Arthur Danto
New York City
24 March 2003

History has been the central category of my philosophy, and the way we define our experience through narrative structures - through stories.
The thing about stories is that we don't know how they are going to turn out, and how different the beginning is going to look to us when we see how it all ended. Philosophers mainly get hung up on the connection between consciousness and the brain, but my interest is in the historical structure of consciousness - how the consciousness of someone living in the thirteenth century has to have been different from the consciousness of someone living as we do in the twenty-first century.

Much of my work over the past twenty odd years has been in the philosophy of art - of how different works of art today are from what they could have been a century ago. Whatever the structure of the brain, it makes historical existence possible, and hence the historical dimension of consciousness. My philosophy of art would not really have been possible much before the art that made it possible came into being. None of the philosophies of art that were worked out before the 1960s were of the slightest use in dealing with the art of the sixties. I had to build from scratch, and try to come up with a philosophy that not merely accounted for the art of my time, but for the art of every time.

Most of what interests me has been marginal to mainstream philosophy in the twentieth century, especially in the anglo-American world. But that helps explain why mainstream philosophy itself has been so marginal to human life in that period. I'm really lucky in the respect that what gripped me as a philosopher put me into the mainstream of life.