Museums and Philosophy--Of Art, and Many Other Things. Part 1.

Abstract

The philosophical discussion of art is seemingly endless, whereas that of museums is scant indeed. My focus in this two-part article is on museums as a whole rather than art in museums. Museums, after all, deal with much more than art. Why should philosophers be interested in museums? One reason is that museums remain significant generators and distributors of knowledge claims in a wide variety of fields of inquiry. This remains the case even though they may have been overshadowed in certain respects by other institutions of scholarship. Although few philosophers have addressed museums, many theorists have done so. Although much theorizing about museums has a Continental flavor, little is philosophically oriented. I shall not directly address the vast literature on museums by theorists of various persuasions, for a plethora of commentaries is already available. Instead, I offer discussions of philosophical issues concerning museums under three headings in Part 1—Cultural Variety, Taxonomy, and Epistemology—and a further three in Part 2—Teleology, Ethics, and Therapeutics and Aesthetics.