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Richard Wollheim

 

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Richard Wollheim



 
 
Richard Arthur Wollheim (5 May, 1923 – 4 November, 2003) was a British
United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom , the UK or Britain,is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe....
 philosopher noted for original work on mind
Philosophy of mind

Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental property, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain....
 and emotion
Emotion

An emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts, and behavior.Emotions are subjective experiences, or experienced from an individual point of view....
s, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting. Wollheim served as the president of the British Society of Aesthetics from 1992 onwards until his death in 2003.

Son of an actress and a theatre impresario, Richard Wollheim attended Westminster School
Westminster School

The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, almost always known as Westminster School, is one of Britain's leading independent schools, with the highest Oxbridge acceptance rate of any secondary school or college....
, London
London

London is the capital of both England and the United Kingdom, and the most populous municipality in the European Union. An important settlement for two millennia, History of London goes back to its founding by the Roman Empire....
, and Balliol College
Balliol College, Oxford

Balliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the Colleges of the University of Oxford of the University of Oxford in England.Balliol is Oxford's most popular college, measured in terms of the number of applications for entry from prospective students....
, Oxford (1941-2, 1945-8), interrupted by active military service in World War II.






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Richard Arthur Wollheim (5 May, 1923 – 4 November, 2003) was a British
United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom , the UK or Britain,is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe....
 philosopher noted for original work on mind
Philosophy of mind

Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental property, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain....
 and emotion
Emotion

An emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts, and behavior.Emotions are subjective experiences, or experienced from an individual point of view....
s, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting. Wollheim served as the president of the British Society of Aesthetics from 1992 onwards until his death in 2003.

Son of an actress and a theatre impresario, Richard Wollheim attended Westminster School
Westminster School

The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, almost always known as Westminster School, is one of Britain's leading independent schools, with the highest Oxbridge acceptance rate of any secondary school or college....
, London
London

London is the capital of both England and the United Kingdom, and the most populous municipality in the European Union. An important settlement for two millennia, History of London goes back to its founding by the Roman Empire....
, and Balliol College
Balliol College, Oxford

Balliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the Colleges of the University of Oxford of the University of Oxford in England.Balliol is Oxford's most popular college, measured in terms of the number of applications for entry from prospective students....
, Oxford (1941-2, 1945-8), interrupted by active military service in World War II. In 1949 he obtained a first in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and began teaching at University College London
University College London

University College London is a university institution and constituent college of the University of London based primarily in London, England, United Kingdom....
, where he became Grote Professor of Mind and Logic and Department Head from 1963 to 1982. He was visiting professor at Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Minnesota, Graduate Center, CUNY, the University of California-Berkeley, UC Davis and elsewhere. He chaired the Department at UC Berkeley, 1998-2002. On retirement from Berkeley, he served briefly as a guest lecturer at Balliol College. Wollheim gave several distinguished lecture series, most notably the Andrew M. Mellon lectures in Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1984), published as Painting as an Art.

Besides his philosophical research and teaching on art, Wollheim was well-known for his philosophical treatments of depth psychology
Depth psychology

Depth psychology is a broad term that refers to any psychological approach examining the depth of human experience. It includes the study and interpretation of dreams, complexes, and Jungian archetypess, and it encompasses any psychology that works with the concept of an unconscious mind....
, notably Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian psychiatrist who founded the psychoanalysis of psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of Psychological repression and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for curing psychopathology through dialogue...
. Art and its Objects was one of the twentieth century's most influential texts on philosophical aesthetics
Aesthetics

Aesthetics or esthetics is commonly known as the study of senses or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste ....
. In a 1965 essay, 'Minimal Art', he seems to have coined the meme
Meme

A meme is a unit or element of culture ideas, symbols or practices; such units or elements transmit from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena....
 term 'minimal
Minimal

Minimal can mean:* In mathematics, see Minimal element.* In art , see Minimalism.* In computing, see Computing minimalism.* Names:**For the song by Pet Shop Boys, see "Minimal "....
', although the meaning of the word drifted from his. In his well-received, posthumously-published autobiography of youth, Germs: A Memoir of Childhood, complemented by a few essays, Wollheim provides much information about his family background and his life, into early manhood, and understanding of the roots of his interests and sensibility.

Publications

For an extensive bibliography of Richard Wollheim's publications by a professional bibliographer, see Eddie Yeghiayan's UC-Irvine site . See also the 'Philweb' listing .

Note: given his unique mind, personality, and distinctive writing styles, along with his curiosity and sociability, many of Richard Wollheim' publications are not captured by academic categories. Besides books, he published many articles, in journals and edited collections, book reviews, and gallery catalogues for shows. Inquiries into his mss, letters and recordings of his talks might be begun.

Books and separately published works

  • F. H. Bradley. Harmondsworth; Baltimore: Penguin, 1959. 2d edition, 1969.
  • 'Socialism and Culture'. Fabian Tract, 331. London: Fabian Society, 1961.
  • 'On Drawing an Object'. London: University College, 1965 (long essay). Repr. in On Art and the Mind.
  • Art and Its Objects: An Introduction to Aesthetics. NYC: Harper & Row, 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970. Harper Torchbook, 1971.
  • Art and its Objects: With Six Supplementary Essays. 2d edition. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
  • A Family Romance. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969. NYC: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1969 (novel).
  • Freud. London: Fontana, 1971. Paperback, 1973. American and later Cambridge University Press (1981) edns titled Sigmund Freud.
  • On Art and the Mind: Essays and Lectures. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1972.
  • 'The Good Self and the Bad Self: The Moral Psychology of British Idealism and the English School of Psychoanalysis Compared' (1975)—repr. in The Mind and Its Depths.
  • 'The Sheep and the Ceremony' (1976)—repr. in The Mind and Its Depths.
  • The Thread of Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.
  • Painting as an Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
  • The Mind and Its Depths. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993 (essays).
  • On the Emotions. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999.
  • Germs: A Memoir of Childhood. London: Waywiser Press, 2004.


Edited books

  • The Image in Form: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes (1974)
  • Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays (1974)
  • Philosophical Essays on Freud, with James Hopkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
  • R.B.Kitaj : A Retrospective, with Richard Morphet. London: Tate Publishing, 1994.


Some main articles

  • “Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art”, The Journal of Philosophy: 62, no. 16 (Ag. 1970): 531.
  • “Adrian Stokes, critic, painter, poet”. Times Literary Supplement (Feb. 17 1978): 207-209.
  • "Minimal Art", Arts Magazine (January 1965): 26-32. Repr. in On Art and the Mind.
  • "A Bed out of Leaves", London Review of Books 25, no. 23 (4 December 2003).


External links

  • - PDF format