The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism

The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism extends Joseph Margolis's wide-ranging, vigorously phrased, and hard-hitting account of the 'encultured' and 'historied' nature of human thinking, selfhood, and art. It advances a trenchant critique of an opposing trend that he provocatively identifies in the late-twentieth-century analytic philosophy of art. -- Whitney Davis, University of California at Berkeley Joseph Margolis's message is important and timely. It is relevant for all those concerned with contemporary aesthetics and the interfaces between cultural and non-cultural domains. This work builds upon themes that have marked one of the most fertile philosophical careers of our generation. -- Michael Krausz, editor of Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology

Joseph Margolis, known for his considerable contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, pragmatism, and American philosophy, has focused primarily on the troublesome concepts of culture, history, language, agency, art, interpretation, and the human person or self. For Margolis, the signal problem has always been the same: how can we distinguish between physical nature and human culture? How do these realms relate? The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism identifies a conceptual tendency that can be drawn from the work of the twentieth century's best-known analytic philosophers of art: Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, Kendall Walton, Nelson Goodman, Monroe Beardsley, Noel Carroll, and Jerrold Levinson, among others. This trend threatens to impoverish our grasp and appreciation of the arts by failing to do justice to the culturally informed nature of the arts themselves. Through his analysis, Margolis sets out to retrieve an adequate picture of the essential differences between physical nature and human culture--particularly through language, history, meaning, significance, the emergence of the human self or person, and the essential features of human life--all to explain how such difference bears on our perception of paintings and literature. Clearly argued and provocatively engaging, Margolis's work reestablishes what is essential to a productive encounter with art.