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The Open Museum and its Enemies: An Essay in the Philosophy of Museums

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2016

Charles Taliaferro
Charles Taliaferro*
Affiliation:
St. Olaf College
*
taliafer@stolaf.edu
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Abstract

Borrowing from the title and some of the content of Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), it is argued that museums have great value as sites for what may be called a philosophical culture. A philosophical culture is one in which members or citizens engage in (ideally) fair-minded debate and shared reflection, presenting and evaluating reasons for different positions particularly as these have relevance for matters of governance. In a philosophical culture, persuasion is almost always a matter of seeking to provide reasonable grounds for adopting some position without resorting to violence or physical force (though, of course, force may be necessary to constrain those who themselves resort to violence).

A philosophical culture is, in turn, an important foundation for a democratic culture and republic. A philosophy of museums emerges, a model we shall call the Philosophical Culture Museum Model. This concept is stipulative and ideal in the sense that it presents a paradigm of a museum with great virtue and promise. It must be confessed, however, that, historically, this is an emerging concept of the role of museums and one not evident in many of the museums in the early modern era or today. Reasons are offered as to why the time may be right to recognize the philosophy of museums as a particular sub-field in the overall practice of philosophy.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 79: Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums , October 2016 , pp. 35 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2016 

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References

1 Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume One: The Spell of Plato (London: Routledge, 1945)Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 204.

3 Ibid., 203.

4 Ibid., 204.

5 Waldron, Jeremy, ‘The Constitutional Conception of Democracy’, in Waldron, Jeremy, Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Ibid., 282.

7 Ibid., 282.

8 Ibid., 283.

9 Rosenberg, Harold, ‘Reverence is All’, in Rosenberg, Harold, Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

10 See Cowan, Brian, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

11 See the report from the American Association of Museums entitled, ‘Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums’ (1992). http://www.depts.ttu.edu/museumttu/CFASWebsite/5333/Required%20Readings%202011/Hirzy_Excellence%20&%20Equity.pdf.

12 To see read the definition, see the ‘FAQs’ on the About page of the UK Museums Association website. http://www.museumsassociation.org/about/frequently-asked-questions.

13 Dewey, John, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 2005)Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., 27.

15 Ibid., 2.

16 Ibid., 4, 87.

17 Shusterman, Richard, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 19–20 Google Scholar.

18 Foucault, Michel, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: New Press, 1998), 182Google Scholar.

19 For example, the work of Alvin Goldman, Philip Kitcher, Elizabeth Anderson, and Steve Fuller.

20 I am grateful to Victoria Harrison, Bailey Wheelock, Benjamin Peirce, Dempsey Olsen, Caroline Page, and those present at the ‘Philosophy and Museums’ conference at the University of Glasgow in 2013, where an earlier version of this chapter was presented.