Due to a series of unfortunate events, some related to COVID, I worked slower than usual and it took nearly 10 months to arrive at an amount of updates worthy of a blog post. Here’s what I’ve done since July 2020:

1. Clement Greenberg, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Noam Chomsky, Nancy Cartwright, and Martha Nussbaum are added.
2. William James and Elizabeth Anscombe got substantive revisions with a lot of new/edited sentences (8 and 7 respectively).
3. Sentences are added/edited for Anaximander (3), Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Heraclitus (2), Immanuel Kant (2), Arthur Schopenhauer, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Carl Hempel (2), Wilfred Sellars, Donald Davidson, Richard Hare, John Rawls (3), David Lewis, Peter Singer, and Judith Butler.
4. Dozens of new connections are drawn, making a total of 3063 (1808 positive, 1255 negative).

 

 

 

Although Danto and Dickie are close in many dimensions, their concepts of “art world” are somewhat different. In Danto’s words:

The difference, philosophically, between an institutionalist like Dickie and myself is not that I was essentialist and he was not, but that I felt that the decisions of the art world in constituting something a work of art required a class of reasons to keep the decisions from being merely fiats of arbitrary will. And in truth I felt that according the status of art to Brillo Box and to Fountain was less a matter of declaration than of discovery. The experts really were experts in the same way in which astronomers are experts on whether something is a star. (After the End of Art)

The disagreements between Greenberg and Danto-Dickie are among those that are “visible from space”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition, in this period since my last update in July, I unfortunately had to add dates of death for two important figures, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Edmund Gettier.

The next updates will continue to include philosophers of art, along with important names from other branches. (Habermas, Lakatos, and Plantinga are at the top my list, but it doesn’t always go as planned – casual flirts can lead to entries.)

The usual reminder: You can browse the whole thing here.