But my guess is that the above-described phenomenological movement in Anglophone philosophy will certainly continue to bear out Danto’s intimation of a “third model” – a development that Dewey, as even the older neoHegelian Danto never acknowledged, already substantially pioneered decades earlier. This movement also promises to encompass more radically transdisciplinary developments within this century’s intellectual networks that are receiving the attention of many older-school philosophers only now.
Such observations begin to take the story of what Danto’s critique of Dewey and Dewey’s reconstructed critique of Danto mean beyond what either envisaged. Their disagreements were, as we have seen, deep and many. But dialectical encounters—even hypothetical ones like mine here—can sometimes also bring new pieces of common ground into focus. Danto ultimately turned out to share the spirit if not the letter of Dewey’s thought that the full meaning of any action, conversation, or practice lies as much in how it shapes the future as in its roots in the past and present. That thought paves the way, dialectically, for another which increasingly frames the work of, among many others, Hegelians, pragmatists, and analytic philosophers in this century. This is that our always-unfinished contributions to the future ensure that no one will get the last word about our connections to the world, even if nothing in the world could ever matter more to philosophers than getting those connections right.
Notes
1 1 For a sense of the multidisciplinary breadth of recent interest in Dewey, see Fesmire (2019).
2 2 On the idea of an “analytic ideology,” see Bernstein (2010) and Rorty (1992).
3 3 Giovanna Borradori, ed., The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, Macintyre, Kuhn (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 98-.
4 4 I further discuss how Dewey’s approach to understanding art and aesthetic experience differs from those of philosophers (including Danto) who retained certain key transcendental and representationalist commitments of traditional empiricist and Kantian-idealist aesthetics in Haskins (2019).
References
1 Bernstein, Richard J. 2010. The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press.
2 Borradori, Giovanna. 1994. The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, Macintyre, Kuhn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
3 Danto, Arthur C. 2013. “Intellectual Autobiography of Arthur C. Danto”, in Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds., 2013. The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court: 3–70.
4 ––––. 1968. Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5 ––––. 1989 and 1997. Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
6 Dewey, John. 1988. “Experience and Nature” (1925) in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
7 ––––. 1989. “Context and Thought” (1931) in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 6. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press: 3–21.
8 Fesmire, Steven C., ed. 2019. The Oxford Handbook of Dewey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
9 Haskins, Casey. 2019. “Dewey’s Art as Experience on the Landscape of Twenty-First Century Aesthetics.” In Fesmire, Steven C., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Dewey. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 445–70.
10 Rorty, Richard. 1992. “Philosophy in America Today.” In Consequences of Pragmatism, edited by Richard Rorty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 211–30.
11 ––––. 2007. “Holism and Historicism.” In Philosophy as Cultural Politics, edited by Richard Rorty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 176–83.
8 Thought Experiments: Art and Ethics
F.M. KAMM
In the first section of this chapter, I consider Arthur Danto’s use of a particular thought experiment to support his theory of art and Richard Wollheim’s discussion of it. In the second section, I consider a comparable thought experiment about conceptual issues in ethics. I then explore how ethics employs thought experiments to determine permissibility of acts and whether thought experiments could comparably be used to determine the merit of artworks. I finally consider Danto’s discussion of an ethical issue and how his discussion compares with Wollheim’s views about art.
1 Conceptual Issues about Art: Danto versus Wollheim
A. Among the contributions for which Danto is known is his “Gallery of Indiscernibles.”1 It includes a set of imagined red canvases that cannot be distinguished from one another on perceptual grounds. This, presumably, is not due to the limits of perception but because they are identical with respect to perceptual properties. However, they have different descriptions, which include (1) a painting of people drowning in the Red Sea, (2) a landscape of Red Square, (3) a minimalist painting (perhaps “Homage to the Red Square” by Josef Albers), (4) a canvas stretched and painted red by Giorgione that he never used for a painting, (5) a stretched red canvas that “an egalitarian” artist finds and submits as art and which is accepted as such. There are other indiscernible items described by Danto outside this red canvas set that could inspire more red canvases, such as (6) a canvas painted red by a child, and (7) the product of a puff of red paint “miraculously” (and accidentally) forming another indiscernible canvas.
These imagined red canvases involve at least two representational artworks (1 and 2). These two canvases have different subjects but cannot be distinguished physically; they could be perceptually mistaken for one another. There are also artworks that could be mistaken for things that are not artworks (e.g., 1 and 4). These thought experiments could be raised as counterexamples to the claim that (a) different artworks must be perceptually distinguishable, and (b) artworks can be distinguished from non-artworks by perceivable properties (introduced by artists). If these general claims were shown to be false by the counterexamples, there would be at least some artworks that are not artworks because of their perceptual properties alone. Assuming we could create comparable indiscernibles with other perceptual properties that other artworks have (e.g., fuzzy blue halos), if the thought experiments were successful counterexamples to (a) and (b), they would show that perceptual properties are never sufficient to distinguish between what is an artwork and what is not.
B. Richard Wollheim has counterargued2 that something like (a) and (b) could be “general truths” rather than necessary truths. The general truths, he thinks, are that “objects … made with the broad intention of being works of art will stand out from objects … not made with such an intention and works of art … made with different specific intentions will stand out from one another” (p. 35). So the fact that (5) could be accepted as an artwork does not function as a counterexample to a necessary condition on art, and that a certain assumption can be transgressed in a particular case does not show it could be universally transgressed. In addition, (i) Wollheim suggests that it might not be possible to accept (5) as a work of art if the general truths he describes did not hold (which seems to imply that it is necessary that certain truths hold at least generally) and (ii) he claims it is important that we would only “reluctantly” (p. 34) accept this atypical item as an artwork.
Consider Wollheim’s claim about reluctance. Once the barrier is breached and
