Gallie’s paper is organized as a series of titled but unnumbered sections. I’ve assigned only about the first half of this paper, and that will take you through the first part of the fourth of its sections. The guide below has a few comments on later parts of the paper to suggest what you can find there if you have time to read more than we will discuss.

• “Introductory” (pp. 167-170). This motivation for Gallie’s discussion sets some ideas you’ve seen in the paper you just read in a more general setting. That is important because Gallie’s ideas have been influential outside discussions of art; but, for our purposes, this section might be most interesting as an occasion to think about Gallie’s relation to Kant’s discussion of the antinomy of taste. In that regard, notice the reference to Kant on p. 167 and his brief statement (at the end of the first paragraph of p. 169) of what he means by the phrase “essentially contested.”

• “The Artificial Example” (pp. 170f). It is important to remember that this example is designed to serve a purpose and may not reflect any ordinary use of word (“championship”) that Gallie employs. Be sure to note, in particular, feature II of the use he has in mind.

• “The Conditions of Essential Contestedness” (pp. 171-180). This is the central section of the paper, the one in which Gallie sets out his account essentially contested concepts. That account is stated as a series of conditions that fall into three groups. At the beginning of the section, Gallie presents four preconditions for a concept to be essentially contested and a fifth that tells when the concept does have that property. Most of the section is devoted to discussing these conditions but at the very end he introduces two more, for a total of seven.

• “Some Live Examples” (pp. 180-187—you are assigned pp. 180-183). I’ve assigned the first two of Gallie’s four examples, adherence to a religious tradition, specifically Christianity (pp. 180f), and art (pp. 182ff). It’s the latter that is of most interest to us, but the discussion of it depends somewhat on Gallie’s discussion of the former. Of course, you should look for connections here with his other paper. (Of the remaining two examples, democracy and social justice, the first receives by far the most attention. Although these examples go beyond the scope of this course, they are important applications of Gallie’s ideas, and political philosophy may be the area where his work has been cited most often.)

We won’t have time to discuss the following two sections of the paper.

• “Outstanding Questions” (pp. 188-195). Gallie considers three further questions about the idea of essentially contested concepts (on pp. 188-192, pp. 192-194, and pp. 194-195) though only the first is numbered in the text. The first is probably the most interesting of them in connection with the concept of art.

• “Concluding Remarks” (pp. 196-198). In his conclusion Gallie considers two possible objections (on p. 196 and pp. 196-198—these are numbered in the text). The second is interesting in connection with art though less with aesthetics directly than with something like the “philosophy of aesthetics”—i.e., less with a discussion of the nature of art than with a discussion of how we may understand the nature of art.