Noel Carroll

_Philosophy of Art_ is a textbook for undergraduate students interested in the topic of philosophical aesthetics. It introduces the techniques of analytic philosophy as well as key topics such as the representational theory of art, formalism, neo-formalism, aesthetic theories of art, neo-Wittgensteinism, the Institutional Theory of Art. as well as historical approaches to the nature of art. Throughout, abstract philosophical theories are illustrated by examples of both traditional and contemporary art including frequent reference to the avant-garde in this way enriching the readers understanding of art theory as well as the appreciation of art. Unique features of the textbook are: * chapter summaries * summaries of major theories of art and suggested analyses of the important categories used when talking and thinking of art * annotated suggested readings at the ends of chapters. Also available in this series: _Epistemology_ Pb: 0-415-13043-3: £12.99 _Ethics_ Pb: 0-415-15625-4: £11.99 _Metaphysics_ Pb: 0-415-14034-X: £12.99 _Philosophy of Mind_ Pb: 0-415-13060-3: £11.99 _Philosophy of Religion_ Pb: 0-415-13214-2: £12.99.

Theory appears to have played the ideological-institutional role of enfranchiser, even if the role was ulti-mately an epiphenomenal one. Furthermore, the expectation of gold in "them thar hills" also encouraged too many university presses to invest in film publications, especially when the arcane peregrinations of Theory facilitated their rationalization of their relaxation of their traditional role as academic gatekeepers. Hence film studies has been flooded with repetitive decoctions of the Theory in search of the same market in much the same way that con-sumers are confronted with so many marginally differentiated shampoos.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Historical Significance and Structure of Monroe Beardsley's AestheticsAn AppreciationNoël Carroll (bio)IntroductionMonroe C. Beardsley's Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, published in 1958 by Harcourt, Brace and World Inc.,1 was a watershed event in the history of analytic aesthetics—a climax of sorts with respect to what preceded it and, at the same time, the opening of a new, more intricately developed and defended research program in aesthetics than what had been previously on offer. Beardsley's Aesthetics, and developments therefrom,2 consolidated and crystallized a tendency in aesthetics that had begun to emerge at least by the time of the publication of Francis Hutcheson's An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design,3 which tendency, following Beardsley, we can call the aesthetic theory of art. Assembled out of parts and suggestions from Hutcheson, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Bell, among others, the aesthetic theory of art—of which Beardsley's version is one of the most accomplished, if not the most accomplished—has shown remarkable resilience, continuing to command allegiance from many distinguished, contemporary proponents, including Nick Zangwill, Gary Iseminger, and, with certain important modifications, Alan Goldman and Malcolm Budd.Part of what I would like to do in this essay is not only to trace the evolution of the aesthetic theory of art from its origins through to Beardsley's Aesthetics (and his subsequent tinkering with this masterwork) but also to show how the structure of the aesthetic theory of art, as crafted by Beardsley, is simultaneously so elegant, comprehensive, and systematic that it is understandable that Beardsley preferred constantly to repair it after each attack rather than to abandon it for the kinds of alternatives being proffered by Goodman, Danto, Wollheim, Dickie, Wolterstorff, and then Walton. In other words, Beardsley's reluctance to give up was genuinely motivated. [End Page 2] For, if only the kinks could have been smoothed out of it, the aesthetic theory of art, of the sort initiated in Aesthetics and elaborated subsequently by Beardsley, was itself a thing of beauty: exceedingly economical in its foundational principles and powerful in its reach. Thus, whereas typically I address the shortcomings of the aesthetic theory of art, in this essay I would like to talk about its strengths, strengths that I believe encouraged Monroe Beardsley to stick with it through thick and thin—that is, through a thick swarm of often thin counterexamples.In the next part of this essay, I will try to place Aesthetics historically in the course of Western aesthetics. Then in the final section, I shall attempt to explain how the structure of the sort of aesthetic theory of art incipient in Beardsley's Aesthetics and pursued by him in later works is so almost irresistibly attractive that virtually no number of anomalies can shake its friends out of the faith that such problems can be ultimately controlled, if not entirely overcome.On the Historical Significance of Beardsley's AestheticsBeardsley's Aesthetics is the culmination of certain tendencies that had been coalescing in various ways in Western aesthetics since the eighteenth century. One of Beardsley's most significant and influential twentieth-century predecessors was Clive Bell, who in his book Art, as is well known, defined art as that which possessed significant form. Significant form, in turn, was characterized as that which caused an aesthetic emotion. Bell's notion of an aesthetic emotion, I conjecture, derived from Schopenhauer's claim that what an artwork does is to lift us out of our everyday concerns—out of the world of striving. The aesthetic emotion, according to Bell, is a matter of being carried "out of life into ecstasy."4 The aesthetic experience, according to the Schopenhauer-Bell line of thought, involves the release of the individual from the pressures of life—from the pursuit of an endless process of desiring in Schopenhauer's lingo.This notion of aesthetic experience as detachment owes something to Kant's hypothesis that an authentic aesthetic judgment is disinterested, which, of course, itself is descended historically from Hutcheson's contention that beauty amounts to an experience of disinterested pleasure. However, whereas for Hutcheson and Kant disinterestedness is a...