From Defining Art to Defining the Individual Arts: The Role of Theory in the Philosophies of Arts

Abstract

What is the definition of art? Not too long ago, this might have been properly said to be the central issue in philosophical aesthetics. Not anymore.1 But philosophers of art are unlikely to give up on the pursuit of definition that easily. Most of us have invested far too much time and energy learning how to go about the game of definition and counterexample to simply let it go just like that. Might there not be some other questions of definition that could structure the field in this new century? What, after all, is a comic book? Or a film? Or a poem? Or a dance? Perhaps if we pursued definitions of the individual arts or art forms we might get somewhere. In this essay, I shall offer some sceptical thoughts about that pursuit—sceptical thoughts inspired by the paper that inadvertently triggered interest for more than five decades in the definition of art, namely, Morris Weitz’s ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’.