Art has a special tie to the aesthetic, as we have seen. But more surprisingly, philosophy does too. A philosophical problem is…
Art has a special tie to the aesthetic, as we have seen. But more surprisingly, philosophy does too. A philosophical problem is a puzzle arising from the apparent incompatibility of different things that we find ourselves confidently believing. Wittgenstein put it like this: A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about. Not for lack of information, or because of empirical error, but rather because we are disoriented and cannot see our way clear to recognizing the resolution of the conflict. What is required, typically, is a reorientation of the problem, a rethinking of the very meaning of what one supposedly knows, a new analysis of what is already in front of one’s nose, What is required is a new understanding that consists, in effect, in seeing things differently, or in seeing anew what was in plain view all along.
Alva Noë. 2023. The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.