>
>I like Gombo, say what you will. He was a great scholar, though very
>formalistic. --jks
>
>------------------
>
>Justin, why do you have to sound so damned reasonable?
Tempermental hazard.
I was trained in history undergrad in part by Anthony Grafton, who taught my Renaissance and Reformation class, also, I think, taught my section in one of my history of science classes. Tony's a Warburg Institute guy like Gombo, immensely learned in the classical tradition, pretty opaque on the classical German philosophy. Not that Tony has any objection to it; actually he's personally leftish, just doesn't know much about it or work with it. He follows Gombo in bringing to art and all European history the classical tradition--he's a scholar of classical scholarship by trade, an expert in Scaliger in particular. I find it illuminating to have that mindset brought to bear on art, although it is a very "internal" rather than a social approach. I like Panofsky too, who has the same limittaions and strengths.
I'll try to
>put together why Gombrich is a far lesser light than Cassirer,
Please do. I wouldn't dispute proposition. Cassirer is a philosopher of real weight and a European intellectual in a mold that has been broken, but which I immensely admire. However, Gombo _is_ a great scholar, and the philosophical ideas in Art and Illusion, although nothing like Cassirer's in scope or ambition, are pretty solid and were at the time fairly radical. They have become pretty much common sense now, thanks to Gombo and his students.
, Gombrich murdered art,
>while Cassirer, Malraux, Hauser, and Paz lived it---made it live (evil
>Hegel's wretched offspring, one and all).
I adore evil Hegel and his wretched offspring, including a certain German emigre who dabbled in political economy.
So, in a sense the theoretical concern for academic
>scholarship and formalism was used as a filtering tool to discredit
>most other european philosophies of art and art history. It was part
>of a conspiracy of silence and I think of it as an example of cold war
>intellectual brain washing.
Probably it was; in my own experience, having the classical tradition brought to bear on art was very exciting. Hegel and his offspring were not exactly encouraged at Princeton in the '70s, when I was there, but I seem to have missed being inoculated.
As hard as it might be to imagine now,
>reading Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre, or Cassirer, Malraux, Paz and Hauser
>was actually an act of rebellion, back then.
>
>In an indirect way, these experiences account for why, when I first
>heard Feyerabend rail on against Popper, I felt a deep affinity and
>graditude toward Feyerabend---even though now, after reading him
>again, much later, he seems a bit of a crank. Oh, well, a very lovable
>crank he was. And, like Cassirer, he opened up philosophy, rather than
>closed it down.
>
I had the same reaction to Feyerabend after Princeton. A story: I was sitting in on a class at Michigan on philosophy of mind taught by Jaegwon Kim, another Princeton product. I was working on a dissertation on mind-body reductionism, which I unfashionably defended. Kim was at the time my diss advisor, but he left for Brown, and I finished it under Allen Gibbard, a much better fit. ANyway, Kim was teaching about theories of reductionism, He sketched out Kemeny-Oppenheim, Nagel, Churchland, couple of others, and prepared to move on. I put up my hand. Prof. Kim, I sad, aren't you going to talk about Feyerabend? No, he said, I am not. Why not, said I; his is one of the main theories. I'll do it if you won't. OK, he said, here's the chalk. So I took the blackboard for 15 minutes and told the class about F. Kim continued on in his inscrutably Korean way (he really _is_ inscrutable) as if I had not spoken. I had a discussion of F in the thesis. He advised against it. If you publish on F, he said, people will think you are a crank! Gibbard was perfectly happy to have me talk about F. My first paper discussed F among others. But I got iced out of philosophy, so maybe Jaegwon was right.
--jks _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com