Paul Ziff
Encyclopedia
Paul Ziff (22 October 1920 in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

—9 January 2003 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Chapel Hill is a town in Orange County, North Carolina, United States and the home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UNC Health Care...

) was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 and philosopher specializing in semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....

 and aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

.

Career

He studied art at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 and New York’s Master Institute of Arts in 1937–1939, and was a practicing artist, partially subsidized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is a nonprofit corporation founded in 1937 by philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim and artist Hilla von Rebay. The first museum established by the foundation was the "Museum of Non-Objective Art", which was housed in rented space on Park Avenue in New York....

 until 1942. He returned to New York in 1945 after serving in the United States Coast Guard
United States Coast Guard
The United States Coast Guard is a branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven U.S. uniformed services. The Coast Guard is a maritime, military, multi-mission service unique among the military branches for having a maritime law enforcement mission and a federal regulatory agency...

 to study art and philosophy at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

, receiving his BFA
Bachelor of Fine Arts
In the United States and Canada, the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, usually abbreviated BFA, is the standard undergraduate degree for students seeking a professional education in the visual or performing arts. In some countries such a degree is called a Bachelor of Creative Arts or BCA...

 in January 1949, and his Ph.D
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...

 in September 1951.

He spent two years at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

 as a Research assistant
Research assistant
A research assistant is a researcher employed, often on a temporary contract, by a university or a research institute, for the purpose of assisting in academic research...

, in the Language and Symbolism Project, and as an Instructor, before taking a post as Instructor at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, becoming an Assistant Professor
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

, in 1954.

He remained at Harvard until 1959, taking two periods of leave; to study at Oxford University in 1955, and to teach at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 in 1958.

From 1959 until 1964 he was Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...

. Between 1962–1963 he studied in Rome on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

From 1964–1968 he was a Professor
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...

, and from 1968–1970 was a Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago
University of Illinois at Chicago
The University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC, is a state-funded public research university located in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its campus is in the Near West Side community area, near the Chicago Loop...

 before settling at the University of North Carolina
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...

 as William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor from 1970 until 1988 (Professor Emeritus
Emeritus
Emeritus is a post-positive adjective that is used to designate a retired professor, bishop, or other professional or as a title. The female equivalent emerita is also sometimes used.-History:...

 until 2003.)

The "Robert Paul Ziff Distinguished Professorship" was established at University of North Carolina in 1994. He died in 2003.

Articles

Paul Ziff started publishing in graduate school in 1949, doing book reviews for The Philosophical Review
The Philosophical Review
The Philosophical Review is a quarterly journal of philosophy edited by the faculty of the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University and published by Duke University Press . The journal publishes original work in all areas of analytic philosophy, but emphasizes material that is of general...

. He kept on publishing for 41 years, his last article appearing in 1990 in a special issue of the European journal Dialectica. No doubt he was asked to contribute a paper to that issue since it was dedicated - both the issue and his paper - to the memory of his former teacher at Cornell
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

, Max Black
Max Black
Max Black was a British-American philosopher, who was a leading influential figure in analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and science, and the philosophy of art, also publishing studies...

.

Ziff published six books, 38 articles, five discussions, and 14 reviews. His first four books were published by Cornell University Press; his last two were published by Reidel
D. Reidel
D. Reidel was an academic publishing company based in Dordrecht. It joined with Kluwer in the 1990s as Kluwer/Reidel, together being purchased by Cinven and Candover in 2003. Cinven and Candover also purchased Springer, merging the operations of all the publishers into one conglomerate, Springer...

. When he published with Cornell, it was one of the best university presses for philosophy. He moved to Reidel in the 1980s because their managing editor, Jaakko Hintikka
Jaakko Hintikka
Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka is a Finnish philosopher and logician.Hintikka was born in Vantaa. After teaching for a number of years at Florida State University, Stanford, University of Helsinki, and the Academy of Finland, he is currently Professor of Philosophy at Boston University...

, offered to accept two of his book-length manuscripts and publish them as consecutive volumes in the Synthese Library series.

Ziff’s articles appeared most often in The Philosophical Review, Mind
Mind (journal)
Mind is a British journal, currently published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association, which deals with philosophy in the analytic tradition...

