This article examines E.H. Gombrich’s critical appraisal of Arnold Hauser’s book, The Social History of Art. Hauser’s Social History of Art was published in 1951, a year after Gombrich’s bestseller, The Story of Art. Although written in Britain for an English-speaking public, both books had their origins in the intellectual history of Central Europe: Gombrich was an Austrian art historian and Hauser was Hungarian. Gombrich’s critique, published in The Art Bulletin in 1953, attacked Hauser’s dialectical materialism and his (...) sociological interpretation of art history. Borrowing arguments from Karl Popper’s critique of historicism, Gombrich described Hauser’s work as collectivist and deterministic, tendencies at odds with his own conception of art history. However, in his readiness to label Hauser a proponent of historical materialism, Gombrich failed to recognize Hauser’s own criticism of deterministic theories of art, especially formalism. This article investigates Gombrich’s reasons for rejecting Hauser’s sociology of art. It argues Gombrich used Hauser as an ideological counterpoint to his own version of art history, avowedly liberal and individualist in outlook. (shrink)

To date, critical engagement with Arnold Hauser’s sociology of art has been confined to the field of art history. This perspective has ignored Hauser’s interest in literary history, which I argue is essential to his project. Hauser’s dialectical model, composed of conflicting realist and formalist tendencies, extends to the literary sphere. In The Social History of Art, these two traditions are epitomised by the Russian social novel and German idealism. Anti-enlightenment tendencies in German intellectual culture provide Hauser with (...) evidence of idealism’s propensity for escapism and reaction. Conversely, he extols the Russian social novel as the naturalistic art form par excellence. Because the intelligentsia is central to Hauser’s understanding of the formation of literary culture, this paper provides an outline of his sociology of intellectuals. Through a comparison of the German and Russian literary intelligentsia, this paper shows that Hauser’s analysis of literature is often more complex than his sociological interpretations of the visual arts. (shrink)

Human beings engage works of the arts in many different ways: they sing songs while working, they kiss icons, they create and dedicate memorials. Yet almost all philosophers of art of the modern period have ignored this variety and focused entirely on just one mode of engagement, namely, disinterested attention. Nicholas Wolterstorff asks why this might be, and proposes that almost all philosophers have accepted the grand narrative concerning art in the modern world. It is generally agreed that in the (...) early modern period, members of the middle class in Western Europe increasingly engaged works of the arts as objects of disinterested attention. The grand narrative claims that this change represented the arts coming into their own, and that works of art, so engaged, are socially other and transcendent. Wolterstorff rejects this claim, and offers an alternative framework for thinking about the arts. Central to his alternative framework are the idea of the arts as social practices and the idea of works of the arts as having different meaning in different practices. (shrink)

A partir de las reflexiones de dos conocidos historiadores del arte del siglo XX, Heinrich Wölfflin y Aby Warburg, se examina la vigencia de dos aspectos centrales de la teoría estética kantiana: por un lado, la posibilidad de emitir juicios de gusto plenamente acabados, lo que justificaría la empresa de una deducción trascendental de los mismos, y, por el otro, su implicación en el conjunto de la vida cultural y social, es decir, la significación de la experiencia estética de (...) la forma, tan enfatizada en la doctrina kantiana del gusto. On the basis of the reflections of two well-known art historians of the 29th century, Heinrich Wölfflin and Aby Warburg, the article examines the validity of two central aspects of Kantian aesthetic theory: on the one hand, the possibility of providing fully complete judgments of taste, which would justify their transcendental deduction, and, on the other hand, their involvement in cultural and social life, that is, the significance of aesthetic experience as emphasized in the Kantian doctrine of taste. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe paper argues for the restricted viability of the concept of style in the history of science. Since historians of science borrow this term from art history or the sociology of knowledge, the paper outlines its emergence and function in these disciplines, in order to show that the need for ever subtler stylistic distinctions in historical description inevitably leads to the dissolution of the concept of style itself.“Style” will be defined in predominantly cognitive or technical terms when imputed to (...) an individual; in social or moral terms when thought to be carried by some collective entity. Both descriptions are given normative interpretations. A good individual style, then, is regarded as the pledge for valid knowledge or insights of a “higher order,” while a collective style, understood as the vehicle of successful intra group communication, involves the acceptance of certain rhetorical norms and/or socially shared values that are supposed to structure that style. “National styles” belong to the latter category; the emergence of this dubious notion can best be explained in sociological terms.If historians of science insist on adopting the concept of style, they will have to agree on its meaning. The paper concludes, therefore, with a rough typology of its most frequent meanings and uses. (shrink)

