My work has mainly been in analytical philosophy. I came to the philosophy of art in the course of working out a system on what I call the theory of representation, and had published three volumes of a projected five when I embarked on the analytical philosophy of art. These were: Analytical Philosophy of History (1965); Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge (1968); and Analytical Philosophy of Action (1973).I did not want to call the volume of art "Analytical Philosophy of Art," which was published instead as The Transfiguration of he Commonplace. (1981) That book was inspired by what had happened in the art world itself, especially in the Sixties, and it had an impact outside philosophy. It also led to my becoming art critic for The Nation, in 1984. From that point on , my work took a turn. After the Transfiguration, I published After the End of Art (1995), a kind of philosophy of art history, based on my Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery; and The Abuse of Beauty, based on my 2001 Carus Lectures for the American Philosophical Association. There have been several collections, both of criticism and philosophy of art. Though most of this has been on visual art, I have a keen interest in literature. My presidential address to the American Philosophical Association was titled Philosophy and/as/of Literature. I would love writing more literary criticism.

I have published eight books, six of them fiction, including five novels and one book of short stories, "Strange Attractors." Quite a lot of my fiction features mathematicians, philosophers or physicists. For example, the last novel, "Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics," (Houghton Mifflin) had as its main protagonists three physicists entangled with the problem of quantum entanglement, not to speak of one another. (In addition to all else I find fascinating about math and physics is its metaphorical language.) My last two books have been non-fiction, intellectual biographies of, in the one case, a mathematician, and in the other, a philosopher. In 2005, I published "Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Goedel," (Norton), which concentrates on the philosophical implications that do--and that don't--follow from Goedel's famous theorems, and in 2006 "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity" (Schocken), which concentrates on Spinoza's radical reinterpretation of personal identity. I am now back to writing a novel, entitled "The Afterlife of Skeptics." I have been writing it while at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University and have also supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship this year.

David Konstan earned his B.A. in mahtematics and his Ph.D. in classics at Columbia University. He has been at Brown since 1987. His books included: Roman Comedy (Cornell, 1983); Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (Princeton, 1994); Greek Comedy and Ideology (Oxford, 1995); Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge, 1997); Euripides Cyclops, translated by Heather McHugh, introduction and notes by David Konstan (Oxford 2001); Pity Transformed (Duckworth, 2001); and The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (Toronto, 2006). Professor Konstan has been awarded grants by the Fullbright Foundation, National Endoment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation. In 1999, he was president of the American Philological Association.

coming soon...

Richard Vann is Senior Editor of History and Theory and Professor of History and Letters, emeritus, at Wesleyan University. He has written two books on the history of Quakerism in Britain and Ireland and several works on the history of the family in England. A collection of his articles on the logic and rhetoric of historiography will shortly appear.