Artifacts, Representations and Social Practice: Essays for Marx Wartofsky

572 Pages·1994·10.25 MB·English

by  Hilde Hein (auth.)

ARTIFACTS, REPRESENTATONS AND
SOCIAL PRACTICE
BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Editor
ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University
Editorial Advisory Board
THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University
ADOLF GRÜNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh
SAHOTRA SARKAR, Dibner Institute, M.I.T.
SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University
JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University
MARX W. WARTOFSKY, Baruch College of
the City University of New York
VOLUME 154
MARX W. WARTOFSKY
ARTIFACTS,
REPRESENTATIONS AND
SOCIAL PRACTICE
Essays for Marx Wartofsky
Edited by
CAROL C. GOULD
Stevens Institute of Technology
and
ROBERT S. COHEN
Boston University
k4
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SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Artifacts, representations, and social practice : essays for Marx
Wartofsky / edited by Carol C. Gould and Robert S. Cohen.
p. cm. — (Boston studies In the philosophy of science ; v.
154)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-94-010-4390-8 ISBN 978-94-011-0902-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-0902-4
1. Philosophy. 2. Aesthetics. 3. Science—Philosophy. 4. Social
sciences—Philosophy. I. Wartofsky, Marx W. II. Gould, Carol C.
III. Cohen, R. S. (Robert Sonne) IV. Series.
B73.A69 1994
100—dc20 93-38216
ISBN 978-94-010-4390-8
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1994
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1994
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE / Carol C. Gould ix
MARXOLOGY / Robert S. Cohen xi
Art
HILDE HEIN / Institutional Blessing: The Museum as Canon-
Maker 1
GREGG M. HOROWITZ / "Suddenly One Has The Right Eyes":
Illusion and Iconoclasm in the Early Gombrich 21
MICHAEL KELLY / Danto, Dutton, and our Preunderstanding
of Tribal Art and Artifacts 39
PETER KIVY / In Defense of Musical Representation: Music,
Representation and the Hybrid Arts 53
DOUGLAS P. LACKEY / Two Vignettes in the History of the
Mensuration of Value 69
BEREL LANG / Irony, Ltd., and the Future of Art 87
GARY SMITH / A Genealogy of 'Aura': Walter Benjamin's Idea
of Beauty 105
Science
ROSHDI RASHED / Analysis and Synthesis According to Ibn
al-Haytham 121
JOHN STACHEL / Changes in the Concepts of Space and Time
Brought about by Relativity 141
Philosophy and Its History
ANDREW BUCHWALTER / Hegel and the Doctrine of
Expressivism 163
PETER CAWS / Translating Feuerbach 185
WILLIAM JAMES EARLE / Is the Enlightenment Over? 195
vii
viii T ABLE OF CONTENTS
PAUL FEYERABEND I Realism 205
JAAKKO HINTIKKA I An Anatomy of Wittgenstein's Picture
Theory 223
ISAAC LEVI I Rationality and Commitment 257
ALASDAIR MaciNTYRE I The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road
not Taken 277
JOSEPH MARGOLIS I Donald Davidson's Philosophical
Strategies 291
JOELLE PROUST I Time and Conscious Experience 323
ABNER SHIMONY I Ten Philosophical Poems 343
Politics and Praxis
JOSEPH AGASSI I The Philosophy of Optimism and Pessimism 349
BERNARD ELEVITCH I Life is not a Poem? 361
ROGER S. GOTTLIEB I Levinas, Feminism, Holocaust, Ecocide 365
CAROL C. GOULD I Marx After Marxism 377
ERAZIM KOHAK I The Good and the Rational 397
GYORGY MARKUS I The End of a Metaphor: The Base and
the Superstructure 419
WILLIAM McBRIDE I The Marxian Vision of a (Better)
Possible Future: End of a Grand Illusion? 441
THOMAS McCARTHY I On the Communicative Dimension
of Social Practice 463
CHEYNEY RYAN I The Bread of Faithful Speech 483
KRISTIN SHRADER-FRECHETTE I Unsafe at Any Depth:
Geological Methods, Subjective Judgments, and Nuclear Waste
Disposal 501
LORENZO C. SIMPSON I Community and Difference:
Reflections in the Wake of Rodney King 525
WILLIS H. TRUITT I Partisanship, Universalism, and the
Dialectics of Moral Consciousness 543
NAME INDEX 551
CAROL C. GOULD
PREFACE
The essays collected here in honor of Marx Wartofsky's sixty-fifth
birthday are a celebration of his rich contribution to philosophy over
the past four decades and a testimony to the wide influence he has had
on thinkers with quite various approaches of their own. His diverse
philosophical interests and main themes have ranged from constructivism
and realism in the philosophy of science to practices of representation
and the creation of artifacts in aesthetics; and from the development of
human cognition and the historicity of modes of knowing to the
construction of norms in the context of concrete social critique. Or again,
in the history of philosophy, his work spans historical approaches to
Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, as well as contemporary implications of
their work; and in applied philosophy, problems of education, medicine,
and new technologies. Marx's philosophical theorizing moves from the
highest levels of abstraction to the most concrete concern with the
everyday and with contemporary social and political reality. And perhaps
