Nemesio G. C. Puy

The view of musical works as structural universals has been recently presented as a plausible candidate to explain the nature of works of Western classical music. According to A. R. J. Fisher (Erkenntnis 88:1245–1267, 2023), this view explains five basic intuitions about musical works’ nature: manifestation, repeatability, creatability, destructibility and persistence after the composer’s death. Fisher argues that the structural universalist view is superior to type/token theories insofar as the latter fail to explain destructibility and offer complicated explanations of creatability. And, in case they explain the same phenomena alike, the structural universalist view should be preferred to type/token theories because it is more parsimonious. This paper questions the appeal of the structural universalist view over type/token theories. First, we shall see that the structural universalist view cannot explain musical works’ destructibility without denying other basic intuitions about the persistence of musical works. Second, the structural universalist view will be revealed as unable to explain the creatability intuition properly, even in a complicated way as type/token theories do. And third, the simple way in which type/token theories explain how a musical work is the intentional object of performances, interpretations and appreciation will be contrasted with the difficulties faced by the structural universalist view. These three points will support the idea that the structural universalist view has less explanatory power than type/token theories in musical ontology, which in turn undermines the argument from parsimony against type/token theories.

Authenticity is an important and widely used concept in aesthetics. Yet it is also a contested and elusive one. In this article, we clarify the concept of authenticity as it is used in aesthetic discourse. Authenticity, we argue, is a term used to assert the truth of something possessing some contextually relevant feature that it is purported to have. Typically, however, this has an evaluative or normative dimension: the feature that an authenticity attribution verifies is either part of what grounds the object's aesthetic value or is normatively required by the aesthetic practice to which it belongs. We then propose a taxonomy of applications of authenticity according to the type of contextually relevant feature an object must possess to count as authentic—material authenticity, work authenticity, cultural authenticity, and personal authenticity. Using these categories, we provide a roadmap for navigating recent debates on authenticity in aesthetics.

Amie Thomasson’s descriptivism and Julian Dodd’s revisionism are two outstanding opposed views within the methodological debate in the metaontology of art. In this paper, I argue that none of them provide an adequate methodology for the ontology of artworks insofar as they do not secure ontological accounts to play a substantive role in improving our understanding of artworks and the practices they involve. Thomasson’s descriptivism faces a problem of triviality, unjustifiably reducing art ontology to a trivial task. In turn, Dodd’s revisionary approach faces a problem of solipsism, being a methodology that does not ensure conceptual mediation between the ontology of art and artistic practices. Finally, I will sketch a solution for both problems based on Nelson Goodman’s distinction between entrenchment and familiarity of a predicate.

This paper identifies a previously unrecognized, and philosophically interesting, kind of mistake that can be made by a composer in composing a work of Western classical music. Specifically, she may err by writing some scored instructions for performance that undercut the meaning of her own work. Since following those instructions would frustrate the most fundamental purpose of performing that work—namely, to evince understanding of it—the practice of work-performance sanctions performers to correct those mistakes in performance by departing from the score where necessary. The possibility of this kind of mistake and their correction lies, we argue, in the distinction between a work’s meaning and its elaboration in the scored instructions for performance. We substantiate this claim and defend it against the tight constraint thesis, the view that a work’s meaning is determined by the totality of its score’s instructions. This thesis will be revealed to be both in conflict with the manifest image of our performance practice and philosophically unmotivated. Finally, we consider the scope of the composer’s authority in light of the possibility of the sort of mistakes and their correction that concern us here.

This paper analyzes the peculiarity of some architectural works being artifacts designed to on a par perform typically divorced functions. Like technical artifacts, they are primarily intended to fulfill specific practical functions related to our everyday life. Simultaneously, some of them are intended to primarily perform an artistic function as well. This artifactual duality involves relevant challenges for determining their ontological nature and normative issues related to their legal protection. The practical and artistic functions of an architectural artifact may occasionally come into conflict and its owners often decide to modify it for a better fulfillment of its practical functions. Architects sometimes feel harmed in their moral rights qua artists when those modifications are unconsented. As we shall see, the doctrine of moral rights strongly suggests ontologically categorizing architectural works as concrete particulars. However, the artistic function of architectural works motivates the view that they are to be protected by intellectual property law too. The problem is that the objects protected by intellectual property law are intangible entities that motivate their categorization as artifact types, which is inconsistent with seeing architectural works as concrete particulars. As a solution, the plausibility of categorizing architectural works as artifact types will be explored as an ontological account that may reconcile architects’ aims and intuitions regarding both moral and intellectual property rights over their works.

According to the mainstream view in the philosophy of music, the only way to authentically perform works of past centuries is according to the ideal of Historically Authentic Performance (HAP). This paper aims to show that, despite recent defences of the mainstream view, it lacks motivation, and hence should be abandoned or revised. As we shall see, first, there is no plausible account of HAP as a final and intrinsic value consistent with the work-focused teleology of work-performance. Second, a plausible account of the value of HAP in work-performance regards HAP as a way of performing works of past centuries convincingly. However, this approach does not support the mainstream view because this only leaves HAP as an interpretive option. Finally, an alternative defence of the value of HAP in the form of an indispensability argument is considered: HAP is indispensable to accurately comply with a work’s score, and thus to perform it faithfully. This strategy supports the demands of the mainstream view, but we will see that, if we take this option seriously, HAP must be understood in a substantively different manner than the mainstream view does, such that it ultimately amounts to the second option analysed above.