Intellectual history in the United States has long borne a peculiarly close kinship to social history. The twin fields rose together a century ago in a filial revolt against the cloistered, conservative study of political institutions. Sharing a progressive interest in social thought and social reform, they joined in the self-styled “social and intellectual history” of the interwar decades. After mid-century, however, they moved in divergent directions. Many social historians adopted the quantitative methods of the (...) social sciences, documenting the diverse experiences of workers, women, immigrants, slaves, native peoples, and others often marginalized in the textual record as well as the property regimes, modes of production, patterns of inheritance and mobility, and large-scale demographic and environmental forces that governed their lives. Intellectual historians tended to favor the qualitative evidence gleaned from the more cohesive letters and libraries of traditional elites, specializing in close readings of the intricate discursive, aesthetic, and spiritual templates of social experience found in religion, science, philosophy, political theory, and art and literature. Both subdisciplines had come into parallel crises by the 1980s, chastened by postmodern attacks on “master narratives” of any kind, whether idealist or materialist. In the decades since, social historians have sought a more nuanced consideration of thought and culture, while intellectual historians have at once broadened the range of their subjects and sources and limited more carefully the claims they make for them. (shrink)

Vere Gordon Childe’s theory of craft specialisation was an important influence on Arnold Hauser’s book The Social History of Art, published in 1951. Childe’s Marxist interpretation of prehistory enabled Hauser to establish a material foundation for the occupation of the artist in Western art history. However, Hauser’s effort to construct a progressive basis for artistic labour was complicated by art’s ancient connections to religion and superstition. While the artist’s social position and class loyalties were ambiguous in Childe’s accounts (...) of early civilisations, Hauser consigned artists to the lower echelons of society. This relegation did not imply that Hauser had a low regard for artistic skills. Quite the opposite, the artist’s inferior social status enabled Hauser to distance artists from the ruling class, and consequently, to separate artistic handiwork from the dominant ideology that works of art manifested. (shrink)

In anthropology, works of art are used as sources of information rather than as expressive realities in their own right. In anthropology the work of art is treated more as a window than as a symbol; it is treated as a transparency rather than as a membrane having its own properties and qualities. For instance, it is usually in social science that art "reflects" life with more or less distortion. Yet no art can record anything it is not actually (...) programmed to register. This programming usually concerns very small sectors of all actuality, and it is limited by the figural traditions and by the technical resources of the artisans....Given my assumptions—that art does not "reflect" life; nor does it necessarily imitate nature; nor can it be explained away by texts or informants—given these assumptions, we are required to limit our notions about how much "information" the arts can convey. George Kubler is Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His publications include The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, Studies in Classic Maya Iconography, Portuguese Plain Architecture, 1526-1706 and The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya, and Andean Peoples. (shrink)

The history of emotions is one of the fastest growing fields in current historical debate, and this is the first book-length introduction to the field, synthesizing the current research, and offering direction for future study. This book is organized around the debate between social constructivist and universalist theories of emotion that has shaped most emotions research in a variety of disciplines for more than a hundred years: social constructivists believe that emotions are largely learned and subject to historical (...) change, while universalists insist on the timelessness and pan-culturalism of emotions. In historicizing and problematizing this binary, Jan Plamper opens emotions research beyond constructivism and universalism; he also maps a vast terrain of thought about feelings in anthropology, philosophy, sociology, linguistics, art history, political science, the life sciences - from nineteenth-century experimental psychology to the latest affective neuroscience - and history, from ancient times to the present day. (shrink)

