St. Augustine’s Press

Philosophy and the Arts

Seeing and Believing

Harrison, Andrew

How can pictorial and narrative arts be usefully contrasted and compared? What in principal can be, or cannot be, communicated in such different media? Why does it seem that, at its best, artistic communication goes beyond the limitations of its own medium – seeming to think and to communicate the uncommunicable? Indeed, what kinds of thought are exercised in the pictorial and narrative arts?

The ways of understanding art are ways of understanding what it is to be human. Much of what baffles or misleads us in the arts invokes what puzzles us about ourselves. The issues raised are thus central to philosophy as a discipline – failures in understanding art can be philosophical failures.