Art and knowledge Book

I teach university-level aesthetics, and I find myself switching between this text and Hofstadter's "Philosophies of Art and Beauty." Neither does everything I'd like, but they represent the best of the rest.

I like the latter (Hofstadter) because of the depth of its selections and because it's not the least bit trendy (it boasts comprehensive selections from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Ficino, Shaftesbury, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Croce, Dewey, and Heidegger--in other words, aside from Hume it includes the seminal texts from virtually every historically essential figure up to 1930 except Tolstoy.) But Hofstadter's book has no contemporary theory at all after Heidegger (and it lacks some critical sections from Kant).

Ross' anthology by contrast includes the really important material from Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger (which most other aesthetics anthologies do not), plus it has selections from Hume and Tolstoy and many contemporary figures of import like Bell, Collingwood, Dewey, Langer, Merleau-Ponty, Pepper, Hirsch, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Foucault, Bullough, Danto, Bakhtin, Freud, Jung, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Lyotard, Irigaray, and others (including some theoretically important artists like Kandinsky and Mandrian). But the early historical selections are much less comprehensive, and Ross includes no medieval or Renaissance writers at all. In short, the Hofstadter has better depth and the Ross has better breadth.

The third edition of "Art and Its Significance" is greatly improved over the second edition, mostly because it expanded the Kant section to include essential parts of Kant's third Critique that were puzzlingly absent from the earlier editions (though a few critical sections are still missing), and because it has enlarged the Derrida section to include more critical writings. That has certainly helped address the depth weakness, and perhaps pushes it to the top of the list. But in aiming for breadth in an apparent attempt to please everyone, Ross has included some selections that aren't nearly as important, influential or finely argued as texts by figures he chose to leave out (like Croce and Schopenhauer). To my mind, he would have done better to include some Bonaventure and Dante, for instance, and a little more material from Plato, Aristotle and Kant--who even now, are more widely read and more cogent than some of the additional writers Ross did include. In addition, too many of the excerpted selections are so oddly edited or include so little of the original text that the theory ends up being incomprehensible to someone who hasn't already read the excerpted text in its entirety.

In sum, if you want an anthology that comes close to sampling all the essential writers on the subject (past and present) and doing it fairly well, "Art and Its Significance" is one of your best choices, despite its nod to trendiness. And it's still one of the most reasonably priced philosophy of art anthologies available. But the cost of including so much material is that the material the text does include is too often abridged to the point of incomprehensibility.