ABSTRACT
The notorious gap between art historians and philosophers, which is evinced once again by the conversation documented in this volume, is not unlike the problem famously formulated by Kant: conceptions without intuitions are empty and intuitions without conceptions are blind. Not that it would not be objectionable—as Kant perfectly well knew and went on to demonstrate in the Critique of Pure Reason—if there were such a thing as a pure conception without any kind of intuition, and vice versa. But however provisional or artificial the distinction between concepts and visual perceptions, thinking and seeing, might be, it nonetheless highlights differences in figure-ground constellations, that is to say: it shows what in each discipline is prior and what is background. It makes a crucial difference if, on the one hand, one is chiefly concerned with forming concepts and elaborating critical definitions, or if, on the other hand, one’s basic enterprise is to look at particular works in order to find out as much as possible about their visual features. And even if an art historian temporarily refrains from notions such as form and style to focus on, say, the circumstances of a work’s production, he or she still stresses the singular art work. By contrast, it is telling that a philosopher can, under certain circumstances, work very well without opening his or her eyes to the concrete givenness of a specific work.
