I initially drafted much of what follows at Cambridge University, where I presented parts of the work in progress to various seminars and meetings. I thank everyone with whom I discussed this project as it developed, especially John MacKinnon, Hugh Mellor, Alex Neill, Robert Stern, and George Watson. I also thank Colin Lyas and Michael Tanner, whose detailed commentary on an earlier draft sharpened the focus of the entire project. Most of all, I thank Renford Bambrough, who allowed me to present sections of this book to his seminars and read and commented extensively on each part as it developed as well as on the entire manuscript. I cannot overstate the philosophical benefit I derived from those many meetings and conversations, and the careful reader will see throughout the extent to which my work refers to his.
I also thank a great many people and institutions on this side of the Atlantic, including, at the Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, William Mahar, head of the Humanities Division, and Howard Sachs, dean for Research and Graduate Studies (both of whom put many resources at my disposal); the Research Initiation Grant Program and the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, both of which supported the work with fellowships; and a few individuals who stand out from a larger, very supportive crowd: Donald Wolff, Troy Thomas, and, most particularly, Louise Hoffman. I presented sections of the work in progress to meetings of the American Society for Aesthetics and to the International Association for Philosophy and Literature, and I am also grateful for the support and fully comprehending commentary of Laurent Stern, Lydia Goehr, and Henry Alexander, whom I thank especially for his enduring encouragement. From Richard Eldridge I received not only one but two extremely astute, constructive, and very finely detailed readings of earlier versions, both of which proved enormously helpful. I thank as well the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting my work in Cambridge and my participation in the Institute for Theory and Interpretation in the Visual Arts at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1987. Of the many people to whom I am indebted from that utopian experience I must particularly mention Michael Podro and Annabel Wharton for sustained conversation on a range of aesthetic issues. Also, my good friends Allen Cox, Edward Wight, and the late Howard Roberts helped with many conversations in their areas of expertise (painting, musicology, and music performance respectively). I also acknowledge my debt to Bard College not only for providing a superb context for aesthetic scholarship but also for supporting further work in Cambridge with an Asher B. Edelman fellowship, and my debt to my colleagues in philosophy, William Griffith and Daniel Berthold-Bond, whose philosophical engagement I have found consistently inspiring.
Chapter 5 was previously published in slightly different form in Philosophy and Literature 13 (April 1989): 75–95, edited by Denis Dutton; I thank the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to incorporate it here and the editor for publishing the piece initially. The remainder of the work is published here for the first time. Last, I am indebted to Roger Haydon of Cornell University Press, who has given this project much in addition to the patient encouragement it needed, and to Andrew Lewis, whose very fine copy-editing proved extremely helpful at the final stages.
All of the above-mentioned people have made this a better work than it would have been without them (although it does not follow from this fact that any of them would agree with what I’ve written); indeed, given the quantity and quality of the support this work has enjoyed, it is very much more than a pro forma move in a narrowly circumscribed language-game to say that with regard to any remaining flaws, I am entirely on my own. Carol Brener, Kathleen Elliot, René Horley, Kathleen Jacob, Marie Ratchford, and Janice Russ very kindly and patiently prepared the manuscripts, and to them I remain extremely grateful.
GARRY HAGBERG