most notably, it is acutely sensitive to the importance of historical
development and social practice.
As a student of John Herman Randall, Jr. and Ernest Nagel at
Columbia, Marx developed an exemplary background in both the history
of philosophy and systematic philosophy and subsequently combined
this with a wide acquaintance with analytic philosophy. He is at once
aware of the requirements of system and of the need for rigorous and
careful detailed argument. Interestingly, too, as a practicing artist and
violinist from early on, he became attuned to the role of the aesthetic
in experience and in science as well. And as a politically engaged person,
he has always been keenly aware of the situatedness of philosophical
thought and of the impact of both theories and actions on those who
are exploited or oppressed.
What has perhaps not been sufficiently noted about Marx's thought
is the degree to which he anticipated so many of the recent trends in
philosophy years before it became fashionable to do so. For example,
his early innovative concern with historical epistemology and with
historical approaches to the philosophy of science has been widely echoed
ix
C.c. Gould and R.S. Cohen (eds.), Artifacts, Representations and Social Practice, ix-x.
© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
x CAROL C. GOULD
recently and his analysis of representation and artifacts in aesthetics
has also been reiterated in present discussions. It is our expectation that
this book will elicit further attention to Marx's creative and important
contributions to a wide range of key philosophical problems and will
stimulate further thought in the directions he has emphasized.
The essays collected here touch on a number of the themes that have
been central in Marx's theorizing, though always from the unique
standpoint of each of the distinguished contributors. The authors of
these essays are friends or colleagues of Marx from the various "eras"
of his work - from Boston University and from Baruch College, from
colleagues in the U.S. philosophical community to friends from Western
and Eastern Europe, and include some of his older and more recent
students as well. Inevitably, many philosophical friends, colleagues,
and students of Marx are missing here, either because of the editors' over
sight or because the authors were asked to produce their contributions
in some haste. We are sorry for these omissions but look forward to
editing another Festschrift on Marx's seventy-fifth birthday, by which
time he will undoubtedly have produced a range of new ideas and themes
on which we may comment and which will inspire us to new sorts of
thinking of our own.
ROBERT S. COHEN
MARXOLOGY
Observation is praxis-laden ...
First the facts. Marx Wartofsky, the philosopher and violinist, was first
a musician and an artist. He graduated from that wonderful High School
of Music and Art in New York City in January 1945. After a semester
at Brooklyn College, he went to Columbia University, all the way to
his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1952. He came to Boston University in 1957,
and after 26 years returned to New York as Distinguished Professor of
Philosophy in Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York, where he flourishes today. I met him in the
fall of 1958 when we shared a graduate seminar on Hume. I thought then,
and now too, that he is the ideal colleague, teacher, friend, comedian, and
critic. For six years he was the chairman of the philosophy department
at Boston University, a time of turmoil without and within the University,
and yet we experienced a Renaissance of philosophical quality due to
him as first among equals. He seems to be a natural mediator while
also a firm leader, qualities which were so very valuable in his years
as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Philosophical Association,
Eastern Division, as a local, state, and national official of the American
Association of University Professors, and as one of the main figures in
the development of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science
in 1960. He was the creative and innovative figure even as a depart
ment chairman when he decided to cut through university bureaucratic
budget-making by inventing a new unit of exchange value for full-time,
part-time, tenure-track, non-tenure-track, teaching fellows, visiting pro
fessors, adjunct faculty ... he called it 'philosophon'. No dean would
recognize it. This was his only failure known to me.
What has he published thus far? Three books: Conceptual Foundations
of Scientific Thought (1968, with translations published in Madrid, 1973,
Budapest, 1977, and Beijing, 1984); Feuerbach (1977); Models:
Representation and the Scientific Understanding (1979, with transla
tion published in Moscow, 1988). He has published more than three score
and ten philosophical papers, beginning with his fine essay on 'Diderot
xi
C.c. Gould and R.S. Cohen (eds.), Artifacts, Representations and Social Practice, xi-xiv.
© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers.