Those questions are doubtless valid and important and, as one might expect, philosophers of art discuss them periodically, some employing the term ' temporal arts ' to identify art forms such as music or poetry in which time seems to play a prominent role. The issue here has nothing to do with the function of time within works of art – for example, the ways in which the passing of time might be represented in film or the novel, or the role of tempo in music. The dilemma in question concerns the relationship between art (understood in the general sense of the term) and the passing of time, and to avoid possible confusion, it is important to begin by clarifying what is at stake. To keep discussion within manageable proportions, the focus here is placed principally on the analytic school, a limitation that is perhaps less serious than it might seem given that this approach to the philosophy of art is currently quite influential not only in Anglophone countries but elsewhere as well. The dilemma I address here also affects the other major school of thought in modern aesthetics – the ' Continental ' school – but in that context it assumes a somewhat different form which would require separate consideration.

The issues considered here are seldom discussed by analytic philosophers of art themselves – a matter to be regretted, as I will argue – but they are, nevertheless, of a quite fundamental kind and tell us much about the nature of the discipline, the presuppositions on which it is based, and, as I shall argue in the concluding stages, certain factors that isolate it from the world of art as we now know it. This essay examines certain assumptions underlying Anglo-American ' analytic ' aesthetics, and more specifically the areas of that discipline that concern themselves with the nature and significance of art.

Porte mine pica dry