Morris Weitz

Education

BA, Wayne State University, 1938. PhD, University of Michigan, 1943.

Career

University of Washington, 1944-1945. Vassar College, 1945-1948. Ohio State University, 1954-1969.

Professor, Brandeis University, from 1969.

Views

Weitz wrote extensively on the basic concepts of literary criticism and art history. He also investigated philosophical ideas expressed in literature. In "The role of theory in aesthetics’ (1956) he argued that generalizations about the nature of art, particularly those that assumed that art could be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, involved a logically vain attempt to define what could not be defined and foreclosed on artistic creativity. These claims stirred Mandelbaum and others to defend the attempt to find a definition of art, although Weitz continued to maintain his view that such an attempt was misguided. Weitz’s later writings, particularly The Opening Mind (1977), expanded his account of open concepts, a notion derived from Wittgenstein's writings on family resemblance terms, and investigated the history of theories of concepts. Sources: Directory of American Scholars, 6th edn; Pi, complete bibliography in Weitz 1988.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Wittgenstein.