Artifacts, Representations and Social Practice: Essays for Marx Wartofsky (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science (154))

The essays collected here in honor of Marx Wartofsky's sixty-fifth birthday are a celebration of his rich contribution to philosophy over the past four decades and a testimony to the wide influence he has had on thinkers with quite various approaches of their own. His diverse philosophical interests and main themes have ranged from constructivism and realism in the philosophy of science to practices of representation and the creation of artifacts in aesthetics; and from the development of human cognition and the historicity of modes of knowing to the construction of norms in the context of concrete social critique. Or again, in the history of philosophy, his work spans historical approaches to Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, as well as contemporary implications of their work; and in applied philosophy, problems of education, medicine, and new technologies. Marx's philosophical theorizing moves from the highest levels of abstraction to the most concrete concern with the everyday and with contemporary social and political reality. And perhaps most notably, it is acutely sensitive to the importance of historical development and social practice. As a student of John Herman Randall, Jr. and Ernest Nagel at Columbia, Marx developed an exemplary background in both the history of philosophy and systematic philosophy and subsequently combined this with a wide acquaintance with analytic philosophy. He is at once aware of the requirements of system and of the need for rigorous and careful detailed argument. Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Institutional Blessing: The Museum as Canon-Maker....Pages 1-19 “Suddenly One Has The Right Eyes”: Illusion and Iconoclasm in The Early Gombrich....Pages 21-38 Danto, Dutton, and Our Preunderstanding of Tribal Art And Artifacts....Pages 39-52 In Defense of Musical Representation: Music, Representation and the Hybrid Arts....Pages 53-67 Two Vignettes in the History of The Mensuration of Value....Pages 69-86 Irony, Ltd., and the Future of Art....Pages 87-103 A Genealogy of ‘Aura’: Walter Benjamin’s Idea of Beauty....Pages 105-119 Analysis and Synthesis According to IBN Al-Haytham....Pages 121-140 Changes in the Concepts of Space and Time Brought about by Relativity....Pages 141-162 Hegel and the Doctrine of Expressivism....Pages 163-183 Translating Feuerbach....Pages 185-193 Is The Enlightenment Over?....Pages 195-203 Realism....Pages 205-222 An Anatomy of Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory....Pages 223-256 Rationality and Commitment....Pages 257-275 The Theses on Feuerbach : A Road not Taken....Pages 277-290 Donald Davidson’s Philosophical Strategies....Pages 291-322 Time and Conscious Experience....Pages 323-341 Ten Philosophical Poems....Pages 343-348 The Philosophy of Optimism and Pessimism....Pages 349-359 Life is not a Poem?....Pages 361-364 Levinas, Feminism, Holocaust, Ecocide....Pages 365-376 Marx After Marxism....Pages 377-396 The Good and the Rational....Pages 397-417 The End of a Metaphor: The Base and the Superstructure....Pages 419-439 The Marxian Vision of a (Better) Possible Future: End of a Grand Illusion?....Pages 441-461 On the Communicative Dimension of Social Practice....Pages 463-482 The Bread of Faithful Speech....Pages 483-500 Unsafe at Any Depth: Geological Methods, Subjective Judgments, and Nuclear Waste Disposal....Pages 501-524 Community and Difference: Reflections in the Wake of Rodney King....Pages 525-542 Partisanship, Universalism, and the Dialectics of Moral Consciousness....Pages 543-550 Back Matter....Pages 551-572 These essays by his friends, students, colleagues, and admirers honor Marx Wartofsky on his 65th birthday by their humane and rigorous investigations of themes from his own broad range of interests. Art and science, ethics and history, from the great Enlightenment through the 19th century to our time of failed hopes and ironic successes, and especially human self-understanding through praxis, Wartofsky's joys, sorrows, curiosity and intelligence find their reflections in these insightful and original contributions. The authors include Joseph Agassi, Andrew Buchwalter, Peter Caws, Robert S. Cohen, William Earle, Bernard Elevitch, Paul Feyerabend, Roger S. Gottlieb, Carol C. Gould, Hilde Hein, Jaakko Hintikka, Gregg Horowitz, Michael Kelly, Peter Kivy, Erazim Kohak, Douglas Lackey, Berel Lang, Isaac Levi, Joseph Margolis, Gyorgy Markus, Alasdair MacIntyre, William McBride, Thomas McCarthy, Joëlle Proust, Roshdi Rashed, Cheyney Ryan, Abner Shimony, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Lorenzo Simpson, Gary Smith, John Stachel, and Willis Truitt A collection of essays by friends, students, and colleagues on Max Wartofsky's 65th birthday. Reflecting Wartofsky's own interests, topics discussed in this text range from the arts and sciences, to ethics and history, from the Enlightenment, through the 19th century to the present day.