The Principles of Art

Rating:
Summary: Good book.
Review: Excellent and tasteful critiques. That's what I got browsing through this book while standing in the back of a major Amazon competitor's store.

When I bought the book and read it, phew.

This is the kind of "highbrow" book that laymen (sorry, not pc) would enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: Strike but hear me
Review: In the preface to his first book - Speculum Mentis or The Map of Knowledge - Collingwood wrote: "I do not expect the critic to spare his blows: I only say 'strike but hear me'." In his second one - Essay on Philosophical Method - he argued that philosophy should not have a special technical language, since it does not operate with concepts that cannot be expressed by using that of "laymen". In his next - The Principles of Art - he reinforced this point by arguing that philosopher's ability to define phenomena by the language currently in use but initially developed for other purposes is one of the ultimate tests of his or her skill. This little book is a brilliant application of Collingwood's philosophy to the study of art as one of the forms of human experience. In a way it is a struggle with language that sometimes deceives us, sometimes lures into the blind alleys concealing the meaning of phenomenon. But it is a struggle marked above all by respect, ability and willingness to hear the opponents. Not surprisingly art itself is in the end understood as an on-going dialogue between the artist and the audience, something that Collingwood's contemporary Michael Oakeshott would call "the conversation of mankind".