Once again I am grateful to Hilary Gaskin, this time for proposing this revised and expanded edition and for seeing it through production.
The past ten years or so have seen a wide variety of important new work in aesthetics that is of very high quality. While the overall structure and argument of this book are unaltered in this new, expanded edition, I am pleased to have been able now to take substantial notice of the following significant (mostly) recent work: on the theory of pictorial depiction (Robert Hopkins, John Hyman, Dominic Lopes, Michael Newell), on demonstrative attention (John Spackman), on artistic form (Robert Kaufman, Martin Seel), on expression (Stephen Davies, Mitchell Green, Jerrold Levinson, Jenefer Robinson), on Hegel (Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Benjamin Rutter), on imagination (Gregory Currie, Kirk Pillow, Richard Moran, Martin Seel), on interpretation (Rita Felski, Alexander Nehamas), on emotion (Gregory Currie, Deborah Knight, Ted Cohen, Jenefer Robinson), on art and morality (Ted Cohen, Berys Gaut, Alexander Nehamas), and on contemporary art (Peter Bürger, Daniel Herwitz, Gregg Horowitz, Dominic Lopes, Sianne Ngai, Peter Osborne). I am also pleased to have been able to incorporate at least brief reference, which may be useful to some readers, to Denis Dutton and Stephen Davies on art and evolution, to Frederick Beiser on Schiller, and to Carolyn Korsmeyer and Aaron Meskin and colleagues on the theory of taste, among others. I have also taken the opportunity of a new edition to improve the clarity and precision of certain wordings where I could.
For roughly the past ten years, I have regularly discussed in detail most of the new work mentioned above with the members of the Philadelphia Area Aesthetics Reading Group: almost always including Noël Carroll, Paul Guyer, Susan Feagin and either Espen Hammer or Kristin Gjesdal, plus at various times Emily Brady, John Carvalho, Liz Camp, Lara Ostaric, Kirk Pillow, Nola Semczyszyn, and Mary Wiseman. The group has been mostly organized and most regularly hosted by Susan Feagin; we are all indebted to her for her efficiency and extraordinary hospitality. I cannot imagine a better setting than this reading group in which to think continuously, productively, and pleasurably about contemporary developments in aesthetics. Its life has been a model for me of collegiality and mutual interest coupled with sharpness of engagement, and this new edition would certainly not be what it is without it.
Finally, I am grateful to my seminar students in the philosophy of art at Swarthmore, this time for having had the patience and goodwill over the last ten years to work with the first edition of this book and to talk with me imaginatively and critically about what art is and how it matters to them.

Acknowledgments page viii

Preface to the second edition xi

1 The situation and tasks of the philosophy of art 1

Who needs a theory of art? 1

Philosophy as articulation 4

Art as a natural social practice 5

Action, gesture, and expressive freedom 7

Schiller on art, life, and modernity 12

Identification versus elucidation 17

What may we hope for from the philosophy of art? 21

2 Representation, imitation, and resemblance 25

Representation and aboutness 25

Aristotle on imitation 26

Visual depiction, resemblance, and game-playing 31

Contemporary theories of depiction 38

Representing as natural, human, world-responsive activity 44

Distinctive functions of artistic representation 47

3 Beauty and form 53

Beauty, absorption, and pleasure 53

Kant on natural and artistic beauty 57

General versus individual form 62

Beardsley's theory of individual form 63

Criticisms of formalist-aesthetic theories of art 67

Defenses of the aesthetic interest of art 70

4 Expression 75

Feelings about subject matters in life: Wordsworth, Tolstoy, and Collingwood 75

What is expressed in art? Hegel versus Danto 82

How is artistic expression achieved? 92

Collingwood's psychodynamic theory 93

Physiognomic similarity theories 98

"Working-through" theories 103

Emotions and contemporary psychology 104

Why does artistic expression matter? 109

5 Originality and imagination 115

Genius and the pursuit of the new: Kant 115

Hegel's criticisms of subjectivism 120

Why originality matters: Adorno on free meaning-making 122

Criticisms of the pursuit of originality: postmodernism and feminism 127

Originality and imagination within common life 132

Creativity: Scruton and Coleridge on artistic imagination 135

6 Understanding art 142

Six strategies for understanding art 142

The natures of thought and action: Hegel, Baxandall, and others 145

Pluralism and constraint in interpretation: Abrams, Fish, and Derrida 150

The special importance of the elucidation of formal-semantic elements 156

Nehamas and Felski on what calls for elucidatory interpretation 160

The possibility of agreement in understanding 163

7 Identifying and evaluating art 167

Why we go on arguing about which works are good 167

Subjectivism and the sociology of taste: Smith and Bourdieu 170

Dickie's institutional theory 173

Historical and narrative identifications: Levinson and Carroll 176

Objectivism: Mothersill and Savile 178

Hume on feeling and judgment 182

Kant on feeling and judgment 187

Personal and/versus discussable: Isenberg, Scruton, and Cohen on taste 196

8 Art and emotion 200

Some varieties of emotional response 200

The paradox of fiction 202

Hume on tragedy: denying (1) 204

Making-believe and quasi-emotions: Walton, Levinson, and Feagin 207

Robinson on affective appraisals: denying (3) 213

Danto and Cohen on powers of attentive involvement 214

Aristotle on catharsis 218

Artistic making and the "working through" of emotion 221

9 Art and morality 225

Some controversial cases: Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Finley, and others 225

Autonomism and experimentalism 227

Moralism and the clarification of thought and feeling 234

Clarificationism and responding to complexity 237

Art, propaganda, advertising, and cliché 244

Ethical understanding and working through puzzlement 247

10 Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 253

The reproduction of social life vis-à-vis "infinite satisfaction" 253

Art and modernity: Schiller and others 255

Lukács, Marcuse, and Adorno 261

Structuralism and structural opposition in social life: Lévi Strauss and Althusser 263

Foster's postmodern sociocultural criticism 267

Avant-gardism and contemporary art 268

Can artistic beauty still matter? What about fun? 271

Art and social aspiration 272

Some contemporary practices of art: primitivism, vernacularism, avant-gardism, and constructivism 274

11 Epilogue: the evidence of things not seen 284

Bibliography 289

Index 304

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