Art, Self and Knowledge
From the cover
Art can provide us with a sensory experience that provokes us to reconfigure how we think about our world and ourselves. Theories of art have often sought to find some feature of art that isolates it from the rest of experience. Keith Lehrer argues, in opposition, that art is connected, not isolated, from how we think and feel, represent and react. Drawing from Hume, Reid, Goodman, Danto, Brand, Ismael and Lopes, Lehrer argues here that the artwork is a mentalized physical object engaging us philosophically with the content of exemplar experience. The exemplar representation of experience provoked by art ties art and science, mind and body, self and world, together in a dynamic loop, reconfiguring them all as it reconfigures art itself.