Journal article
Heidegger and van Gogh’s Shoes
- Abstract:
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Martin Heidegger’s discussion of one of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings of a pair of shoes plays a critical role in the development of his philosophy of art. Few passages in Heidegger’s entire corpus have occasioned more controversy and commentary than his short discussion of this painting. Reception of Heidegger’s philosophy of art has, to a surprising degree, been shaped by a sharply critical essay published by the art historian Meyer Schapiro in 1968, entitled ‘The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh’. In the decades since, Schapiro’s critique has set the terms of the debate over Heidegger’s interpretation of van Gogh’s painting. The near consensus view seems to be that, as Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe puts it, ‘every fact enunciated by Schapiro in that attack […] is correct’. In this essay, however, I show that it is closer to the truth to say that every claim Schapiro made in his attack on Heidegger is false. Ever since, both critics and defenders of Heidegger have uncritically accepted and repeated Schapiro’s basic factual errors. Once the record is corrected, this opens up space for a reappraisal of Heidegger’s engagement with van Gogh’s shoes, which I offer in the concluding sections of the essay.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 2.7MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1080/02666286.2024.2412352
Authors
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/012mzw131
- Grant:
- MRF-2022-032
- Publisher:
- Routledge
- Journal:
- Word & Image More from this journal
- Volume:
- 41
- Issue:
- 1
- Pages:
- 1-23
- Publication date:
- 2025-05-09
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-05-02
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1943-2178
- ISSN:
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0266-6286
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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2031905
- Local pid:
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pubs:2031905
- Deposit date:
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2024-09-23
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Mark Adam Wrathall
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permitsnon-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this articlehas been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
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