He’d Rather Philosophize

In the way of publishing, I worked closely with Arthur C. Danto on several books about art without learning a great deal about his place in the world of philosophy. Crispin Sartwell artfully spells out Danto’s philosophical work on the Times blog The Stone, including the story that Danto “abandoned his successful career as an abstract expressionist printmaker one day in 1963 when he was working on a woodcut and suddenly realized he’d rather be writing philosophy.” And Sartwell finds words for the loss of his forebears in philosophy that capture what many of us feel about the loss of forebears in literature, art, religious belief and the like:

I’m 55. As people of my generation have lost or will soon lose our parents, philosophers in my cohort are losing the living presence of the major figures of the period of our apprenticeship, the figures who gave rise to us and who had to be emulated or resisted or refuted for us to find our own voices. In the last 15 years or so, we’ve said goodbye to such emblems of an era as Richard Rorty, John Rawls, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-François Lyotard, Donald Davidson, W.V. Quine, Bernard Williams, Thomas Kuhn, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Robert Nozick and now Arthur Danto. I’m not sure my generation can yet claim figures of comparable accomplishment. It might be a good time to ask, as the late George Jones asked about the great country singers of that same generation, “Who’s gonna fill their shoes?”

(That’s Ocean Surface Woodcut 1992, by Vija Celmins, up top.)

• 19 November 2013