ABSTRACT
The overarching aim of this book is to demonstrate not just what art can mean to philosophy, but also what it means as philosophy. Artists, of course, do not have to be philosophers to be good artists, or bad ones, for that matter, and it is not the general argument of this book that art is philosophy when or because artists deliberately use their work to make philosophical arguments. Indeed, that would seem a sure-fire recipe for making bad art. We do believe, however, that what art does is philosophically sig nificant. Each chapter in this book is both an argument for and a demonstration of art’s power to aid and inform philosophy. Our approach to art is to treat it as a kind of phenomenology-which is not to say that art can be reduced to a discursive content, but rather that art can function as a way of directing us to important phenomena and helping us to understand them in their own terms. In fact, we deliberately chose to approach this topic with a multiple-authored, “edited” volume. We felt that the best way to make the case for art as phenomenology was to show how diverse-in both the works of art that each author chose to examine, but also in the philosophical problems upon which they focus-and thus how versatile this approach can be.
