Art History and Analytic Philosophy

One of the most important tasks in philosophical aesthetics today is to develop a philosophy of art history and to redefine the relationship between art history and philosophy. But this task, local to aesthetics, is part of a wider problem of the strained relationship between philosophy and history. I mean that generally speaking, the analytic tradition has either ignored history altogether, favoring instead a model of knowledge based on the physical sciences, or subsumed the historical world under the covering laws of the physical sciences, or reduced history to the referential relationships between written truth-claims and actual events.

History was thought by some analytic philosophers to be valid only on condition that all statements making up the narrative be ultimately capable of translation into externalist or psychological terms. These ahistorical positions have had the effect of blocking the development of a viable epistemology of the social sciences from arising from within traditional analysis. But a strong philosophy of the social sciences, all of which are based upon history to a greater or lesser degree, is exactly what’s needed for a fruitful relationship between art history and philosophical aesthetics. This requires nothing less than a wholesale reform of analytic philosophy.[1]






[1]. See Joseph Margolis, “The Eclipse and Recovery of Analytic Aesthetics,” in Analytic Aesthetics Richard Schusterman ed. Basil Blackwell, 1989 pp. 161-189