The fundamentals of the Frankfurt school's conception of art were expounded in Horkheimer and Adorno's book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, where the "critical theory of society" appeared in the form of a specific philosophy of history—the history of bourgeois enlightenment, whose sources the authors trace to ancient Greek mythology.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society, and Artistic RationalisationJohn C. McEnroeJeremy Tanner. The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society, and Artistic Rationalisation. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xvi + 331 pp. 62 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $99.In his introductory chapter, Jeremy Tanner quotes J. J. Winckelmann's eighteenth-century description of the Apollo Belvedere: "Among all the works of antiquity which (...) have escaped destruction, the statue of Apollo is the highest ideal of art... In the presence of this miracle of art, I forget all else, and I myself take a lofty position for the purpose of looking on it in a worthy manner" (6). Tanner makes it clear that Winckelmann, widely regarded as the founder of modern art history, was not simply recording a personal reaction. Instead, Winckelmann's notion of artworks as autonomous objects of aesthetic experience was deeply rooted in the transformation of the basic institutions of art during [End Page 423] the Enlightenment. These included changes in patronage and production, and the introduction of the new philosophy of aesthetics. The new conception of art as a form of individual expression was tied not only to the notion of personal liberty but also to the growing obsession with national identities. Winckelmann's rapturous response to the Apollo Belvedere is understandable only as a part of this broader set of social and intellectual currents.The kinds of art history that Tanner is concerned with in this book are quite distinct from Winckelmann's and belonged to profoundly different cultural networks. Tanner lays out three goals for the book: first, to analyze art as a form of material culture that was both shaped by society and, in turn, helped to shape society; second, to develop an analytic framework for comparing classical and modern art history without conflating the two; third, to move art history to the explanatory level, exploring not only how classical art developed over the long term, but why. Tanner's approach is sociological, drawing especially on the work of the once influential American sociologist, Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). As a result, Tanner shifts from the traditional focus on artists to the interaction of artists, patrons, and viewers.In chapter 2 ("Rethinking the Greek Revolution," 31–96) Tanner addresses one of the central problems in art history, the apparently sudden transformation from abstraction to naturalism in Greek art in the beginning of the fifth century B.C.E., famously described by E. H. Gombrich as "the Greek Revolution." Why, after generations of continuity within the Archaic style, did Greek artists, alone among the artists working in the broader Middle Eastern tradition, develop the naturalistic style of art represented in, for example, Polykeitos's Doryphoros? For Gombrich, the "Greek Revolution" was fundamentally a matter of artists breaking from ingrained patterns and attempting, as individuals, to match the appearance of their statues with the natural world. Other writers, including several contributors to Diana Buitron-Oliver, ed., The Greek Miracle: Classical Sculpture from the Dawn of Democracy (Washington, D.C., 1992), have described the change in terms even more deeply grounded in Winckelmann: the revolution in style was a product of the birth of individuality and personal freedom that accompanied the birth of democracy in classical Greece.Tanner is specifically concerned with what the "Greek Revolution" meant for cult statues. While he rejects the simplistic equation democracy = naturalism as an explanatory device, Tanner nevertheless holds that political changes, marked by the Kleisthenic reforms, had profound effects on both the makers and the viewers of art. Through most of the sixth century B.C.E., the aristocracy was in firm control of religious art. Through the forms of the kouros and kore, aristocrats merged their identities with those of the gods. Through their sponsorship and control of the sanctuaries, they controlled the access ordinary viewers had to images of the sacred. While the immediate effects of the Kleisthenic reforms may have been more complex than Tanner implies, over the course of a generation the authority of the traditional aristocracy declined, and the sponsorship of cult images was... (shrink)

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in (...) the psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework. (shrink)

Until fairly recently, most of the attention of art historians and others in these debates has been paid to differences among the partisans of various disciplinary methodologies, or to the differential benefits of one or another school of thought or theoretical perspective in other areas of the humanities and social sciences as these might arguably apply to questions of art historical practice.1 Yet there has also come about among art historians a renewed interest in the historical origins of the (...) academic discipline itself, and in the relationships of its institutionalization in various countries to the professionalizing of other historical and critical disciplines in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These interests have led increasingly to wider discussion by art historians of the particular nature of disciplinary knowledge, the circumstances and protocols of academic practice, and the relations between the various branches of modern discourse on the visual arts: academic art history, art criticism, aesthetic philosophy, the art market, exhibitions, and musicology.2 What follows does not aim to summarize or characterize these developments but is more simply an attempt to delineate some of the principal characteristics of the discipline as an evidentiary institution in the light of the material conditions of academic practice that arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century in relation to the history of mueological display. In brief, this essay is concerned with the circumstances of art history’s foundations as a systematic and “scientific” practice, and its focus is limited to a single, albeit paradigmatic, American example. 1. An extended discussion of these issues may be found in Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science , pp. 80-121. See also The New Art History, ed. A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello .2. One important sign off these discussions has been a series of “Views and Overviews” of the discipline appearing in The Art Bulletin in recent years, of which the most recent has been perhaps the most extensive and comprehensive: Mieke Bal and Norman Byrson, ”Semiotics and Art History,” The Art Bulletin 73 : 174-208. Donald Preziosi is professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and, beginning in 1992, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science and is currently completing a book on the history of museums entitled Framing Modernity. (shrink)

Hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century, yet the history of science has often treated them as stages for scientific practice, not as the play itself. Drawing on recent work in the history of science and of international relations, the introduction to this special issue suggests avenues for exploring the phenomenon of the international scientific conference, broadly construed, by highlighting the connected dimensions of communication, sociability and international relations. It lays (...) out a typology of scientific conferences as a way of gaining an overview of their diversity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that the international scientific conference is a central locus for understanding science as a social, cultural and political practice. (shrink)