, The Journal of Philosophy, Analysis, and Foundations of Language (which became Studies in Language sometime in the late 70s). He was invited to contribute to various conference proceedings and collections, and fifteen of his articles and discussions appeared in these - some of them high-profile collections in their area at the time, including Katz
Jerrold Katz
Jerrold J. Katz was an American philosopher and linguist.After receiving a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, Katz became a Research Associate in Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy there in 1963,...

 and Fodor
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...

's The Structure of Language (1964) and Harman
Gilbert Harman
Gilbert Harman is a contemporary American philosopher, teaching at Princeton University, who has published widely in linguistics, semantics, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller...

 and Davidson
Donald Davidson (philosopher)
Donald Herbert Davidson was an American philosopher born in Springfield, Massachusetts, who served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton...

’s Semantics of Natural Language (1972). Most of Ziff’s articles (29) show up in his books. One that did not, "About Proper Names" from Mind, was selected as one of the best philosophy articles of 1977 and reprinted in The Philosopher’s Annual. Ziff published mainly in the areas of philosophy of language
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...

, philosophy of art
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

, philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...

, and epistemology, but also had articles in philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion is a branch of philosophy concerned with questions regarding religion, including the nature and existence of God, the examination of religious experience, analysis of religious language and texts, and the relationship of religion and science...

 and ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

. He even had three about Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...

’s views, and one about his own take on philosophy.

"Art and the 'Object of Art'" was originally in Mind in 1951, and takes apart the claim, made by prominent philosophers in the 1930s-1950s, that "the painting is not the work of art." This paper is reprinted in other places as well, notably William Elton’s famous collection Aesthetics and Language, which put aestheticians on notice that the analytics had shown up to clean house. "The Task of Defining a Work of Art" has been anthologized at least three times. It is the most sophisticated of the "you can’t define art" papers in the apply-Wittgenstein/ordinary language analysis years. "Reasons in Art Criticism" was in the two best aesthetics anthologies of the 60s, the ones edited by Kennick and by Margolis. It was also in the Bobbs-Merrill
Bobbs-Merrill Company
The Bobbs-Merrill Company was a book publisher located in Indianapolis, Indiana. Bobbs-Merrill was known for publishing such authors as Richard Halliburton, David Markson, Ayn Rand, James Whitcomb Riley, Walter Dean Myers, and Irma S. Rombauer. Bobbs-Merrill also published the early works of...

 Reprint Series in Philosophy, which was a selection of the most talked about articles in the 50s and 60s. George Dickie
George Dickie
George Dickie is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at University of Illinois at Chicago and is an influential philosopher of art working in the analytical tradition...

 devoted a chapter of his book Evaluating Art to Ziff’s view about reasons why a work of art is good, and, 30 years after it was first published, he said it "remains one of the few truly stimulating pieces by present-day philosophers on the theory of art evaluation."

Many students know Paul Ziff from the philosophy of mind papers in Philosophic Turnings. "The Feelings of Robots", in which Ziff argued with his typical panache that robots could not have feelings, has attracted the most attention: viz., replies, reprintings, and inclusion on course reading lists. It went from Analysis in 1959, along with replies by Jack
J. J. C. Smart
John Jamieson Carswell "Jack" Smart AC is an Australian philosopher and academic who is currently Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Australia...

 and Ninian Smart
Ninian Smart
Professor Roderick Ninian Smart was a Scottish writer and university educator. He was a pioneer in the field of secular religious studies...

, to Alan Ross Anderson
Alan Ross Anderson
Alan Ross Anderson was an American logician and professor of philosophy at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh....

’s volume Minds and Machines in 1964, which was part of Prentice Hall
Prentice Hall
Prentice Hall is a major educational publisher. It is an imprint of Pearson Education, Inc., based in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, USA. Prentice Hall publishes print and digital content for the 6-12 and higher-education market. Prentice Hall distributes its technical titles through the Safari...

’s Contemporary Perspectives in Philosophy Series, and the first "can machines think" collection. People who have written on this topic, such as Keith Gunderson, invariably bring up Ziff’s short paper. It eventually showed up in introductory anthologies as well.

