Arthur Danto's contributions to the philosophy of art have been shaped by his experiences as art maker, art critic, and art lover. He earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts from Wayne State University in 1948. For the next decade, his woodcuts were shown in such important venues as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, Los Angeles County Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. During this period of active art-making, he completed a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University in 1952 and began his half-century-long appointment in the Columbia philosophy department.

One of Danto's central aims for the first thirty years of his career was to render the ideas of nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophers such as Hegel, Nietszche, and Sartre accessible and useful to analytical philosophers. Danto's writing about...