Professor Max Charlesworth and I worked, at Deakin University, on a course, 'Understanding Art'. Max was interested in the Social History of Art and in art as: 'giving form to mere matter'. Here 'form' might be read as 'lucid', 'exemplary', 'beautiful' etcetera. I am an Aristotle Poetics 4 man '… imitating something with the utmost veracity in a picture', and an Aristotle and John Cage man: 'Art is the imitation of nature in the manner of operation. Or a net'. (...) (Cage) (See Aristotle Meteorologica, 381b Book iv.) I was invited by the University of Melbourne to lecture on The Philosophy of Art, which I did for five delightful years. There I included the Heidegger essay, giving it as favourable a reading as I could. Unfortunately I have mislaid my marked-up copy and was forced to re-visit the essay, cold. My new reading lacks - in most respects - my former geniality. Kant's Aesthetic Ideas give us more than Heidegger does. So: I stuck with Aristotle, Cage and Kant. (shrink)

_History of Psychology: A Cultural Perspective_ easily distinguishes itself from other texts in a number of ways. First, it examines the field within the rich intellectual and cultural context of everyday life, cross-cultural influences, and contributions from literature, art, and other disciplines. Second, it is a history of ideas, concepts, and questions, instead of dates, events, or great minds. Third, the book explores the history of applied, developmental, clinical, and cognitive psychology as well as experimental psychology. Conveyed in a lively (...) writing style, this text tells a gripping story that continues to the present day. Its current perspective allows students to connect the history of the field to the work being published in current journals. O’Boyle writes in the “historical present”, giving readers a sense of immediacy and aliveness as they journey through history. Her account uses imaginative new features, including “The Times”, which gives readers a feel for what everyday life was like during the age discussed in the chapter. Descriptions of ordinary life, as well as information about important issues influencing their lives such as wars, social movements, famines, and plagues, pique students' interest. "Stop and Think" questions, scattered throughout, enhance retention and encourage critical thinking. An ideal text for a history of psychology or history and systems of psychology course, this creative new book will also appeal to those with a general interest in the field. The Instructor’s Resource CD, written by the text author, includes class activities and demonstrations, suggestions for small group and class discussions, a list of films and videos related to the material in each chapter, and a test bank with objective and essay questions. (shrink)

Much of Arnold Hauser’s work on the social history of art and the philosophy of art history is informed by a concern for the cognitive dimension of art. The present paper offers a reconstruction of this aspect of Hauser’s project and identifies areas of overlap with the sociology of knowledge—where the latter is to be understood as both a separate discipline and a going intellectual concern. Following a discussion of Hauser’s personal and intellectual background, as well as of the (...) shifting political and academic setting of his work, the paper addresses one of Hauser’s central questions, viz. how best to square a thoroughgoing commitment to the social nature of art with the reality of successive artistic styles, given that the latter seem to be characterizable on purely formal grounds. This is followed by a discussion of Hauser’s conflicted views on the relation between art, science, and technology. This injects a tension into Hauser’s work, due to his initial reluctance to explain just how the aesthetic and the cognitive realms relate. The final part of the paper, through a closer examination of the analogies and disanalogies that Hauser sees between art history and the history of science, attempts to give a positive answer—“on Hauser’s behalf”, as it were—to the question of whether art may be credited with a specific cognitive dimension of its own, and if so, what its contribution to our cognitive enterprise may consist in. (shrink)

