Katherine Gilbert

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Katherine Gilbert (born July 29, 1886 - April 28, 1952 in Durham, North Carolina) was an American philosopher.

Gilbert taught as a philosophy professor at Duke University and headed the Department of Aesthetics, Art and Music until her retirement in 1951. She was the first full professor at Duke University.

Gilbert's work is about the knowledge of the aesthetic and the actual artistic. But Gilbert integrates this basic knowledge into a system of thought that also includes other areas of philosophy. Art is assigned a specific place in it.

In all of Gilbert's writings, arguments are presented for the thesis that artistic activity can be equated with a problem of knowledge. Parallel to the cognitive process of science, which wants to construct a model of reality in a rational-discursive way, the cognition of the artistic proceeds differently. Art tries to create an imaginative reality on the path of sensually perceptible production.

Works

  • Maurice Blondel's Philosophy of Action, 1924;
  • Studies in Recent Aesthetics, 1927;
  • A History of Esthetics (with H. Kuhn) 1939;
  • Aesthetic Studies, (extensive bibliography), 1952;
  • The Mind and its Discipline, in: Philosophical Review 27, 1918, pp. 413-427.
  • The Relation between Esthetics and Art Criticism, in: Journal of Philosophy 35, 1938, pp. 289-95.