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Philosophers ask very general questions about what the world is like, whether there is anything in the world that could not possibly be any other way than in fact it is, how knowledge is possible and what should count as knowledge, what's the relationship between mind and brain, what values are and where they come from. We look for basic assumptions, including those that are ordinarily invisible. We analyze arguments to see whether their conclusions follow from their premises.
Philosophers often think about the basic assumptions of some particular field of human activity or study, and investigate very general questions of theory that are raised by that field. So there is philosophy of science, philosophy of history, and philosophy of language. As a general rule, there is not much overlap between the philosophy of a field and day-to-day work in that field (the philosophers are kibbitzing, not doing the work), though when there is such an overlap it is often very important and may have to do with fundamental changes in the field. A philosopher asks questions like "What goes on in this field? How do people reach conclusions in it? Why does something count as succesful or not succesful in this field? Are there any fundamental assumptions that govern the field, but may be invisible to many or all of the people who work in it?"
Philosophy of the arts (often known as Aesthetics) is one of these "philosophies of _______." It addresses such questions as
- What is art?
- What is an aesthetic property?
- What do the arts have in common?
- Why do some people make such a sharp division between fine art and other things (e.g., craft, design, entertainment, commercial art, popular art, folk art). What should we make of these distinctions?
- What kinds of answers are available for questions like this, if indeed they can be answered? And how should we go about trying to find them? For example, do they have universal answers, or only culturally specific ones?
- How should an art critic go about forming judgments about a work of art?
- What is the relationship between the arts and other areas of human culture? To what extent is art "autonomous" (i.e., free to develop on its own, independent of economics, politics, class divisions, gender and racial bias, and various cultural assumptions)?
- What is the relationship between the arts and science? For example, can biology or psychology teach us anything about the arts? Can philosophers learn anything relevant to our study of the arts by looking at biology or psychology?
There are also many more specific philosophical questions related to particular arts. Here are a few of them:
- What is music capable of expressing, and how does it manage to express whatever it does express?
- How does visual art communicate through shape, line and color?
- How should we think about the interpretation of a text, or for that matter of any other work? Is the author of the text the expert on its meaning? Is the meaning up to the readers or the audience? Does the text have its meaning independently of what the author and readers think it means? Are there other possibilities beside these?
- What sort of art is film? What are its possibilities, how does the "feel" of it compare with music, still photography, and theater?
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