In this volume, the third in his classic series of texts surveying the history of art theory, Moshe Barasch traces the hidden patterns and interlocking themes in the study of art, from Impressionism to Abstract Art. Barasch details the immense social changes in the creation, presentation, and reception of art which have set the history of art theory on a vertiginous new course: the decreased relevance of workshops and art schools; the replacement of the treatise by the critical review; (...) and the interrelation of new modes of scientific inquiry with artistic theory and praxis. The consequent changes in the ways in which critics as well as artists conceptualized paintings and sculptures were radical, marked by an obsession with intense, immediate sensory experiences, psychological reflection on the effects of art, and a magnetic pull to the exotic and alien, making for the most exciting and fertile period in the history of art criticism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Histories of Science in Early Modern Europe:IntroductionRobert GouldingIn 1713, Pierre Rémond de Montmort wrote to the mathematician Nicolas Bernoulli:It would be desirable if someone wanted to take the trouble to instruct how and in what order the discoveries in mathematics have come about.... The histories of painting, of music, of medicine have been written. A good history of mathematics, especially of geometry, would be a much more (...) interesting and useful work.... Such a work, if done well, could be regarded to some extent as a history of the human mind, since it is in this science, more than in anything else, that man makes known that gift of intelligence that God has given him to rise above all other creatures.1Such a history of mathematics was attempted by Jean-Etienne Montucla in his Histoire des mathématiques (first printed in 1758, and reissued in a [End Page 33] greatly expanded form in 1799).2 Montucla's great work is generally acknowledged as the first genuine history of mathematics. According to some modern historians, previous attempts at such a history had amounted to little more than collections of anecdotes, biographies or exhaustive bibliographies: "jumbles of names, dates and titles," as one writer in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography characterized them.3 Montucla, on the other hand, was thoroughly animated by the Enlightenment project expressed in Rémond's letter, and his Histoire was a philosophical history of the "development of the human mind," as he himself described it.4 It was precisely Montucla's vision of what mathematics meant and his conviction that mathematics itself must change in order to reflect the historical elevation of the human intellect, that allowed him to transform the scattered dates and anecdotes of his predecessors into a genuine history. All subsequent histories of mathematics—until the most recent social histories5 —have been in a sense "footnotes to Montucla."The papers here argue that there were indeed histories of mathematics before Montucla which are worthy of scholarly attention, and that the dismissal of Renaissance histories of science as nothing more than a "cloud of fine adjectives and metaphors" is unfair (although it contains a germ of truth). Anthony Grafton has argued in an article on the historical writings of Cardano, Rheticus, and Kepler, that the purpose of such texts was not so much to trace what actually happened, as to justify the study of a subject often derided—by both humanist and scholastic writers—as obscure, useless and undignified.6 The following four papers go further in arguing that writings in this genre (or, at least, some writings in this genre) were not limited to this characteristically humanist objective. Authors did not just use their histories to persuade others. They themselves relied on historical narratives in order to think about their discipline, define its parts, distinguish among its acceptable and unacceptable forms and prescribe its content [End Page 34] and method of teaching. By placing their discipline into a historical context shared by other, more mainstream humanistic arts, moreover, they could draw upon the large, narrative structures which Renaissance humanists had adapted to understand human intellectual and cultural development, origins, progress and decline.James Byrne's article highlights a disparity of vision between those humanists who treated the origin of the arts as just another subject for humanistic display; and those (like Regiomontanus) who were invested in the arts and wrote their histories from an insider's perspective. Alongside Regiomontanus, one could include several other authors treated in this collection, such as Thomas Vaughan, Peter Ramus, and Henry Savile. In each case, history provided a means for working through problems of the legitimacy and nature of their disciplines. While their writings are not "histories of the human mind," their interests went beyond mere rehearsal of anecdotes. Ramus's histories, for instance, written 200 years before Montucla's Histoire, had the kind of unifying vision which de Montmort demanded, and shared Montucla's concern to find a meaning in the development of mathematics. Ramus, and the supporters and detractors he spawned, were convinced that constructing the history of this science was crucial to understanding how and why human beings have... (shrink)

“There is not, then, more than one science of man in time (history), and that science has the task of uniting the study of the dead with the study of the living.”— Marc BlochUnlike the scientist, who in the nineteenth century was anointed with the aura of the solitary genius, the historian has, since ancient times, been thought of as a creator conditioned by his social group. The historian knows his profession thanks to routine apprenticeship under his professors. He (...) trains in the discipline by reading the models inherited from his predecessors. He discovers the secrets of the art by analyzing the work of his colleagues. His richest sources of inspiration are the masterpieces of all times from the most diverse cultures. (shrink)

This paper considers the way social theorists draw on affective imagery to convey ideas about complex social processes such as the formation of subjectivity within a given habitus. The argument focuses on discussions of art in the work of Elias and Foucault to question whether imagery, and particularly imagery drawn from art, serves to simplify more complex processes of reasoning, or whether the image can be understood as a type of conceptual consolidation of an argument rather than a (...) means to simply illustrate or augment it. The paper also raises the question of whether art is a more complex form of social agency than it was sometimes understood to be in its original social context. (shrink)

