Draft:Arnold Isenberg

Arnold Isenberg (September 12, 1911 – February 26, 1965) was an American analytic philosopher best known for his work in aesthetics and ethics.

Biography
Isenberg was awarded a PhD by Harvard University in 1935. Following stints teaching at both Harvard and Cornell, he joined the faculty of Queens College in 1941. There he served as acting chairman and then chairman of the philosophy department from 1947. Isenberg moved joined Stanford University's philosophy department at a later date. During his time there, he was funded for a couple of years by a Ford Foundation grant. In 1962, Isenberg joined the Philosophy Department at Michigan State University, where he worked until his death. During his career, he also held visiting posts at Columbia University and the Universities of California and Colorado.

Isenberg published widely both as an author and as an editor, mostly in the fields of aesthetics and ethics and frequently gave papers at meetings of the American Philosophical Association, of the American Society for Aesthetics, among others.

Contributions to philosophy
The most lasting contribution Isenberg made to philosophy is his theorizing about the nature of art criticism.

Among the most famous of these works is the article 'Critical Communication', published in The Philosophical Review in 1949. In the article, he distinguishes the kind of communication that characterizes art critical discourse from more ordinary forms of discourse. Isenberg famously argues that a significant part of art critical discourse is concerned with guiding others' perceptions so that they might perceive the work in question as the critic perceives it. What distinguishes art critical discourse from more ordinary discourse is that, while in ordinary discourse (e.g., "there is a tree in the garden"), the content is fully communicated by the language the communicator uses, in art critical discourse, the content is "completed" by the recipient's perceiving what is described in the artwork. Such communication succeeds when the communicator induces a "sameness of vision, of experienced content" in the recipient.