i will have much more to say about arthur danto, i hope. to me he was, among the very large philosophers of his generation (almost all of whom are gone: rawls, rorty, baudrillard, quine, derrida; perhaps habermas and cavell are still with us? i saw joe margolis stalking krakow recently) the one i would take as a model. he had extremely broad interests: unusually broad interests within philosophy, believe it or not (eastern, nitezsche), as well of course as all those wonderful and sometimes amazong excursions into visual arts in relation to everything.
it is as a stylist that i admire him most, by which i also mean to indicate that i wouldn't particularly agree with his philosophy, though it is somewhat characteristic that it might be hard to say what that means, exactly. among philosophers, he has few equals in the twentieth century as a craftsman of english prose (we might mention russell, j.l. austin, quine). really, he plays the damn language like a strad, and in a completely particular way: it's an supple structure of digression upon digression or within digression, erudite tour de force within erudite tdf, shaggy dog story after shaggy dog story. sometimes, one feels that the sum doesn't amount to all one wished, but you will never regret reading anything he wrote, from the most sophisto art theory to the philosophy of history or action to the art criticism. go buy and read the transfiguration of the commonplace.
danto was never my teacher, but i met him on a number of occasions, dined with him here and there and so on. one of my first publications was a kind of literalistic attack on the basic stance of the transfirguration. he sent me a gracious reply. i have written about him on many occasions, notably in six names of beauty. i'm scheduled to teach his book the abuse of beauty starting tomorrow. i told my class thursday, as i often do, that we were about the start reading the greatest living aesthetician, the greatest living philosopher of art. i guess in hindsight that was misleading. i must say he was about the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet: not a given in particular at the topmost reaches of my profession.