Pictures in historical chapters of textbooks convey information about the values and assumptions of the authors’professions and the larger culture. We scrutinized 15 recent abnormal psychology textbooks for reproductions of art created before 1900. Thirteen works appeared in three or more textbooks. Overall, these pictures support a “Whiggish” account of history that celebrates the present and gives a distorted, incomplete rendering of the past. The 13 pictures tended to depict the mentally ill as an underclass who are released from their (...) literal and metaphorical shackles by men who are “ahead of their time” in their struggles against prevailing ignorance. The pictures also emphasized the difference of the mentally ill by presenting a catalogue of stereotypic visual elements attributed to insanity throughout Western history. We argue for the inclusion in textbooks of “history for the sake of the past” as a way of genuinely engaging different ideologies and thereby stimulating interest in our own implicit values and biases. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:History of Philosophy and History of Ideas PAUL OSKAR KRISTELLER THE TF.~MS "history of philosophy" and "history of ideas" are frequently associated in current public and professional discussions, and many statements seem to suggest that the two terms are more or less synonymous, or that the former term, being old-fashioned, might well be replaced with the latter which for many ears appears to have a more fashionable and glamorous (...) ring. Hence there arises the question what each of these terms really means, or what it should mean, and whether and to what extent it is justifiable to identify them with each other, to reduce the history of philosophy to the history of ideas, or to treat the former as a part or subdivision of the latter. I am not convinced that these questions can be answered through an appeal to ordinary usage since this usage is fluid and reflects at best the intellectual formulations and decisions of a remote or recent past. We may have reason to question the very validity of these decisions, and perhaps to suggest or make different decisions, and in case we are successful and obtain a reasonable amount of approval, these different decisions will be reflected in the ordinary usage of tomorrow, though not yet in that of today. The attempt to discuss the meaning and relationship of the history of philosophy and the history of ideas is obviously difficult and hazardous. It involves not only the discussion of such complicated notions as history and philosophy (and idea), but also the shifting balance of the intellectual globe that includes the continents or territories denoted by those terms, and even of the academic globe that purports to be, with varying success, its faithful image. In a short paper, I cannot hope to present an original or adequate discussion of these difficult problems, but merely try to raise a few questions which to my knowledge have not received sufficient attention and may be of interest to philosophers and historians. The history of philosophy has been of recurrent interest to philosophers and other scholars, especially in classical antiquity and again in the Renaissance period. It came to occupy a central place in European thought during the last century, especially in the wake of German idealism. Hegel recognized "history" as a major area of reality and of philosophical concern, as Vico and Herder had done before him, and thus left a living heritage not only to his followers down to Croce and Gentile, but also to Marx and his [1] 2 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY disciples, and to many other thinkers who cannot be called Hegelians. Hegel also did not conceive political history in isolation, but in his phenomenology and philosophy of the spirit came close to a concept of culture or civilization in which political and social institutions, religion and the arts, the sciences and philosophy are interrelated as manifestations of the same spirit and subject to the same "dialectical" laws of historical development. The vast progress which the historical disciplines made during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not only in the field of political and economic history but in the history of languages and literatures, of the arts and religions, and of civilization in general was not influenced by Hegel's theories, but rather opposed to them. Yet this vast body of knowledge and of learning imposed itself as an epistemological problem to such thinkers as Dilthey, Rickert, and Cassirer. Finally, Hegel considered philosophical thought itself as dialectical, that is, in a certain sense as historical, and thus foreshadowed not only Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, or Croce's claim that philosophy and history are identical, but also Heidegger's conception of historicity as a basic aspect or dimension of human thought and being. Within such a framework, the history of philosophy occupies a significant and even a central position for the philosopher since it elucidates the basic stages through which philosophical thinking passed before it reached its present situation. Any attempt to grasp or answer our present philosophical prob- ]ems thus presupposes at least a general understanding of the historical developments which have prepared or produced these problems. In the English-speaking world, both... (shrink)

This book concentrates upon how economic rationalities have been embedded into particular historical practices, cultures, and moral systems. Through multiple case-studies, situated in different historical contexts of the modern West, the book shows that the development of economic rationalities takes place in the meeting with other regimes of thought, values, and moral discourses. The book offers new and refreshing insights, ranging from the development of early economic thinking to economic aspects and concepts in the works of classical thinkers such as (...) Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Karl Marx, to the role of economic reasoning in contemporary policies of art and health care. With economic rationalities as the read thread, the reader is offered a unique chance of historical self-awareness and recollection of how economic rationality became the powerful ideological and moral force that it is today. (shrink)

What, if anything, has art to do with the rest of our lives, and in particular with those ethical and political issues that matter to us most? Will art created today be likely to play a role in our lives as profound as that of the best art of the past? A Theory of Art shifts the focus of aesthetics from the traditional debate of "what is art?" to the engaging question of "what is art for?" Skillfully describing the (...) class='Hi'>social and historical situation of art today, author Karol Berger argues that music exemplifies the current condition of art in a radical, acute, and revealing fashion. He also uniquely combines aesthetics with poetics and hermeneutics. Offering a careful synthesis of a wide breadth of scholarship from art history, musicology, literary studies, political philosophy, ethics, and metaphysics, and written in a clear, accessible style, this book will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in the arts. (shrink)

Form of Thought and Presentational Gesture in Karl Popper and E. H. Gombrich The paper deals with common elements and differences in Popper and Gombrich, especially concerning their forms of thought and presentational gesture. Among others it considers the model of common sense which was basal for both of them as well as the similarities of searchlight theory (Popper) and some postulates of Gestalt psychology (Gombrich). At the end it analyses their approaches to historiography with special focusing on Gombrich's comments (...) on the concept of social history of art. (shrink)

