부산대학교 도서관

This paper critically examines the controversy of“the open concept of art”in the history of analytic aesthetics, and convincingly undermines the problem of relativism concerning Wittgenstein’s“family resemblance,” drawing on the natural history and“the commonality of Homo Aestheticus.” The major controversy concerning the open concept of art comes from Weitz’s 1956 paper,“The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.”In this paper, Weitz argues that the essential definition of art is unavailable and that art can never acquire the necessary and sufficient properties to be properly defined. Instead, Weitz prefers to lean on defining art in accordance with family resemblance. This position, however, is evaluated as the nullification of the definition of art, and is mostly considered by later analytic aestheticians to be inadequate, since the definition depends on“the similarity of exhibited properties.”In particular, Carroll, who is one of later analytic aestheticians, discloses that his claim falls into the horns of a dilemma: either the definition is doomed to imply the skeptic conclusion that“everything is art” by not revealing to the certain constraint of the resemblance, or, if it sets out to establish a necessary or sufficient condition to avoid the implication, and turns out to be the conditional definition. Accordingly, either approach is impractical for applying the definition of family resemblance. However, I insist that all the concepts including art open in nature and thereby endorse both of Weitz’s critical observations and Wittgenstein’s family resemblance. Instead, I clarify how the constraint of family resemblance verifies in terms of the continuity between“language game”and“forms of life,”namely“the natural history,”which Carroll pretermits. Additionally, I go further to indicate that the structure of the constraint involved in the concept“artification,” which is the commonality of species as Homo Aestheticus that has evolved within the flourishing and the survival of all human beings, and has been long studied by cultural anthropologist Dissanayake. Consequently, I maintain that family resemblance can be a suitable model for the naturalist categorization of art, and thereby Wittgensteinian approach to exploring the definition of art still remains valid.