Projecting Worlds Today: An Appraisal of Wolterstorff’s Works and Worlds of Art Forty Years Later

Abstract

This essay aims at an appraisal of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s magum opus on the subject of art, the book Works and Worlds of Art, published in 1980 by the Clarendon Press in Oxford. The book is well known by analytic philosophers of religion, but its innovative value still seems to receive less recognition from other schools of thought and from artists and scholars in the area of Arts. Therefore, this introduction situates the book in the history of Philosophy of Art, with special focus on the state of affairs for the discipline in the twentieth century, engaging dialogue with other philosophical proposals in the period. Finally, the core concepts of Wolterstorff’s philosophy of art will be presented and defined in order to offer a glimpse of the richness that this book could still provide to contemporary scholarship.