"About Behaviorism", another Analysis paper, discusses two bad arguments against philosophical behaviorism in order to show the difference between, as Vere Chappell
Vere Claiborne Chappell
Vere Claiborne Chappell is an American philosopher and scholar specializing in early modern philosophy, history of philosophy, philosophy of mind and action, and metaphysics....

 put it, crude and refined behaviorism. Chappell included this paper in his anthology The Philosophy of Mind, which came out in 1962 and was the first collection of readings on that area of philosophy. "The Simplicity of Other Minds" comes from The Journal of Philosophy. It was originally an invited symposium paper at the American Philosophical Association
American Philosophical Association
The American Philosophical Association is the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States. Founded in 1900, its mission is to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarly activity in philosophy, to facilitate the professional work...

’s Eastern Division meeting in 1965. The commentators were Sydney Shoemaker
Sydney Shoemaker
Sydney Shoemaker is an American philosopher. Until his retirement, he was a Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. He holds a PhD from Cornell and BA from Reed. In 1971, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University...

 and Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher and the emeritus John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics, and Christian apologetics...

. Ziff went at the other minds problem
Problem of other minds
The problem of other minds has traditionally been regarded as an epistemological challenge raised by the skeptic. The challenge may be expressed as follows: given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds? The thought behind the question is that no matter...

 by taking it as a question about picking the best explanatory hypothesis. According to Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam is an American philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist, who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science...

, Ziff was extending the "empirical realist reply to skepticism." In his 21-page paper about Ziff’s view, "Other Minds" (1972), Putnam discussed both Ziff’s argument and his commentators’ criticisms, and said that he and Ziff were in "essential agreement" on how to solve the other minds problem, and in "common disagreement with the modish treatment in terms of" criteria, analogies, and language learning.

"Understanding Understanding" came out in 1972, Ziff’s second year at UNC
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...

. It has eight papers, all of them concerned with what had now become his main topic in the philosophy of language: viz., "how one understands what is said." He had, to some extent, written about this in his previous book, where three essays took up how to handle deviant, ungrammatical, and ambiguous utterances. Ziff was, before cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

 came around the bend, virtually the only one working on how people really speak. Claims about truth conditions, reference, and speech acts were the center of attention back then. As I put it in my review in Metaphilosophy
Metaphilosophy
Metaphilosophy, also called philosophy of philosophy, is the study of the nature, aims, and methods of philosophy. The term is derived from Greek word meta μετά and philosophía φιλοσοφία ....

, "lacking in both current linguistic theory and philosophy of language is any useful conception of how people talk". "Understanding Understanding" began to develop such a conception, factor by relevant factor. Zeno Vendler
Zeno Vendler
Zeno Vendler was an American philosopher of language, and a founding member and former director of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. His work on lexical aspect, quantifiers, and nominalization has been influential in the field of linguistics.-Life:Vendler was born and...

 said that "in spite of Ziff’s own modest assessment of the results, it still represents the most interesting, and most important, recent work on the problem of understanding speech".

Two essays are criticisms, taking on Grice
Paul Grice
Herbert Paul Grice , usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H...

’s original attempt to connect what a sentence means and what a speaker intends, and then Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition...

’s concept of stimulus meaning. The former was first in Analysis, the latter in The Philosophical Review. A. J. Ayer thought the paper on Grice was one of the better critical pieces he had read in a number of years. The reviewer for Philosophia was discouraged "to find later elaborations of Grice’s theory (e.g., Schiffer’s) failing to respond to this essay originally published in 1967". Two essays are about how natural languages differ from formal languages, and how one should view talk about the logical structure of English sentences, which was in vogue then, in large part because of the hoopla about Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

an deep structures and a new interest (à la Davidson, Montague, and Parsons) in event sentences and indirect discourse. In "Understanding", Ziff presented an analytical data processing-systematic synthesis view of understanding what people say. The most important chapters - "What Is Said", "There’s More To Seeing Than Meets the Eye", and "Something About Conceptual Schemes" - are about, in their various ways, how levels of abstraction are involved in understanding what people say, as with Ziff’s famous example of someone saying that a cheetah can outrun a man. Ziff was the first philosopher to appreciate this phenomenon.

