Philosophy of Museums

Abstract

Museums and their practices of collection, curation, and exhibition raise a host of philosophical questions. The philosophy of museums is a relatively new and growing subdiscipline within the academic field of philosophy. While only recently taking shape as a distinct area, this subdiscipline builds upon a tradition of interest in museums that has been taken up by prominent philosophers, such as Theodor Adorno (Prisms 1967) and Michel Foucault (Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology 1998). Philosophers active in the philosophy of museums are less concerned with intra-disciplinary differences (between, e.g., “continental philosophy” and “analytic philosophy” and their recent permutations) than they are with thinking about the museum on its own terms as a phenomenon calling for philosophical engagement. Indeed, as Beth Lord put it, the basic conviction among scholars in this area is that “philosophy can help us to think about museums, [and] . . . that museums can contribute to philosophical thinking” (Philosophy and the museum. Museum Management and Curatorship 21.2 (2006): 80). As such, the promise of the philosophy of museums is that, despite it being a subfield of a larger discipline, it will enable a fresh look at its parent discipline while also prompting the development of new perspectives on more traditional philosophical questions. Philosophical approaches will also help us to understand museums and their objects in myriad new ways, as this emerging discipline within the broad church of philosophy matures over the coming years. Although many of the philosophical questions raised by museums are ethical, the philosophy of museums goes beyond the confines of any single established area of philosophy, such as ethics, aesthetics, or metaphysics. Work within the philosophy of museums thus now ranges over themes such as philosophical museology, the epistemological and ethical dimension of humanity and social life, culture, and religion, as well as those more directly connected to issues arising from museum practices of curation, conservation, and exhibition. The philosophy of museums is not entirely independent of scholarship within the field of museum studies, therefore, this article makes reference not only to works that are philosophical in a narrow sense but also to work of philosophical interest within museum studies and more occasionally to scholarship within other disciplines such as anthropology and history.