This second edition features a new 48-page Afterword--1980 updating Professor Beardsley's classic work.

By demonstrating the uniformity and universality of the principles of valid interpretation of verbal texts of any sort, this closely reasoned examination provides a theoretical foundation for a discipline that is fundamental to virtually all humanistic studies. It defines the grounds on which textual interpretation can claim to establish objective knowledge, defends that claim against such skeptical attitudes as historicism and psychologism, and shows that many confusions can be avoided if the distinctions between meaning and significance, interpretation and criticism are (...) correctly understood. It provides perhaps the first genuinely comprehensive account of hermeneutic theory to appear in English and the first systematic presentation of the principles of valid interpretation in any language. Mr. Hirsch, associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of _Wordsworth and Schelling _and _Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake._ “Here is a book that brings logic to the most unruly of disciplines, literary interpretation. Viewing this subject within the tradition of hermeneutics, Mr. Hirsch is able to trace its origins and development with brilliant insight. The result is a lucidly systemic and authoritative account of the premises and procedures applicable to the interpretation of a literary text. Mr. Hirsch has performed a monumental service thereby that of reinstating the credentials of objectivism and defining the limits of the aesthetics of truth. This study is a necessary took for anyone who wants to talk sense about literature.”—_Virginia Quarterly Review_ “Professor Hirsch demonstrates convincingly that objectivity is attainable in humane studies, and that it is not identified with the subject but with the evidence. A valid interpretation is not necessarily a correct one, but one which is more probably than any other on the basis of existing evidence. He makes a subtle and important distinction between a text’s ‘meaning’ and its ‘significance’, and brilliantly relates meaning to understanding and interpretation to explanation…” In short, this is a work which future students of literary theory cannot afford to neglect.”—_Notes and Queries_ E.D. Hirsch, Jr., is professor of English at the University of Virginia. (shrink)

Zettel, an en face bilingual edition, collects fragments from Wittgenstein's work between 1929 and 1948 on issues of the mind, mathematics, and language.

I argue that when we interpret a literary work, we engage with at least two different kinds of meaning, each requiring a distinct mode of interpretation. These kinds of meaning are literary varieties of what Paul Grice called nonnatural and natural meaning. The long-standing debate that began with Beardsley and Wimsatt's attack on the intentional fallacy is, I argue, really a debate about nonnatural meaning in literature. I contend that natural meaning has been largely neglected in our theorizing about literary (...) interpretation and that this comes at a serious cost, resulting in an inadequate account of what interpretation involves. I argue, first, that by recognizing that literary meaning includes both nonnatural and natural meaning, we are better placed to understand the interpreter's relationship with the author, and, second, that recognition of the distinction between nonnatural and natural meaning advances the established debate about literary meaning, offering support for actual intentionalism. The more inclusive view of literary meaning helps resolve an apparent difficulty raised by Noël Carroll. (shrink)

I argue that contemporary artists fix the features of their works not only through their actions of making and presenting objects, but also through auxiliary activities such as corresponding with curators and institutions. I refer to such fixing of features as the artist’s sanction: artists sanction features of their work through publicly accessible actions and communications, such as making a physical object with particular features, corresponding with curators and producing artist statements. I show, through an extended example, that in order (...) to grasp the nature of contemporary artworks, and thus be in a position to interpret them, we must attend to the features the artist has sanctioned. However, this does not amount to saying that the artist’s intention fixes the features of the work. While related to intentions, sanctions are not identical to them; and, indeed, the features the artist has sanctioned may conflict, in some cases, with those she intended. I distinguish my view from actual and hypothetical intentionalism and show that considering the artist’s sanction does not force us to accept any particular interpretation of the work. I also show that, while it has special relevance to our understanding of contemporary artworks, the notion of the sanction is in fact relevant to traditional Western art as well. (shrink)

In this richly argued and provocative book, David Davies elaborates and defends a broad conceptual framework for thinking about the arts that reveals important continuities and discontinuities between traditional and modern art, and between different artistic disciplines. Elaborates and defends a broad conceptual framework for thinking about the arts. Offers a provocative view about the kinds of things that artworks are and how they are to be understood. Reveals important continuities and discontinuities between traditional and modern art. Highlights core topics (...) in aesthetics and art theory, including traditional theories about the nature of art, aesthetic appreciation, artistic intentions, performance, and artistic meaning. (shrink)

Intentionalism in aesthetics is, quite generally, the thesis that the artist's or artists' intentions have a decisive role in the creation of a work of art, and that knowledge of such intentions is a necessary component of at least some adequate interpretive and evaluative claims. In this paper I develop and defend this thesis. I begin with a discussion of some anti-intentionalist arguments. Surveying a range of intentionalist responses to them, I briefly introduce and criticize a fictionalist version of intentionalism (...) before moving on to an approach I call moderate intentionalism. I consider a salient alternative known as hypothetical intentionalism and try to show why moderate intentionalism should be preferred to it. (shrink)