Books

Semantic Analysis came out in 1960, and by 1967 it had gone through five printings in hardbound and was also appearing in paperback. The book goes back to Ziff’s work in aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

. As far back as graduate school, he was thinking about the reasons why a work of art is either good or bad, and so he was interested in determining what the phrase 'good painting' means. From there, he went on to determine what the word 'good' means in English: viz., "answering to certain interests". And then all the way to "an informal introduction to and sketch of a rigorous semantic theory" that would be adequate for "determining a method and a means of evaluating and choosing between competing analyses of words and utterances". In short, for confirming claims that a word had this meaning or that, like the word 'good'. This "sketch" did not strike everyone as all that informal since he ends up at a set of conditions under which a morphological element has meaning in English, and it does so, for openers, in terms of the distributive and contrastive sets for the element.

Semantic Analysis stared down, as it were, questions of meaning more seriously than any previous philosophy book. It brought ideas from structural linguistics
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...

 (even some from the new generative grammars) right into philosophers’ discussions of what this or that word means with the goal of actually coming to a conclusion that could be sensibly defended. Some philosophers did not like getting this real (e.g., G. E. M. Anscombe
G. E. M. Anscombe
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe , better known as Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher from Ireland. A student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she became an authority on his work and edited and translated many books drawn from his writings, above all his Philosophical Investigations...

, not surprisingly). Others did. Paul Benacerraf
Paul Benacerraf
Paul Joseph Salomon Benacerraf is an American philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of mathematics who has been teaching at Princeton University since he joined the faculty in 1960. He was appointed Stuart Professor of Philosophy in 1974, and recently retired as the James S....

 pointed out how it was "the first systematic attempt to write on these questions", and Jerrold Katz
Jerrold Katz
Jerrold J. Katz was an American philosopher and linguist.After receiving a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, Katz became a Research Associate in Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy there in 1963,...

 called it "a pioneer work, in that it is the first to propose an empirically based theory of meaning to deal systematically with the various topics that are part of the subject of meaning, and to attempt to fit such a theory into the larger framework of structural linguistics". William Alston
William Alston
William Payne Alston was an American philosopher. He made influential contributions to the philosophy of language, epistemology and Christian philosophy. He earned his Ph.D...

 said that "future progress in semantics may go through Ziff’s book, or it may recoil from it in another direction. But to ignore it will be impossible". Jonathan Cohen
Laurence Jonathan Cohen
Jonathan Cohen FBA was a British philosopher. He was Fellow and Praelector in Philosophy, 1957–90 and Senior Tutor, 1985–90 at The Queen's College, Oxford and British Academy Reader in Humanities, University of Oxford, 1982–84.Education: St...

 said, back in the early 60s, the last chapter "is one of the best discussions of the word 'good' that has ever been published". It still is, forty years later. In a recent survey of the past fifty years of philosophy, Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam is an American philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist, who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science...

 makes a point of mentioning how important Semantic Analysis was, and remarks that the "Ziffian image of meanings as a recursive system" became part of "all of our philosophical vocabularies" in the early 60s, along with Chomsky’s ideas about recursive syntactic structures. The "our" here refers to the young analytic philosophers, principally on the East coast, and specifically then at Princeton. Putnam adds, in a footnote, all of today’s graduate students should also realize that it was Ziff, and not Donald Davidson
Donald Davidson (philosopher)
Donald Herbert Davidson was an American philosopher born in Springfield, Massachusetts, who served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton...

, who came up with the recursive idea in semantic analysis.

Semantic Analysis holds a record for Ziff’s six books. It received the longest review, going 18 pages in Language in 1962. Antiaesthetics is in second place. The review in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy (1987) is 15 pages long, and explained many features of Antiaesthetics. The book had two big topics, and Ziff wrote in a more traditionally sustained and explicit way about one of them, anti-art and its spin-off, anti-aesthetics. It took him back to defining art – what counts as art – and what to say about new things that lacked features of previous art. Ziff thought they could be art, even if they involved "the total rejection of present aspects of art". More generally, he thought "anything that can be viewed is a fit object for aesthetic attention", and none is "more fit than others". The second big topic was not entirely new for Ziff either. It had shown up, for example, in Understanding Understanding, and I called it in my review in Metaphilosophy, "a moral concerning limitations of analysis", and asked if it meant that analyzing things wouldn’t help you understand what is said, or if you simply can’t analyze the complexities. Ziff repeatedly discussed this in Antiaesthetics, and he remarked, and illustrated essay by essay, that we don’t have and may never have good analyses - standard necessary and sufficient conditions, the philosopher’s effective procedures or algorithms - for understanding one thing after another about art. He wrote about this again in his paper "Remarks About Judgements, Painters, and Philosophers", which appeared in 1987 in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

