ABSTRACT
The discovery of finitude, after all, is a discovery of something that must have been true of human concepts from the start. Philosopher has a way of accounting for the mutual imbrication of classification and evaluation, which Fried argues is crucial to the modernist condition. Stephen Davies's remarks come in the context of a critique of "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics," a classic article by Morris Weitz from 1956, which influentially argued that "art" should be understood as a family resemblance concept in Wittgenstein's sense. Consider Weitz's worry that aestheticians who deploy definitions of art are smuggling subjective judgments of value into ostensibly objective accounts. Despite his claims about their supreme value, consider how bizarre aesthetic theories must actually look to Weitz. Despite their obvious differences, Dickie's account and that of Weitz both rely on a blunt distinction between classification and evaluation.
