The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art Book

While I'm not sure that I agree with all of Danto's arguments, I do appreciate his rigor and style. He writes for both philosophers (read: some academic language and syntax) and the common reader. I am aware that I'm inviting an obvious objection, so I'll pre-empt it: yes, you would get more out of the text if you studied philosophy somewhat discursively. However, I wouldn't just call what he does simply name dropping. He makes his points while crediting the thinker. And the best part is that his treatments result in very little, if any, distortion of the original thinker, though one might raise some minor quibbles.

My major beef is that I did not like his style of citations, because I couldn't locate at least one quotation that I wanted to follow up on. I would have preferred him axe the index in favor of footnotes or endnotes.

By far, the best essays for me were "Philosophy as/and/of Literature" and "Philosophizing Literature". But that is probably because I studied and continue to study philosophy while teaching English.