J. M. Hanson, his second book (from 1962) is not a philosophy book. Hanson was an English painter who came to Cornell as a professor of art in 1945 when he was 45 years old. He was Paul Ziff’s teacher during his B.F.A. degree years, and this book has one color and 32 black-and-white plates of Hanson's paintings (oil on canvas). Ziff introduced the plates with an essay about Hanson’s background and style. He called Hanson an "English Romantic" who worked in "the tradition of cubism and geometric abstraction" to produce "images of clarity" that were "neither rough nor loud" nor large like fashionable works from, say, abstract expressionists
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...

.

Philosophic Turnings appeared in 1966, went through a number of printings in hardback, and was translated into Italian in 1969. It is subtitled "Essays in Conceptual Appreciation", includes 13 papers (12 previously published), and has some of Ziff’s classic papers from the period 1951-1966, especially about art and mental issues. It starts with, as Helen Cartwright put it in her review, "Ziff’s quite substantial work in aesthetics". Paul Ziff was one of the few philosophers in the past fifty years - you can count them on one hand - who had a name both inside and outside of aesthetics. As one reviewer said, he is "one of the more provocative thinkers in the field of aesthetics today, and has helped to re-establish the status of aesthetics in philosophy by introducing a new series of questions in the arts".

Epistemic Analysis came out with Reidel in 1984, but Ziff started it back in 1962 when he was in Rome for the year on a Guggenheim Fellowship. He stalled well into the manuscript, and didn’t start writing again until the early 1980s. The book has a subtitle: "A Coherence Theory of Knowledge". Most of it was never published before. It only contains material from two published papers, one in Linguistics and Philosophy on coherence, and one in Studies in Language on reference. Epistemic Analysis goes at the word 'know' like Semantic Analysis went at the word 'good', and it may be, to use Jonathan Cohen’s line, one of the best discussions of 'know' that has been published. Gilbert Harman
Gilbert Harman
Gilbert Harman is a contemporary American philosopher, teaching at Princeton University, who has published widely in linguistics, semantics, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller...

 called it a "brilliant, difficult book", "rich with insights about the passive construction in English, reference, hypostasis, evidence, and many other subjects", as well as "marvelously written, philosophical poetry". Other reviews used words like "rich", "provocative", "iconoclastic", "bold", "subtle, interesting, inventive and stylishly written", with "a fascinating line of anti-skeptical argument" from an author of "undoubted acumen and insight".

The book went against the grain and did not extend the usual ideas. It did not have any of the "justified, true belief" analysis and the search for a fourth condition to patch it up, or talk about varieties of foundationalism, externalism or internalism, let alone the merits of naturalizing. Indeed, Ziff never mentioned Gettier
Edmund Gettier
Edmund L. Gettier III is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; he owes his reputation to a single three-page paper published in 1963 called "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?"Gettier was educated at Cornell University, where his mentors...

 or most of the usual crowd then - say Goldman
Alvin Goldman
Alvin Ira Goldman is an American professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He previously taught at the University of Michigan and at the University of Arizona. He earned his PhD from Princeton University and is married to Holly Smith, a well known ethicist, former...

, Harman
Gilbert Harman
Gilbert Harman is a contemporary American philosopher, teaching at Princeton University, who has published widely in linguistics, semantics, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller...

, Dretske
Fred Dretske
Frederick Irwin Dretske is a philosopher noted for his contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of mind. His more recent work centers on conscious experience and self-knowledge. Additionally, he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in 1994...

, Pollock
Jean-Yves Pollock
Born in Paris in 1946, Jean-Yves Pollock is a French linguist. Specialist of comparative syntax Pollock is best known for his work on verb movement and the structure of IP in French and English.- References :...

 and Unger
Peter Unger
Peter K. Unger is a contemporary American philosopher and professor at New York University. His main interests lie in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of mind. He attended Swarthmore College at the same time as David Lewis, earning a B.A. in philosophy in 1962,...

; a few pages are on Nozick
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick was an American political philosopher, most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia , a right-libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice...

