Russell Pryba

At the 2007 Eastern APA in Baltimore, the last time that many of us saw Peter Hare, I was sitting next to him at the William James Society session. Like many young philosophers at the beginning of their careers, I was eager to be associated with my well-known and respected dissertation advisor. Throughout the course of the talk I looked over at Peter's handout and saw that he had written the word "flexibility" in the upper right-hand corner of his paper. As the talk progressed the word "flexibility" became surrounded by an increasing number of circles and underlines. During the question period Peter queried the speaker about how flexibility might be associated with the talk that was just given. After the talk ..

This paper examines the early aesthetic writings of Joseph Margolis from the late 1950s to the mid‐1960s in order to argue for the relevance of these works in understanding Margolis’s later, more well‐known views in the philosophy of art. Specifically, the paper addresses Margolis’s early essays on the definition and ontology of art and aesthetic perception. These essays not only show Margolis engaged in the most significant debates in mid‐century analytic aesthetics but also provide important indications of the limitations of that approach to thinking about the arts that informs the development of Margolis’s later cultural realism.