Artifacts, Representations and Social Practice, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1994
Essays for Marx Wartofsky
Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science Series, Vol. 154

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.

Preface / Carol C. Gould.- Marxology / Robert S. Cohen.- Art.- Institutional Blessing: The Museum as Canon- Maker.- “Suddenly One Has The Right Eyes”: Illusion and Iconoclasm in the Early Gombrich.- Danto, Dutton, and our Preunderstanding of Tribal Art and Artifacts.- In Defense of Musical Representation: Music, Representation and the Hybrid Arts.- Two Vignettes in the History of the Mensuration of Value.- Irony, Ltd., and the Future of Art.- A Genealogy of ‘Aura’: Walter Benjamin’s Idea of Beauty.- Science.- Analysis and Synthesis According to Ibn al-Haytham.- Changes in the Concepts of Space and Time Brought about by Relativity.- Philosophy and Its History.- Hegel and the Doctrine of Expressivism.- Translating Feuerbach.- Is the Enlightenment Over?.- Realism.- An Anatomy of Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory.- Rationality and Commitment.- The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road not Taken.- Donald Davidson’s Philosophical Strategies.- Time and Conscious Experience.- Ten Philosophical Poems.- Politics and Praxis.- The Philosophy of Optimism and Pessimism.- Life is not a Poem?.- Levinas, Feminism, Holocaust, Ecocide.- Marx After Marxism.- The Good and the Rational.- The End of a Metaphor: The Base and the Superstructure.- The Marxian Vision of a (Better) Possible Future: End of a Grand Illusion?.- On the Communicative Dimension of Social Practice.- The Bread of Faithful Speech.- Unsafe at Any Depth: Geological Methods, Subjective Judgments, and Nuclear Waste Disposal.- Community and Difference: Reflections in the Wake of Rodney King.- Partisanship, Universalism, and the Dialectics of Moral Consciousness.- NAME INDEX.