. He maintained that it was senseless to speak about a justified belief, that "neither knowledge nor belief either require or can accept justification", that you did not need evidence to "know that p", or need to believe that p, that 'know' is univocal and means, at bottom, you are in a position to know, no matter whether it is knowing that p, how to do something, or knowing a person, that knowing something (or someone) always counts as an increase in "global coherence" compared to not, and that "coherence is a matter of logical structure". Ziff’s coherence view differs from the other coherentists
Coherence theory of truth
Coherence theory of truth regards truth as coherence with some specified set of sentences, propositions or beliefs. There is no single coherence theory of truth, but rather an assortment of perspectives that are commonly collected under this title...

 (Lehrer
Keith Lehrer
Keith Lehrer is the Regent's Professor emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Arizona with an affiliation with the University of Miami in Florida. He previously taught at the University of Rochester....

, BonJour
Laurence BonJour
Laurence BonJour is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington.-Life:He received his bachelor's degrees in Philosophy and Political Science from Macalester College and his doctorate in 1969 from Princeton University with a dissertation directed by Richard...

, Rescher
Nicholas Rescher
Nicholas Rescher is an American philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh. In a productive research career extending over six decades, Rescher has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style and author of a system of pragmatic idealism which weaves together threads of...

). He stated his analysis of the philosopher’s favorite, knows that p, like this: "one knows that p if and only if p is true, and one is in a position such that, in that position, any possibility of one’s being in error with respect to the truth of p may be safely discounted". This is a fallibilist analysis and Ziff used it to counter skepticism in terms of a technical notion, a safe position, "in which the possibility of error may safely be discounted".

Antiaesthetics was his second book with Reidel, and it also came out in 1984. The book is subtitled "An Appreciation of the Cow with the Subtile Nose", which refers to Jean Dubuffet
Jean Dubuffet
Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making.-Life and work:Dubuffet was...

’s painting in the Metropolitan Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

. There is a page-size picture of this painting at the start of the book and Ziff discussed it at length in places. It is an example of what he called "antiart". The book has eight previously published papers from 1972–1981 and three unpublished ones. "The Cow on the Roof" was an invited symposium paper at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division, and came out in The Journal of Philosophy, along with comments by Kendall Walton and Guy Sircello. It is about the identity of a piece of music and Ziff emphasized the idea that pieces of music have variants. Ziff first wrote on this topic in his critical review of Goodman’s "Languages of Art" in The Philosophical Review (1971). "Art and Sociobiology" was in Mind in 1981, and was another first: viz., a serious philosopher taking a biological view of aesthetic practices and ideas such as appreciating and intrinsic value. Ziff combined the sociobiology with his notion of "aspection" and person-act-entity-conditions approach from his early paper, "Reasons in Art Criticism". Other papers were invited for conferences and their proceedings - on sports, dance, Wittgenstein, and literature - and a Reidel festschrift
Festschrift
In academia, a Festschrift , is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during his or her lifetime. The term, borrowed from German, could be translated as celebration publication or celebratory writing...

. One appeared in a book about philosophy along with similar papers by Ayer, Feyerabend
Paul Feyerabend
Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades . He lived a peripatetic life, living at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand,...

, Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...

, and Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition...

, among others. One chapter, "Anything Viewed", was reprinted in an Oxford Reader in aesthetics in 1997.

Works

  • "Art and the Object of Art" (1951)
  • "The Task of Defining a Work of Art" (1953)
  • "Reasons in Art Criticism" (1958)
  • "About Behaviourism" (1958)
  • "The Feelings of Robots" (1959)
  • "On What a Painting Represents" (1960)
  • "Semantic Analysis"
    Semantic Analysis (book)
    Semantic Analysis is a book written by american philosopher Paul Ziff. It was first published in 1960 but has been reprinted at least four times since.-Synopsis:...

    (1960)
  • "On Understanding Understanding Utterances" (1964)
  • "The Simplicity of Other Minds" (1965)
  • "On H.P. Grice’s Account of Meaning" (1967)
  • "What is Said" (1972)
  • "Understanding Understanding" (1972)
  • "The Cow on the Roof" (1973)
  • "About Proper Names" (1977)
  • "Anything Viewed" (1979)
  • "Art and Sociobiology" (1981)

External links

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