David Wight Prall (1886–1940) was a philosopher of art and an academic. His interests include aesthetics, value theory, abstract ideas, truth and the history of philosophy. He is noted for his notion of aesthetic surfaces.

Biography

Prall was born on 5 October 1886 in Saginaw, Michigan. Prall obtained his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan, having studied mathematics, chemistry, English and German literature. He completed his master's degree on German studies and rhetoric in the same institution. He then received his PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1918. Prall was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University (1920–21; 1930–40). He taught also at Cornell (1910–12), the University of Texas (1912–14), Amherst (1918–19), and the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university, research university system in the U.S. state of California. Headquartered in Oakland, California, Oakland, the system is co ...

(1921–30). While at Harvard, Prall was a teacher and mentor to

Leonard Bernstein Leonard Bernstein ( ; born Louis Bernstein; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, pianist, music educator, author, and humanitarian. Considered to be one of the most important conductors of his time, he was th ...

, who dedicated his 1973 Norton lectures at Harvard to Prall's memory. Prall died on 21 October 1940 in Berkeley, CA, while on sabbatical from Harvard. His papers are held at Mills College, Oakland, California.

Works

Prall criticized the positivist standards of beauty and academic inquiry. Instead, he emphasized the validation of experience and feeling. He maintained that the aesthetics field is not a rarified cerebral space reserved for the specialist. Prall's notion of aesthetic surfaces is distinguished from the beauty of art. He devoted a significant part of his work, ''Aesthetic Judgment'' (1929), to this concept and proposed linking it to content. This is said to transpire by thickening aesthetic surface to encompass art's intellectual, moral, and referential content. On value theory, he maintained that there are no existent things that are values but there are entities, realities, and individual forms that are values.

Publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Prall, David American philosophers of art 1886 births 1940 deaths 20th-century American philosophers