Two Recent Anthologies on Color

Although philosophers have puzzled about color for millennia, the recent explosion in philosophical interest in the topic can largely be traced to C. L. Hardin’s widely-read and deservedly-praised Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow [Hardin, 1988]. While Hardin has had no more than the usual, limited success in convincing other philosophers to adopt the substance of his views, he has been quite influential about a point of philosophical methodology: he has convinced many that responsible philosophical work on color simply must make contact with the vast body of empirical color science, and thereby has effected an enormous (and to my mind, extremely salutary) change in the terms of recent philosophical discussion of color. Indeed, writers have been so eager to take Hardin’s lesson on board that one is hard-pressed to find a recent philosophical book on color that does not acknowledge it, crediting Hardin by name. In this vein, a number of recent anthologies on color have attempted to integrate philosophical and scientific work on color. Among these are Readings on Color (itself two volumes: [Byrne and Hilbert, 1997b], and [Byrne and Hilbert, 1997c]), and Color Vision: Perspectives from Different Disciplines [Backhaus et al., 1998].