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10 - Aesthetic Transformations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2009

Lambert Zuidervaart
Affiliation:
Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto
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Summary

In their movement toward truth artworks need the very concept that they keep at a distance for the sake of their truth.

Theodor W. Adorno

In the Introduction I said that both the subject matter and my methodological assumptions require philosophical border crossings. Having nearly completed our journey, we can review what was learned by crossing divides both between continental and analytic philosophy and within each tradition (section 10.1). Then I discuss the societal point of this journey (section 10.2), keeping in mind Adorno's suggestion that a philosophical idea of artistic truth might be both what contemporary art most needs and what it most resists.

Propositionally inflected correspondence theories of truth are prominent in the terrain we have traversed. Because of that, let me map in Table 10.1 various theories with respect to two questions, to which I have indicated my own negative responses: (1) Are propositions (or their equivalents) the primary bearers of truth? (2) Is correspondence the primary criterion of truth? Answers to these two questions govern the general disposition of twentieth-century philosophies with respect to artistic truth. Yet philosophers who agree on the propositional character of truth or on a correspondence criterion can disagree about whether art has truth capacities. So Table 10.1 indicates whether each philosopher ascribes truth capacities to art. Also, whereas some philosophers who allow for nonpropositional truth bearers or noncorrespondence criteria do not completely reject the role of propositions and correspondence in the pursuit of truth, others reject one or the other of these altogether.

Type
Chapter
Information
Artistic Truth
Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure
, pp. 203 - 218
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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