Sandra Shapshay

This essay offers a discussion of how Arthur Danto educated me philosophically both through his personal example and through his work. Along the way, I detail what I take to be his most important lesson: to engage deeply and seriously with the subject of one’s philosophy, in his case predominantly art, and thus always to retain contact with the world outside of philosophy. Danto modeled a truly engaged philosopher of art, attending to history, actual practices and contemporary currents, without sacrificing philosophical clarity and depth.

Zoltán Somhegyi’s Reviewing the Past: The Presence of Ruins takes the reader on a captivating journey through the phenomenon of ruins. It is a remarkable achievement that, I believe, only someone like Somhegyi--a philosophical aesthetician as well as an art historian, and one who has studied ruins on a global scale--could pull off so brilliantly.What I focus on in this essay, however, is on the side of ruins that I believe gets shorter shrift in this book, namely, the environmental side. First, I take up some difficult cases for Somhegyi’s ontology of ruins, which I believe his account handles quite well, namely, the phenomenon of contemporary industrial and commercial ruins and the case of so-called ruins brought about through the destruction of war. Next, I turn to my main criticism of his treatment of ruins: that he looks at them predominantly through the lens of art, and not enough through the lens of nature. I suggest that Somhegyi is not sufficiently alive to consequences of the ruin’s artistic/natural hybridity; more specifically, I think he neglects some of the consequences of nature being a co-creator of the ruin. Finally, I propose further attention to the environmental views embodied in the change from the picturesque to the sublime treatment of ruins in art.

Rustin Cohle, the protagonist of the first season of True Detective, declares that he is "in philosophical terms, a pessimist". The doctrine of "pessimism" espoused by Rust is remarkably similar to the view adumbrated by Arthur Schopenhauer, who holds that conscious life (both human and nonhuman animal) involves a tremendous amount of suffering that is essentially built into the structure of the world and there is no Creator (providential or otherwise) to redeem all of this suffering, by, say, punishing the wicked and rewarding the good. Rust finds some grounds for hope, and he chooses to continue on the path of compassion and justice, the path to try to improve the world. This prompts the question of whether he ever really embraced suicide in principle, and just lacked the constitution to pull it off, or whether, like Schopenhauer, he perhaps always found the intellectual grounds for such a radical decision to be shaky.

This comprehensive Handbook offers a leading-edge yet accessible guide to the most important facets of Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophical system, the last true system of German philosophy. Written by a diverse, international and interdisciplinary group of eminent and up-and-coming scholars, each of the 28 chapters in this Handbook includes an authoritative exposition of different viewpoints as well as arguing for a particular thesis. Authors also put Schopenhauer's ideas into historical context and connect them when possible to contemporary philosophy. Key features: Structured in six parts, addressing the development of Schopenhauer's system, his epistemology and metaphysics, aesthetics and philosophy of art, ethical and political thought, philosophy of religion and legacy in Britain, France, and the US. Special coverage of Schopenhauer's treatment of Judaism, Christianity, Vedic thought and Buddhism Attention to the relevance of Schopenhauer for contemporary metaphysics, metaethics and ethics in particular. The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook is an essential resource for scholars as well as advanced students of nineteenth-century philosophy. Researchers and graduate students in musicology, comparative literature, religious studies, English, French, history, and political science will find this guide to be a rigorous and refreshing Handbook to support their own explorations of Schopenhauer's thought.

I argue for an interpretation of Kant's aesthetics whereby the experience of the beautiful plays the same functional role in the invisible church of natural religion as Scripture does for the visible churches of ecclesiastical religions. Thus, I contend, the links that Kant himself implies between the aesthetic and the moral are much stronger than generally portrayed by commentators. Indeed, for Kant, experience of the beautiful may be necessary in order to found what Kant views as the final end of morality — the ethical community — since human moral psychology requires embodiments of moral ideas. Finally, I seek to modify Martha Nussbaums' argument in Poetic Justice for the increased use of the literary imagination as a means for improving public moral reasoning in this country, with the Kantian insight that aesthetic autonomy is the key to any aesthetic-moral link.

Danto's end of art thesis as well as his partial definition of art as “embodied meaning” have sparked much controversy, but I shall not quarrel with either here. Rather, my aim is to suggest that there was another distinct chapter in the grand narrative described by Danto, one taking place right under his nose. This was an environmental chapter, crystallized most forcefully in my view by the work of Latvian‐American artist Vija Celmins (1938‐ ), especially by her work To Fix the Image in Memory I‐XI (1977‐82) consisting of 11 pairs of perceptually indiscernible stones, one found one made. Without the benefit of seeing her first retrospective in 2019, it would have been very hard to see how her own artistic narrative, culminating in these indiscernible stone pair works, offers “the appropriate next stage in the story.” Inspired by Danto, this is exactly what I hope to show.

When we engage seriously with a work of art, we "walk around it," metaphorically and often quite literally. Analogously, when we seek to act responsibly in relation to other persons, we imagine the impact our action might have on them, and try to see things from their points of view. Metaphorically speaking, this process is "walking around an action." ;In this dissertation, I investigate the complex process of serious interaction with a work of art, and the conditions necessary for this process to take place. I show that these conditions provide a training for moral deliberation, basing my reflection on Kantian and Schopenhauerian thought. Although Kant and Schopenhauer have been characterized as stressing the "non-cognitive" in aesthetic experience, there is another way to read them which stresses their continuity with Plato, Aristotle and the cognitivist tradition. The moral-cognitive importance of aesthetic experience derives, for these thinkers, from the process by which subjects become free individuals while attending to objects in their world in a seriously aesthetic way. This way of approaching the intersections between aesthetics and ethics has been eclipsed in contemporary thinking. ;In Chapter 1, I detail the subtle links, in Kant's writings, between autonomous aesthetic experience and moral judgment and feeling. Unlike other commentators, I pay close attention to the role of aesthetic experience for Enlightenment as sketched out in Kant's Religion, a role I call "subtle scripture for an invisible church." In Chapter 2, I discuss and reformulate the Kantian conditions for aesthetic experience, namely "disinterestedness" and "free-play" of the imagination. Second, I explore three ways in which ethics and aesthetics come into conflict. In Chapter 3, I turn to Schopenhauer's understanding of the relationship between disinterested aesthetic experience and the moral attitude of compassion. After performing some "metaphysical surgery," I detail a "minimal Schopenhauerian metaphysics," shorn of its more untenable trappings. In Chapter 4, I argue for my interpretation of Schopenhauer's moral-aesthetic connection: Where Kant saw beauty as a symbol of morality, Schopenhauer sees aesthetic experience as a metonymy of will-less compassion. I discuss the ways in which this moral-aesthetic connection can survive scrutiny even if the Schopenhauerian metaphysics on which it was originally based cannot. I conclude by contrasting my hybrid Kantian-Schopenhauerian view with those of Martha Nussbaum and Noel Carroll, who focus on a narrow subset of encounters with art . Against these theorists, I argue for a focus on the process of serious interaction with art in general for an understanding of the peculiarly aesthetic relations between art and morality