Research Catalog

Art and morality : essays in the spirit of George Santayana / Morris Grossman ; edited by Martin A. Coleman.

Title
Art and morality : essays in the spirit of George Santayana / Morris Grossman ; edited by Martin A. Coleman.
Author
Grossman, Morris, 1922-2012
Publication
New York : Fordham University Press, 2014.

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TextRequest in advance N72.E8 G76 2014Off-site

Details

Additional Authors
Coleman, Martin A.
Description
xiii, 315 pages : illustrations; 24 cm.
Summary
  • "The guiding theme of these essays by aesthetician, musician, and Santayana scholar Morris Grossman is the importance of preserving the tension between what can be unified and what is disorganized, random, and miscellaneous. Grossman described this as the tension between art and morality: Art arrests a sense of change and yields moments of unguarded enjoyment and peace; but soon, shifting circumstances compel evaluation, decision, and action. According to Grossman, the best art preserves the tension between the aesthetic consummation of experience and the press of morality understood as the business of navigating conflicts, making choices, and meeting needs. This concern was intimately related to his reading of George Santayana. The best philosophy, like the best art, preserves the tension between what can be ordered and what resists assimilation, and Grossman read Santayana as exemplifying this virtue in his embrace of multiple perspectives. Other scholars have noted the multiplicity or irony in Santayana's work, but Grossman was unique in taking such a style to be a substantive part of Santayana's philosophizing"--
  • "Considers the tension between art and morality in literature, artistic performance, economics, statecraft, and human rights; in religion, drama, sculpture, philosophical methodology, biography, and attitudes toward mortality; in the work of Gotthold Lessing, Lewis Carroll, Charles Peirce, Leo Tolstoy, William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Monroe Beardsley, and George Santayana"--
Series Statement
American philosophy
Uniform Title
  • Essays. Selections
  • American philosophy series
Alternative Title
Essays.
Subject
  • Santayana, George 1863-1952
  • Santayana, George, 1863-1952 > Criticism and interpretation
  • Art and morals
  • PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics
  • PHILOSOPHY / General
  • Ästhetik
  • Ethik
  • Art > Philosophy
Genre/Form
Essays
Note
  • Includes index.
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents
Art and morality: on the ambiguity of a distinction -- Morality bound and unbound: some parameters of literary art -- Music, modulation, and metaphor -- Performance and obligation: musical variations on art and morality -- A Mozartian recognition scene -- A note on economy and art -- An aesthetic glance at the constitution: style, intention, performance -- Human rights and artistic appreciations -- Interpreting Peirce -- On Ruf's The creation of chaos: William James and the stylistic making of a disorderly world -- How Sartre must be read: an examination of philosophic method -- On Beardsley's "An aesthetic definition of art" -- Lessing as philosophical dramatist: on Nathan the wise -- Lewis Carroll: pedophile and/or Platonist? -- Art and death: a sermon in the form of an essay -- Brancusi: some changing and changeless perspectives -- Drama and Dialectic: ways of philosophizing -- Ontology and morality: Santayana on the "really real" -- Spirited spirituality -- Interpreting Interpretations -- Santayana's aesthetics -- Santayana's The last puritan -- Santayana in California: the environment, transcendentalism, and nature -- Ultimate Santayana.
ISBN
  • 9780823257225 (hardback)
  • 0823257223 (hardback)
  • 9780823257232 (paper)
  • 0823257231 (paper)
LCCN
  • ^^2013046184
  • 40023885249
OCLC
  • 864096042
  • SCSB-10484933
Owning Institutions
Harvard Library