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Necessity of TheaterNoël CarrollDespite the fact that theater was the first art form to be examined in depth by Western philosophers, it has not received a great deal of attention by contemporary philosophers of art. Essays on literature, music, and cinema are more likely to appear in journals such as the British Journal of Aesthetics and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism than are articles on theater. But with the publication of Paul Woodruff's The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched, James Hamilton's The Art of Theater and the recent anthology Staging Philosophy, edited by David Zucker Saltz and David Krassner, the tide seems to be turning. Philosophers are interested in theater again. Perhaps some lovers of theater may regard this as bad news, recalling what Plato, Augustine, and Rousseau attempted to do to theater. But contemporary philosophers of theater belong more to the school of Aristotle than to that of Plato.Of these recent contributions to the philosophy of theater, Paul Woodruff's book is the one that most resembles Aristotle's Poetics, especially in terms of its analyses of plotting, characterization, conflict, choice, and mimesis. This is maybe no surprise, since Paul Woodruff is not only a professor of philosophy, but also a professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin. [End Page 435]One thing that is immediately striking about The Necessity of Theater is the elegance of its intellectual design. Woodruff begins with the hypothesis that theater is the art by which human beings make or find human action worth watching in measure time and place. That is, theater is art of being watched and watching. This distinction between being watched and watching, then, provides Woodruff with the means to, on the one hand, examine the elements that go into making theater, and, on the other hand, the elements that go into watching or appreciating theater.Creating theater involves making something worth watching—something that will hold the audience's attention. What sorts of things command our attention? Human action, notably as it is organized in terms of a plot which Woodruff, like Aristotle, emphasizes must be of a magnitude sufficient to be cognitively manageable. Since actions require choices, Woodruff follows his analysis of plot, naturally enough, with a discussion of the choices that give rise to those actions for much the same reason that Aristotle includes dialogue as one of the components of tragedy.In order to be worth watching, Woodruff recommends that these choices be free and coherent. Since choices derive—or are thought to derive—from character, theater, in order to hold our attention, needs characters. These characters must be agents and, in addition, they must be capable of engaging our emotions, not just pity and fear, but the gamut of emotions, although the most important of these, on Woodruff's view, would appear to be the elicitation of care on the part of the audience on behalf of the characters on stage. Woodruff contends that care for a character is engendered by giving the character a past as well as hopes for the future (an aim, a project, a problem) and by making that person a center of love (that is, someone who loves and/or is loved by or who cares and is cared for by other people).Theater primarily makes us interested in watching people by encouraging us to respond to characters emotionally. It is able to do this because it traffics in mimesis. Woodruff understand mimesis as a matter of a mimetic object, a theater piece, bringing to the fore certain effects of the object of which it is a representation. With respect to a theater piece, the relevant effects are emotional effects. Because mimesis is selective, it may be able to achieve those effects more intensely than its off-stage model can; the selectivity of the theater piece both places greater emphasis on the emotion-provoking features of situations while also blocking out otherwise [End Page 436] interfering detail. However, theater does require the complicity of the audience who must fill-in the model imaginatively.The introduction of the role of the audience's...

In this article, “Narrative Closure,” a theory of the nature of narrative closure is developed. Narrative closure is identified as the phenomenological feeling of finality that is generated when all the questions saliently posed by the narrative are answered. The article also includes a discussion of the intelligibility of attributing questions to narratives as well as a discussion of the mechanisms that achieve this. The article concludes by addressing certain recent criticisms of the view of narrative expounded by this article.