A truism of art history is that the lifespan of artworks can exceed their original social spaces: Artworks can sometimes be successfully transplanted into completely different settings where they continue to be valued. Does their potential to outlive their original context have to do with a specific feature of artworks’ ontology? Or with how human brains are wired? Or is it a mere function of their historical and social circumstances? I argue that David Summers’s magisterial _Real Spaces: World (...) Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism_ contains elements of a different answer. This answer focuses on what in artworks’ appearance causes them to be effective under various circumstances, without subscribing to the view that art is an irreducibly and inexhaustibly complex source of meaning. In delineating the Summersian perspective, I contrast it with the position (exemplified by the recent work of the archaeologist David Wengrow and the anthropologist Philippe Descola) that treats the art object as a document of underlying structures or currents. (shrink)

In this volume, the third in his classic series on art theory, Moshe Barasch traces the hidden patterns and interlocking themes in the study of art, from impressionism to abstract art. Barasch details the immense social changes in the creation, presentation, and reception of art which have set the history of art theory on a vertiginous new course: the decreased relevance of workshops and art schools; the replacement of the treatise by the critical review; and the emerging interrelationship between (...) scientific inquiry and artistic theory. The consequent changes in the ways in which critics as well as artists conceptualized paintings and sculptures were radical, marked by an obsession with intense sensory experiences, psychological reflection on the effects of art, and an attraction to the exotic and alien--making for the most exciting and fertile period in the history of art criticism. (shrink)

First published in 1948, Frederick Antal’s Florentine Painting and Its Social Background was an important milestone in anglophone art history. Based on European examples, including Max Dvořák, it sought to understand art history’s relationship to social and intellectual history. When Antal, a Hungarian émigré, arrived in Britain in 1933, he encountered an inward-looking discipline preoccupied with formalism and connoisseurship; or, as he phrased it, art historians of ‘the older persuasion’ ignorant of ‘the fruitful achievements of modern historical research’. (...) Despite its considerable scholarship and erudition, Antal’s book was not warmly received, largely because he had used historical materialism to understand the production of art and the development of styles. Antal’s class-based account of the social position of the artist and the role of the patron in determining the emergence of early Renaissance styles was especially controversial. However, although Marxist analysis was used to challenge the assumptions of Anglo art history, it was not Antal’s intention to weaken art history’s disciplinary autonomy. With historical materialism, he sought to place art history on a firmer historical footing. Most importantly, this approach was compatible with the discipline’s Central European tradition, where art-historical scholarship was framed by questions of method and based on broad historical research. Without defending its more deterministic features, this article supports a re-evaluation of Antal’s book, as an important forerunner of interdisciplinary art scholarship. It considers why Antal’s legacy has not endured, despite the ‘social history of art’ enjoying widespread acceptance in English-speaking art history in later decades. (shrink)

For almost two years now the COVID-19 pandemic impacted in most different forms habits, models of organization, socio-political dynamics and economic assets. Arrangements and orders taking decades to reach stabilization have demonstrated an unsuspected precarity, demanding a profound reorganization of dynamics we had been long accustomed to. As the distant, sanitized character of interaction, transmission, fruition and creation processes has turned from a contingent measure into the unamenable norm of these days’ routine, every aspect of social interaction is changing (...) accordingly. “Contact”, “contagion”, “proximity” and “distance” are not features of a transient period anymore: they are keywords of today’s experience. Indeed, while these concepts were already at stake in masscommunication and social media, it was not before nowadays that their precipitate on art forms could be taken into account more pristinely, for especially performative arts never had to amend their “familiar ground” in order to pursue their goals. Hence, how did artforms adjust themselves to wholly new forms of participation? What are we supposed to expect next? The main aim of this paper is to sketch out, relying on some classical loci of the history of Western aesthetics such as Plato, Aloïs Riegl, Walter Benjamin, this new, re-configured notion of aesthetic and artistic experience in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

In The Necessity of Art Ernst Fischer develops a Marxist aesthetics in the humanist tradition, arguing art’s necessity as both a vehicle of social criticism and as an essential element of humanity. These twin themes place Fischer’s work, then, at the centre of issues in Marxist aesthetics that have traditionally proved contentious: firstly, about the function of art, both under capitalism and universally; and about the relationship – causal or otherwise – between economic conditions and art. Fischer’s aesthetics overemphasises (...) the humanising possibilities of great works of art to the neglect of an everyday aesthetics that argues the possibilities for aesthetic lives based on good work under communism. But he provides a theoretic start to effectively countering structuralist Marxism, and he was in his lifetime – as John Berger’s Introduction movingly conveys – a powerful opponent of the bureaucratisation of art under Zhdanov’s Socialist-Realist creed. (shrink)

I FORMS AND PROBLEMS OF CULTURE INTEGRATION AND METHODS OF THEIR STUDY I. Culture Integration And Culture Unity — A Dark Problem Is every culture an ...

