Classics in Western Philosophy of Art: Major Themes and Arguments

by Noël Carroll

In this synthetic introduction to the history of the philosophy of art, Noël Carroll elucidates and analyzes selected writings on art by Plato, Aristotle, Hutcheson, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Bell. Carroll’s narrative tracks developments between major positions in philosophy of art, ranging from the idea that art is unavoidably embedded in society to the evolution of the notion that art is autonomous ("art for art’s sake"), thereby setting the stage for continuing debates in the philosophy of art.

Presupposing no prior background, and useful on its own or accompanying the reading of primary works, Classics in Western Philosophy of Art is ideal as a text for introductory undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of art and aesthetics, or for anyone interested in learning about the origin of some of our most fundamental conceptions of art in the Western tradition.

Genres: Philosophy

331 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 1, 2022

About the author

Noël Carroll (born 1947) is an American philosopher considered to be one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of art. Although Carroll is best known for his work in the philosophy of film, he has also published journalism, works on philosophy of art generally, theory of media, and also philosophy of history.

As of 2012, he is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. He holds PhDs in both cinema studies and philosophy. As a journalist, earlier in his career he published a number of articles in the Chicago Reader, Artforum, In These Times, Dance Magazine, Soho Weekly News and The Village Voice. He is also the author of five documentaries.

Perhaps his most popular and influential book is The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990), an examination of the aesthetics of horror fiction (in novels, stories, radio and film). As noted in the book's introduction, Carroll wrote Paradoxes of the Heart in part to convince his parents that his lifelong fascination with horror fiction was not a waste of time. Another important book by Carroll is Mystifying Movies (1988), a critique of the ideas of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and the semiotics of Roland Barthes, which has been credited with inspiring a shift away from what Carroll describes as the "Psycho-Semiotic Marxism" that had dominated film studies and film theory in American universities since the 1970s.