Philosophy of Sculpture: Historical Problems, Contemporary Approaches

Sculpture has been a central aspect of almost every art culture, contemporary or historical. This volume comprises ten essays at the cutting edge of thinking about sculpture in philosophical terms, representing approaches to sculpture from the perspectives of both Anglo-American and European philosophy. Some of the essays are historically situated, while others are more straightforwardly conceptual. All of the essays, however, pay strict attention to actual sculptural examples in their discussions. This reflects the overall aim of the volume to not merely "apply" philosophy to sculpture, but rather to test the philosophical approaches taken in tandem with deep analyses of sculptural examples.

There is an array of philosophical problems unique to sculpture, namely certain aspects of its three-dimensionality, physicality, temporality, and morality. The authors in this volume respond to a number of challenging philosophical questions related to these characteristics. Furthermore, while the focus of most of the essays is on Western sculptural traditions, there are contributions that features discussion of sculptural examples from non-Western sources. Philosophy of Sculpture is the first full-length book treatment of the philosophical significance of sculpture in English. It is a valuable resource for advanced students and scholars across aesthetics, art history, history, performance studies, and visual studies.

Kristin Gjesdal is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, USA and Professor II of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is the author of Herder’s Hermeneutics: History, Poetry, Enlightenment (2017), Gadamer and The Legacy of German Idealism (2009), and a number of articles in the areas of aesthetics, hermeneutics, and nineteenth-century philosophy.

Fred Rush is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Irony and Idealism (2016) and On Architecture (Routledge, 2009). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (2004) and for several years also edited the Internationales Jahrbuch des deutschen Idealismus.

Ingvild Torsen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her work has been published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and The British Journal of Aesthetics.