•  480
    Artworks as historical individuals
    European Journal of Philosophy 11 (2). 2003.
    In 1907, Alfred Stieglitz took what was to become one of his signature photographs, The Steerage. Stieglitz stood at the rear of the ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm II and photographed the decks, first-class passengers above and steerage passengers below, carefully exposing the film to their reflected light. Later, in the darkroom, Stieglitz developed this film and made a number of prints from the resulting negative. The photograph is a familiar one, an enduring piece of social commentary, but what exact…Read more
  •  332
    Prevention, independence, and origin
    Mind 115 (458): 375-386. 2006.
    A New Route to the Necessity of Origin’ (2004, henceforth ‘NR’), we offered an argument for the thesis that there are necessary connections between material things and their material origins. Much of the philosophical interest lay in our claim that the argument did not depend on so-called sufficiency principles for crossworld identity. It has been the verdict of much recent work on the necessity of origin that valid arguments for the thesis require some such sufficiency principle as a premise bu…Read more
  •  275
    Review of Aesthetic Order by Ruth Lorand (review)
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60. 2002.
  •  229
    Luminosity and the safety of knowledge
    with Ram Neta
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 85 (4). 2004.
    In his recent Knowledge and its Limits, Timothy Williamson argues that no non-trivial mental state is such that being in that state suffices for one to be in a position to know that one is in it. In short, there are no “luminous” mental states. His argument depends on a “safety” requirement on knowledge, that one’s confident belief could not easily have been wrong if it is to count as knowledge. We argue that the safety requirement is ambiguous; on one interpretation it is obviously true but usele…Read more
  •  193
    A new route to the necessity of origin
    Mind 113 (452): 705-725. 2004.
    Saul Kripke has claimed that there are necessary connections between material things and their material origins. The usual defences of such necessity of origin theses appeal to either a sufficiency of origin principle or a branching-times model of necessity. In this paper we offer a different defence. Our argument proceeds from more modest ‘independence principles’, which govern the processes by which material objects are produced. Independence principles are motivated, in turn, by appeal to a p…Read more
  •  101
    Why Play the Notes? Indirect Aesthetic Normativity in Performance
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1): 78-91. 2020.
    While all agree that score compliance in performance is valuable, the source of this value is unclear. Questions about what authenticity requires crowd out questions about our reasons to be compliant in the first place, perhaps because they seem trivial or uninteresting. I argue that such reasons cannot be understood as ordinary aesthetic, instrumental, epistemic, or moral reasons. Instead, we treat considerations of score compliance as having a kind of final value, one which requires further ex…Read more
  •  97
    I could have done that
    British Journal of Aesthetics 45 (3): 209-228. 2005.
    Could a work of art actually authored by one artist have been authored, instead, by another? This is the question of the necessity of authorship. After distinguishing this question from another, regarding individuation, with which it is often confused, this paper offers an argument that authorship is indeed a necessary feature of most artworks. The argument proceeds from ‘independence principles’, which govern the processes by which artworks are produced. Independence principles are motivated, i…Read more
  •  83
    Anscombe, Zygotes, and Coming‐to‐be
    Noûs 48 (4): 699-717. 2013.
    In some quarters, it is held that Anscombe proved that a zygote is not a human being on the basis of an argument involving the possibility of identical twins, but there is surprisingly little agreement on what her argument is supposed to be. I criticize several extant interpretations, both as interpretations of Anscombe and as self-standing arguments, and offer a different understanding of her conclusion on which the non-specificity of creation processes and their goals is at issue.
  •  57
    Inner Achievement
    Erkenntnis 80 (6): 1191-1204. 2015.
    The appealing idea that knowledge is best understood as a kind of achievement faces significant criticisms, among them Matthew Chrisman’s charge that the whole project rests on a kind of ontological category mistake. Chrisman argues that while knowledge and belief are states, the kind of normativity found in, for example, Sosa’s famous ‘Triple-A’ structure of assessment is only applicable to performances, end-directed events that unfold over time, and never to states. What is overlooked, both by…Read more
  •  48
    Psychologism and Completeness in the Arts
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (2): 131-141. 2017.
    When is an artwork complete? Most hold that the correct answer to this question is psychological in nature. A work is said to be complete just in case the artist regards it as complete or is appropriately disposed to act as if he or she did. Even though this view seems strongly supported by metaphysical, epistemological, and normative considerations, this article argues that such psychologism about completeness is mistaken, fundamentally, because it cannot make sense of the artist's own perspect…Read more
  •  43
    Artworld Metaphysics by kraut, robert
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (3): 339-341. 2009.
  •  38
    The Ontology of Art
    In Berys Gaut & Dominic Lopes (eds.), Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 3rd edition, Routledge. pp. 235-45. 2013.
    Ontology is the study of what exists and the nature of the most fundamental categories into which those existents fall. Ontologists offer a map of reality, one divided into such broad, overlapping territories as physical and mental, concrete and abstract, universal and particular. Such a map provides the setting for further philosophical investigation. Ontologists of art seek to locate works of art in this wider terrain, to say where in our universe they fit in. Their governing question is, thus, …Read more
  •  31
    Psychologism about Artistic Plans: Reply to Cray
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 76 (1): 105-107. 2018.
  •  23
    Pluralism About Artwork Completeness
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (1): 105-108. 2022.
  •  2
    Photographs and the Ontology of the Real
    Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. 1999.
    This essay begins with a puzzle in metaphysics, the unity dilemma . The enduring debate between monists and pluralists can be understood in terms of a single problem, the supposed impossibility of including the bulk of our naive ontology in a single, all-embracing ontological category. Either one insists, as the monist does, on a unified ontology at the cost of surrendering much of our naive ontology to reduction or non-existence, or one accommodates the bulk of our naive ontology by accepting m…Read more