Series Editor’S Preface

Abstract

Extract The relation between philosophy and art history gestures towards a rich and complex intellectual lineage with ongoing relevance for the contemporary thinking of art and image. Yet it is rarely directly addressed or named. The writing and thinking that inhabits or implicates this relation is instead most often reclaimed by one or other of these disciplines, or subsumed into other terrains: aesthetics, philosophy of art, art theory, art criticism or visual culture. A long-standing misunderstanding in part accounts for such deflection: the judgement of the inadequacy or absence of the philosophical in art historical thinking, and of the ahistoricity in philosophical thinking on art. Refractions challenges this outlook, constructing a zone for inquiry that examines, tests and renews modes of address too often reductively separated. Fostering unexpected synergies, volumes in the Series reveal how it is in the encounter of the conceptual, speculative and theoretical with the empirical, material and concrete that some of the most vital problems about art and image are posed. In the transhistorical zones where concepts and experience meet, and across borderlines of theory, criticism, historiography and practice, philosophy and art history are brought together in remarkable and creative ways.