimes feel uncomfortable with his harsh judgments (he is perhaps too quick to say that a theorists views; or even that of an entire tradition; are outright mistaken.) His entire theory may possibly be summarized in one overly-long sentence/paragraph which seeks to describe what he calls a philosophical anthropology that combines the best parts of both continental and analytic philosophy and rejects universality in favor of "historicity." ("historicity construes the intelligible world as a flux; not a chaos; and erases any principled distinction between theoretical and practical reason" (149)) The main thrust of his aesthetic theory is against those who would treat works of art as "mere" physical things. This argument is addressed against such thinkers (all analytic aestheticians) as Richard Wollheim; Arthur Danto; Jerrold Levinson; and Kendall Walton.Heres the summary. (Terms you may not understand are usually defined in other parts of the book; except sittlich which; although normally translated at "moral" seems to refer to Hegels idea of the ethical life as bridging individual feelings and general rights.) His view [which he associates here with Darwinism] "would outflank reductionism and dualism at a stroke; confirm the advantage of a phenomenological model of perception over any empirical alternative; account for the encultured nature of human understanding in every sector of inquiry; confirm (accordingly) the inseparability of metaphysics and epistemology; comply with the decisive innovations introduced by Kant and Hegel in (our) overcoming the paradoxes of twentieth- and twenty-first century Anglo-American philosophy (aesthetics; for the moment) as easily as those of the pre-Kantian Cartesian world (since they are basically the same); demonstrate the thoroughly naturalistic status of the concepts and processes of an emergent cultural world; reject (as a consequence) any disjunction between the work of the physical and human sciences as well as any privileging of non-Intentional inquiry over Intentionally informed inquiry; and (therefore) validate the prospects of objective inquiries of a thoroughly cultural sort (the description and interpretation of artworks for instance; the description and explanation of human life and history) in virtue (at the very least) of the thoroughly Intentional nature of the physical sciences as science..." (115)Here is another list that will give you an idea of the full scope (and importance!) of Margoliss thinking:In talking about Socratic elenchus and Hegelian dialectic; he says that he views them as related strategies of inquiry (preferred by him) "that are (1) presuppositionless; (2) sittlich (in a generous anthropological sense; (3) free of Parmenidean infection of any kind; (4) lacking any formal or criterial method; (5)cast as forms of discursive reason; (6) inherently incapable of claiming or validating any unique correct analysis of whatever sector of the world they choose to examine; (7) committed only to what; as a practical matter; is adequate to our salient interests from time to time - or committed in such a way that theoretical inquiry is seen to be dependent on; or derivative from; or internal to; our practices of discursive inquiry; (8) applied to what is intrinsically interpretable without end; (9) unable to discover in any simple or direct way the objective (or telic) structures of the independent world; (10) hence; applied to what is culturally constituted or constructed relative to our evolving experience of the world; (11) applied to what is local; contexted; not strictly universalizable; validated in sittlich ways; (12) historicized and known to be such; and (13( insuperably phenomenological; that is; grounded in and restricted to our encultured experience of the world (in something closer to Hegels than to Husserls sense." (11) All of this; he thinks; bears on defining what it is to be a human being. He uses this to show "the abiding failure of the first two thousand years of Western philosophy!" which; as I mentioned earlier; I think is way overdone. Nonetheless; philosophy; in my view; does not get better than this.The book is actually a collection of previously published essays or presented papers not all of which are clearly related. Margolis attempts to tie them together by way of his "Prologue: The Definition of the Human." Chapter one deals with the perception of paintings as paintings. Here; Margolis defends a position very similar to that of Marx Wartofsky (who was; by the way; my much admired thesis adviser); who he credits at one point (36-9); that perception is conditioned by history: on Margoliss view all perception of art is penetrated by cultural experience in historical ways.I plan to write some more comments about this book on my blog at [...]1 of 4 people found the following review helpful. The human self is a "natural artifact"By ROROTOKO"The Arts and the Definition of the Human" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Margoliss book interview ran here as the cover feature on January 11; 2010.