The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art by Arthur C. Danto, and: Art and Philosophy: Conceptual Issues in Aesthetics by Joseph Margolis, and: Works and Worlds of Art by Nicholas Wolterstorff (review)

298 BOOK REVIEWS intolerance, " the only thing which the believer needs to give up is presumptuousness in repudiating other religious principles. He need not presume that religious beliefs whose point he does not understand must be incompatible with his own beliefs, simply because they are different". How far religious beliefs are compatible, how far incompatible, cannot be settled a priori; it is a matter for students of comparative religion. It is certainly not a matter on which every believer should be required to make up his mind. There does not seem to be any straightforward way of :finding out how far the world's religions are compatible. " A purely logical analysis of the nature of faith claims cann-0t tell us that, but it can tell us that a presumptuous dogmatism born of treating religious beliefs as competing hypotheses and a commodious relativism born of noncognitivist accounts of faith are both wrong." University of Calgary Calgary, Alberta HUGO A. MEYNELL The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: .A Philosophy of .Art. By .ARTHUR C. DANTO. CB,mbridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. Pp. 222. $17.50. Art and Philosophy: Conceptual Issues in Aesthetics. By JOSEPH MARGOLIS New York: Humanities Press, 1980. Pp. 368. $25.00. Works and Worlds of Art. By NICHOLAS WoLTERSTORFF. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980. Pp. 392. $55.00. There is something rich and beguiling about certain simple questi-Ons that has long made them the darlings of philosophieal inquiry. "What is knowledge~" Socrates asks the young Theaetetus, whose four or five valiant attempts t-0 puzzle it out do not so much provide a solution as alert us to the speculative possibilities inherent in the question and deepen our appreciation of the kinds of things that must-and that must notbe involved in a satisfactory answer. Similarly, " What is art? " It is easy enough to begin as Theaetetus did and offer examples of art. But the question asks for a definition, not examples . The search for a definition of art is particularly vexed t-Oday when the category " work of art" seems to have expanded so that it can include anything under the sun. A blank canvas, an ordinary bottle rack, a pile of Brillo boxes or soup cans, a series of nonsense syllables strung together in quatrains : Can such things be art worksV The consensus is BOOK REVIEWS 299 "yes". But whyf What alchemy transforms such lowly objects into works of artf And what makes one soup can a work of art and another just like it a mere soup can? Our sensitivity to the philosophical implications of such questions owes a great deal to the incisive work of Arthur Danto. At least since· 1964, when his influential essay" The Artworld" appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, Danto has been working to formulate a systematic definition of art that can accommodate such objects as Andy Warhol's " Brillo Boxes " and can explain why, given two visually identical objects, one is generally accorded the status of art while the other remains a " mere real thing." The fruits of these efforts appear in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, his eloquent and nimbly argued meditation on the philosophy of art. Danto examines the structure of artistic representation pieee by piece, gradually building not only a definition of art but also a well-considered version of how it is that art works mean or have significance. His method is urbanely Socratic: together, it seems, we plumb the arguments, taking from each an insight or admonition before moving on, thus fortified, to consider the next. Danto is also an accomplished stylist, and this is that rare philosophy text that manages to delight as it instructs. In the first part of the book, Danto spends a good deal of time making us sensitive to the epistemological problems contemporary art has spawned. Central to his concern is our ability "to construct ontologically distinct but perceptually indiscernible counterparts " (p. 60), only one of which is an artwork. He reasons that since there exist artworks that are perceptually indistinguishable from other objects that happen not to be artworks, the desired definition cannot rest on perceptual qualities. Aesthetic appreciation turns out to be conceptually as well as...