This book interprets relationships among art and ethics in the context of contemporary South African art. Nearly three decades after inaugurating political freedom in a democratic form, the infrastructure of South Africa faces palpable issues and challenges to the social fabric. The social tension involves painful struggles for decolonization and violent debates about the removal of colonial statues, change of colonial names, transformation of universities, and curriculum change. This book does critical work in art history, theory, criticism, and (...) visual culture by looking from and looking after social differences to interpret the potential impact of contemporary media and mediation. Artists examined include Zanele Muholi, Mohau Modisekeng, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Hasan and Husain Essop, and Kemang Wa Lehulere. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, visual culture, art theory, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of art, and African studies. (shrink)

An original sociology of art and artistic practice, based on the theories of Emile Durkheim and contemporary models of complex social systems. The book offers a critique of current history, philosophy and sociology of art and stands in a constructive and informative relation to much contemporary art historical theory.

The history of modern innovation is primarily that of the industrial research laboratory, but the demise of the independent inventor —like that of the entrepreneur —has been much exaggerated. Independent inventing, in fact, continues to flourish as a cultural and technical practice in the contemporary United States. There are, however, a number of structural and cultural impediments in the way of independent inventors who seek to translate their invention into a commercial innovation. By drawing a comparison with the art world, (...) this article explores these impediments and argues that their existence is revealing of the deep social embeddedness of the invention and innovation process. (shrink)

The literature on aesthetics often emphasizes the need to set into motion processes that promote the overcoming of alienation. In characterizing the realm of activity and the various causes of this phenomenon, it is necessary to direct attention to the fact that in contemporary aesthetics, the social aspect of art has been given pride of place. Without going beyond the bounds of preliminary systematization of its many-faceted connections, embracing both preconditions in the realm of history as well as ideology, (...) it should be observed here that the rise of interest in problems of social aesthetics coincides in time with the appearance of Marxist philosophy and that this interest became more acute because of the revolutionary triumph of Marxism and the organization of the first socialist state. Of course, it would be oversimplifying to reduce all the problems of social aesthetics that merit attention solely to the influence of Marxism, but the role of Marxist philosophy in shaping the priorities of problems of art and society in contemporary aesthetics is beyond question. The views of the founders of Marxism are undoubtedly the impulse that stimulated the development of social aesthetics. It is no accident that Western researchers who are interested in this subject and who polemicize with Marxism, such as H. Read, W. D. Gottschalk, T. Munro, nonetheless are significantly influenced by its methodology, system of categories, and the like. (shrink)

This article investigates the portrayal of Spanish women in a rarely discussed work by the German popular philosopher Christoph Meiners (1747–1810). Between 1788 and 1800 Meiners wrote four substantial volumes titled History of the Female Sex: Comprising a View of the Habits, Manners, and Influence of Women, Among all Nations, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time, which sought to give an account of the physical and moral qualities of women, and their treatment at the hands of men “at (...) all times in all lands” (Vol. 1, p. III). This article explores the two chapters of this work that address the qualities and status of Spanish women, in order to shed light on perceptions of Spain in northern Europe in the eighteenth century. The decline of the Iberian Peninsula as a seat of European imperial power from the seventeenth century, and the emergence of northern European countries such as France, the British Isles, and even the German provinces, as centres of Enlightenment thinking ushered in a new era of geographical dualism in Europe. This article will build upon recent critiques of the “Orientalisation” of Spain by northern Europeans, showing how the marginalisation of Spain served the nationalist strivings of this provincial German scholar. ☆ Heather Merle Benbow would like to thank the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge, for support towards this research. (shrink)

Davies presents the reader with a sterling review of the literature--the recent history of the interest in defining "art" through the writings of Anglo-American philosophers that follow Morris Weitz' well-known 1956 essay, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics"--and a stimulating discussion of the role of conventions in the making and appreciating of contemporary art. His emphasis on the social nature of art leads one to wonder how other recent inquiries into the multilayered contextually of the artistic enterprise might fare (...) under his perusal, for example, feminist critiques of traditional definitions of "art," challenges to the elitist makeup of the Artworld, . . . and opposition to his very choice of paradigms: in addition to Duchamp, the "hard cases" include works by John Cage, Andy Warhol, Olivier Messiaen, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gerald Hoffnung. Definitions of Art is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of aesthetics and as it informs the current dialectic on art. (shrink)

During the half-century of its existence, the Soviet study of esthetics has achieved considerable success in developing the views of the founders of Marxism-Leninism with respect to the nature and social function of art. There is no need to list the authors and titles of the works in which the history of world thought about esthetics and the cardinal problems of esthetics have been treated from the Marxist standpoint. Suffice it to say that Soviet esthetic thought has been the (...) first to deal with such very important categories as the principle of partisanship in art, the creative method , the principles of socialist realism, the international and the national in art, and so forth. (shrink)