Publisher's Synopsis
The dissertation addresses the question, How should we engage with art? The thesis is that a practice of engaging with art ought to be sensitive with and to a work of art, and conversation better suits sensitivity than criticism. Conversation does not merely mean a conversation we may have about art. Instead, the project proposes that we treat artworks as conversational partners. The construction of the thesis involves three philosophical streams coming together. The first is a survey of prominent philosophical studies of criticism from the late 1930s to the 1960s-a watershed period for the
philosophy of criticism-through to contemporary views that bear the legacy of that period, summarized and exemplified in Noël Carroll's philosophy of criticism. Second, the project contrasts the orthodox view with competing accounts, including those of visual art criticism from the late 1980s and 90s, the critical theory of Terry Eagleton, and the "philosophical criticism" of Stanley Cavell. The third stream consists of testing criticism (and conversation) against the criterion of sensitivity. Taken together, this approach looks at engagement in a more general way than what studies on criticism or other familiar practices tend to countenance.
