Paul Zanker has put together a fascinating comparative study of the history of the visual image of the intellectual in Greco-Roman Antiquity. His focus is on the image of intellectuals as a class within a particular society and the changes in those images that distinguish how the intellectual and his or her role is perceived and defined from one era to another.

Hagberg's working assumption is that "any particular conception of meaning to which one subscribes can shape one's beliefs in related fields of philosophy such as... aesthetics". For Hagberg, it seems that one's linguistic preconceptions always have this "shaping" effect upon one's aesthetic theory. Exploring this relation between aesthetic conception and linguistic preconception, Hagberg attempts a "critical-analytical" examination that begins with what he considers to be the highly influential aesthetic theories of Langer, Collingwood, and Ducasse, and ends with an analysis of (...) the contemporary theories of Danto, Dickie, and Margolis. His general line of argument is that faults in linguistic preconception are invariably correlated with analogous faults in one's aesthetic theory. Hagberg's methodological procedure is threefold. First, he shows how certain aesthetic theories presuppose certain philosophies of language. Second, he subjects the presupposed philosophy of language to criticisms based on Wittgenstein's later philosophy of language. Third, he extrapolates Wittgenstein's criticisms from their context in the philosophy of language and applies them to the aesthetic theories with their corresponding analogous faults. (shrink)

Peter Kivy has a quarrel with “the task that [history] has bequeathed us” of searching for a single definition of art. Kivy’s book breaks down into two parts. In his first two chapters, Kivy traces the search for the definition of art from the Enlightenment until now, and argues the quest has been a failure. In the second half of his work, he analyzes five case studies of failed attempts to define one art in terms of a model appropriate to (...) another. These failures, stemming from inappropriate models, provide Kivy with ways to explore the differences between the arts, and thereby achieve more of a “philosophical understanding of the arts in all their particularity”. Kivy is not arguing the Wittgensteinian position that the search for sameness ought to be abandoned as impossible. His hope is to balance our search for commonality with a study of differences among the arts. For “in looking for differences, the search for sameness is forwarded rather than thwarted”. (shrink)

This is an excellent collection of fifteen essays on the state of analytic philosophy, past, present, and future, with contributions from such philosophers as Peter Hacker, Hilary Putnam, and Jaakko Hintikka. The editors have divided the collection into four parts. Part 1, “Introduction,” consists of an outstanding overview of analytic philosophy by Hacker, “Analytic philosophy: what, whence, and whither?” For the “what,” Hacker describes seven characteristic marks of analytic philosophy. As for “whence,” Hacker gives us a typical synoptic historical view, (...) from Moore and Russell to post-war Oxford and the later Wittgenstein. As for the “whither,” Hacker argues that as analytic philosophy has won most of its battles, it is now, due to Quine, characterized by scientism, but this need not mean the demise of philosophy. Two complementary tasks remain to analytic philosophy: the critical task of rectifying conceptual confusion; and the descriptive task of providing a “perspicuous representation of our conceptual schema”. (shrink)