My principal interests are the theory of art and certain major artists and writers whose works strike me as central to the modern predicament (Goya, Dostoevsky, Laclos...) I believe that the explanations of art offered by modern aesthetics (aka philosophy of art) are fundamentally unsatisfactory largely because they remain shackled to eighteenth and nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural assumptions that have ceased to be credible.
Much of my writing is indebted to the French thinker André Malraux (1901-1976) who is one of the rare figures who offers a theory of art relevant to modern experience. Regrettably, Malraux is widely neglect…
My principal interests are the theory of art and certain major artists and writers whose works strike me as central to the modern predicament (Goya, Dostoevsky, Laclos...) I believe that the explanations of art offered by modern aesthetics (aka philosophy of art) are fundamentally unsatisfactory largely because they remain shackled to eighteenth and nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural assumptions that have ceased to be credible.
Much of my writing is indebted to the French thinker André Malraux (1901-1976) who is one of the rare figures who offers a theory of art relevant to modern experience. Regrettably, Malraux is widely neglected by contemporary philosophers of art, especially in anglophone countries where thinking about art is very conservative and still dominated by 18th century figures such as Hume and Kant. One prominent writer in this school of "analytic” aesthetics told me quite seriously that he was "proud" he had never read any Malraux! Most major publishers, not daring to stray beyond thinkers in the traditional mould, simply follow suit. Students are the losers because they are rarely, if ever, encouraged to examine their discipline's fundamental assumptions.
PLEASE NOTE: The journal with my article on Crime and Punishment is moving from Oxford to Johns Hopkins. The move is still under way (9/2/25) so the article may not be accessible at the moment on either site. In the meantime I've uploaded a copy to "archive" for the article on this site.
Derek Allan.
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