The title of this paper comes from Aristotle's "Metaphysics." It appropriately captures how he understood art education. In what follows, a considerable amount of the author's thinking is indebted to Plato's and Aristotle's understanding of art education as mimetic education. On first view, an art mimetic educational approach may appear worryingly…

A look at Danto's many discussions of the end of art and its meaning. Also examined is Hegel's idea of the end of art and his use of the dialectic to explain it. Both philosophers sought the meaning of art in the object or artwork--more so for Danto, because he thinks the object is a material one that would exclude conceptual artists' thought…

Drama/theater education lives in the tension of being a discipline rooted in the fine arts and humanities that has been transplanted into the social science of education. This paper suggests that a more aesthetic and philosophical reflection on what drama/theater does and can do in educational settings frees us from the scientized and instrumental…

According to Arthur Danto, the crisis of modern art is not the abandonment of representation, nor an attempt at intentional "uglification," but a struggle to escape the aesthetic objectification of artworks. This attempt at escape has led modern artists to hold an indifferent attitude toward beauty, an attitude that has resulted in the readymade:…

That Plato regarded music as an extremely powerful means to cultivate morality and good citizenship is well-known. And yet, it is highly improbable that music advocates would turn to Plato's oeuvre--largely because Plato's name is commonly associated with ascetic otherworldliness and with much loathing for artistic creativity and innovation. These…

Empirical psycho-aesthetics--an interdisciplinary field with a long tradition--is approached in this two-part article from two directions, in each case with several objectives. Part I, in this issue of "JAE", is devoted to the first direction, which is mainly definitional and organizational: the objectives are to present an outline of the field's…

In "The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective," one of Samuel Edgerton's claims is that Filippo Brunelleschi and his contemporaries did not develop a three-dimensional style of representing the world in painting as much as they reappropriated a way to depict the natural world in painting that most mirrored the human perception of it.…

Across most of Oklahoma's gently rolling prairie countryside these artistically uninformed structures often provide the only vertical punctuation to a landscape otherwise made of mostly horizontal lines. One of the pleasures of teaching architecture is to participate in the intellectual progress of students--many of whom hail from rural areas and…

The digital sublime refers to digital-composite photography that presents "the existence of something unpresentable" and that renders a matchless look a sophisticated fabrication, a perfect and clean composition, a maximum color saturation, a multiple-point perspective, and stunning or newfangled content. Abandoning the traditional one-shot mode…

Schopenhauer's account of sense perception contains an acute critique of Kant's theory of cognition. His analysis of the role of the understanding in perception may be closer to Kant's than he conceded, but his physiological analysis of the role of the senses nonetheless proffers a more plausible account than Kant's transcendental conception of…

In this article, the author talks about art-house cinema, avant-garde film, and dramatic modernism. He believes that the most important modes of film practice are art-house cinema and the avant-garde, both of which contrast with the classical Hollywood mode of film practice. While the latter is characterized by its commercial imperative, corporate…

Toward the end of "Of the Standard of Taste," Hume summarizes what it means to be "a true judge in the finer arts." He says: "Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character." Hume is essentially right about what it means…

Among the casualties of the rush to relativism is a central tenet of classical thought: that great works of literature are great in and of themselves and not because of the needs and values of their time. This "canon-based view," supply taken for granted by Johnson, Arnold, Pope, and Eliot, has long since been shown the door by views…

This paper argues for the educational relevance of the apparently unbelievable project of the architects Arakawa and Gins to design houses that would grant their inhabitants immortality. First, the author demonstrates that, broadly conceived, this is a familiar philosophical project, perhaps "the" philosophical project. He then produces a reading…

This essay examines the aesthetic and social origins of a postmodern phenomenon labeled hyperreality, and the development and role of art, in order to recognize the division between these two incompatible illusions. Whereas hyperreality limits a person's engagement to reality, art strengthens that unity. To establish the distinction between the…