David Prall

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 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. 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