Abstract

It is evident that metaphors are common in the arts and in art criticism as well as our talk about the arts more generally. Thus an account of metaphor will form part of a complete understanding of the arts. But some have argued that metaphor is not just something of which the arts avail themselves; it is at the root of the arts (or shares a common root with them). Why this is so will be clear once we better understand the nature of metaphor. We will thus consider, first, a number of prominent philosophical accounts both ancient and modern (including reductivist accounts, conceptual-comparison accounts, accounts emphasizing the creative nature of metaphor, and some recent alternative accounts) and, second, conceptions of the relation between metaphor and the arts and the role metaphor plays within them.