Books by Arthur C. Danto

From the 1990s until just before his death, the legendary art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto carried out extended conversations about contemporary art with the prominent Italian critic Demetrio Paparoni. Art and Posthistory presents these rich dialogues and correspondence, testifying to the ongoing importance of Danto's ideas.

A top-notch artistic dialogue between two "Old Masters" of their crafts

Examining the work of Plato, Descartes, Hume and Wittgenstein, this introduction to the central topics of Western philosophical thought explores debates about empiricism, the mind/body problem, the nature of matter, and the status of language, consciousness and scientific explanation.

Arthur C. Danto is professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University. He is the art critic for the Nation and has served as president of the American Philosophical Association.

Arthur C. Danto has been increasingly concerned with the implications of the demise of modernism, and out of the wake of modernist art has suggested that a radically pluralistic art world has emerged. His essays here discuss his vision of the art world and the implications it has for criticism.

In a work of great wisdom and insight, art critic and philosopher Arthur Dantodelivers a compact, masterfultour of Andy Warhols personal, artistic, and philosophical transformations. Danto traces the evolution of the pop artist, including his early reception, relationships with artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and the Factory phenomenon. He offers close readings of individual Warhol works, including their social context and philosophical dimensions, key differences with predecessors such as Marcel Duchamp, and parallels with successors like Jeff Koons. Danto brings to bear encyclopedic knowledge of Warhols time andshows us Warhol as an endlessly multidimensional figureartist, political activist, filmmaker, writer, philosopherwho retains permanentresidence in our national imagination.Danto suggests that "e;what makes him an American icon is that his subject matter is always something that the ordinary American understands: everything, or nearly everything he made art out of came straight out of the daily lives of very ordinary Americans. . . . The tastes and values of ordinary persons all at once were inseparable from advanced art."e;

A study of the philosophical problems associated with the concept of action. Professor Danto is concerned to isolate logically the notion of a 'basic action' and to examine the way in which context and intention, for example, can convert physiological movements into significant actions.

Argues that aesthetic considerations no longer play a central role in the experience and critique of art. Instead art addresses us in our humanity, as men and women who seek meaning in the "unnatural wonders" of art, a meaning that philosophy and religion are unable to provide.

Explores the nature of historical knowledge and its reliance on narrative. This book introduces the concept of "narrative sentences," in which an event is described with reference to later events and discusses why such sentences cannot be understood until the later event happens. It compares narrative and scientific explanation.

Addressing philosophical questions of mental representation, this title presents a different approach to some of the most enduring topics in philosophy. This title deals with the nature of description, the status of the external world, action theory, the philosophy of history, and the philosophical status of psychoanalytic explanation.

Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Friedrich Nietzsche. When Danto's classic study was first published in 1965, many regarded Nietzsche as a brilliant but somewhat erratic thinker. Danto, however, presented a radically different picture, arguing that Nietzsche offered a systematic and coherent philosophy that anticipated many of the questions that define contemporary philosophy. Danto's clear and insightful commentaries helped canonize Nietzsche as a philosopher and continue to illuminate subtleties in Nietzsche's work as well as his immense contributions to the philosophies of science, language, and logic.This new edition, which includes five additional essays, not only further enhances our understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy; it responds to the misunderstandings that continue to muddy his intellectual reputation. Even today, Nietzsche is seen as everything from a precursor of feminism and deconstruction to a prophetic writer and spokesperson for disgruntled teenage boys. As Danto points out in his preface, Nietzsche's writings have purportedly inspired recent acts of violence and school shootings. Danto counters these misreadings by elaborating an anti-Nietzschian philosophy from within Nietzsche's own philosophy "e;in the hope of disarming the rabid Nietzsche and neutralizing the vivid frightening images that have inspired sociopaths for over a century."e;The essays also consider specific works by Nietzsche, including Human, All Too Human and The Genealogy of Morals, as well as the philosopher's artistic metaphysics and semantical nihilism.

Includes essays that explore the relationship between philosophy and art through a number of cases in which either artists are driven by philosophical agendas or their art is seen as solving philosophical problems in visual terms.

Danto argues that recent developments in art-in particular the production of works that cannot be told from ordinary things-make urgent the need for a new theory of art. He demonstrates the relationship between philosophy and art and the connections that hold between art, social institutions, and art history.