Artistic Truth
Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure

This book portrays artistic truth as a process of imaginative disclosure.

Lambert Zuidervaart (Author)

9780521839037, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 October 2004

296 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.8 cm, 0.536 kg

"this thorough and far-reaching analysis of artistic truth in Western society is but the first publication in a two-part project, in which the author proposes an integrated aesthetic and social philosophy...Zuidervaart deserves praise for his efforts to make philosophers intelligible to each other, and to make art intelligible to those who question its cognitive relevance." - Lauren Bialystok

It is unfashionable to talk about artistic truth. Yet the issues traditionally addressed under that term have not disappeared. Indeed, questions concerning the role of the artist in society, the relationship between art and knowledge and the validity of cultural interpretation have intensified. Lambert Zuidervaart challenges intellectual fashions. He proposes a new critical hermeneutics of artistic truth that engages with both analytic and continental philosophies and illuminates the contemporary cultural scene. People turn to the arts as a way of finding orientation in their lives, communities and institutions. But philosophers, hamstrung by their own theories of truth, have been unsuccessful in accounting for this common feature in our lives. This book portrays artistic truth as a process of imaginative disclosure in which expectations of authenticity, significance and integrity prevail. Understood in this way, truth becomes central to the aesthetic and social value of the arts.

Preface
Introduction
Part I. Hermeneutical Matrix
1. Beardsley's Denial
2. Reciprocations
3. Kant Revisited
Part II. Constructive Clearings
4. Truth as Disclosure
5. Imaginative Disclosure
6. Artistic Truth
Part III. Linguistic Turns
7. Logical Positivist Dispute
8. Goodman's Nominalism
9. Wolterstorff's Realism
10. Aesthetic Transformations
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Philosophy: aesthetics [HPN], Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge [HPK], Literary theory [DSA]