This paper is devoted to face recent views in the ontology of music that reject that musical works are repeatable in musical performances. It will be observed that musical works’ repeatability implies that they are audible and variable in their performances. To this extent, the aim here is to show that repeatability, audibility and variability are ontologically substantive features of musical works’ nature. The thesis that will be defended is that repeatability, audibility and variability are dispositional non-aesthetic properties of musical works. The plausibility of the dispositional account of musical works’ repeatability, audibility and variability will lead us to the conclusion that they are ontologically substantive features of musical works’ nature, and consequently, any suitable explanation of the ontology of musical works must not ignore them.

I defend in this paper the thesis that there is a complex relation between minimalist musical works and the metaphysics of time, involving ontological, epistemological and axiological issues. This relation is explained by means of three sub-theses. The first one is that minimalist musical works literally exemplify –in Goodman’s sense– the properties ascribed to time by the metaphysical static view: 1) minimalist works intrinsically possess those properties by being composed according to the technique of minimal repetition; 2) they extrinsically refer to those properties in virtue of pragmatic processes of accommodation of disagreements on what is taken to be common ground in a particular musical context. The second sub-thesis is that, in exemplifying those properties, minimalist musical works are valuable from two perspectives: a formalist one, according to which minimalist works purify the concept of what a musical work is; and a cognitive one, insofar they allow us to obtain phenomenal knowledge of what it is like to experience time as the static view conceives it. The third sub-thesis is that each particular minimalist musical work is valuable insofar it achieves either the formalist or the cognitive goals in an original way.

This article is devoted to examining the ontological foundations of computer-generated music scores. Specifically, we focus on the categorial question, i.e., the inquiry that aims to determine the kind of ontological category that musical works belong to. This task involves considerations concerning the existence and persistence conditions for musical works, and it has consequences for the determination of what it is to compose a musical work. Our contention is that not all the possible answers to the categorial question in the ontology of music are equally compatible with the hypothesis that creative music systems compose musical works. The thesis defended here is that musical Platonism is the proposal that best accommodates this hypothesis. We claim that musical Platonism is the answer to the categorial question that offers the most straightforward explanation for the possibility of considering creative music systems as genuinely composing musical works. Moreover, we uphold that the notion of creative-evaluative discovery as the characterization of what it is to compose a musical work entailed by Platonism is the simplest explanation of the process developed by a computer in producing musical works. For this purpose, we will take as empirical data the features of the Iamus computer, a system that produces musical works autonomously using evolutionary algorithms and following an evo-devo strategy. The works generated by this computer have been recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra and other renowned international soloists, and its impact has been notable in the literature (Ball, 2012; Coghlan, 2012; Berger, 2013).

This paper aims to shed light on the question of whether musical appropriation is ethically unobjectionable. James Young (2021) has recently advanced a position on this topic, according to which, whereas the appropriation of a whole work is uncontroversially non-permissible, the appropriation of parts of a work is usually permissible. He grounds this view in ontological matters and in a criterion of fair use in terms of economic harm to the source work’s composer. I argue that, pace Young, we cannot make general ethical claims about musical appropriation because their truth is sensitive to the musical genres that the involved works belong to. First, I clarify the scope of musical appropriation by means of considerations on musical practices and ontology. This will reveal that versions and covers are not genuine cases of musical appropriation. In a second step, I consider a specific kind of musical appropriation: using the first measures of a source work as the first measures of a secondary work. I show that, even if we assume Young’s ontological framework and his criterion on fair use, the instances of this kind of musical appropriation count as fair or unfair depending on the musical genres of the involved works due to their normative implications for the composition and appreciation of those works.

La belleza en Charles S. Peirce: Origen y alcance de sus ideas estéticas is a clearly written and well-structured book on Peirce’s aesthetics. Barrena’s thesis is that aesthetics, conceived as a normative science, is central to Peirce’s philosophical system, and especially to his pragmaticism. The goal of the book is twofold: it aims to offer an analysis of the biographical and theoretical aspects of Peirce’s interest in aesthetics and the arts and purports to elaborate a pragmaticist aesthetics. Both objectives can be said to be well achieved. The book is divided into four chapters. The first is devoted to...

This paper discusses methodological issues of two recent experiments conducted by Christopher Bartel, and Elzė S. Mikalonytė and Vilius Dranseika, respectively, about the repeatability and individuation of musical works. I argue, first, that the reliability of their results about people’s intuitions in our everyday musical practices can be questioned due to the use of descriptions instead of musical stimuli of the works and performances involved in the cases tested. This procedure is prone to place participants in an epistemic situation in which their mental capacities for their everyday judgments are not deployed and makes their judgments more vulnerable to the problem of “filling in”. I provide empirical data of an experiment that implements musical stimuli, obtaining large effect sizes regarding the results obtained by Bartel, Mikalonytė and Dranseika. In addition, I argue that the results of three scenarios of the experiment conducted by Mikalonytė and Dranseika are suspicious of being influenced by presentation effects that favor the contextualist intuition that the composer is a relevant parameter in work-individuation. Formal and superficial aspects of the description of their cases would cause these effects. I supply empirical data of an experiment that neutralizes those effects, obtaining moderate and large effect sizes regarding the results of Mikalonytė and Dranseika.

Guy Rohrbaugh and Allan Hazlett have provided two arguments against the thesis that musical works are types. In short, they assume that, according to our modal talk and intuitions, musical works are modally flexible entities; since types are modally inflexible entities, musical works are not types. I argue that Rohrbaugh’s and Hazlett’s arguments fail and that the type/token theorist can preserve the truth of our modal claims and intuitions even if types are modally inflexible entities. First, I consider two alternatives for the type/token theorist proposed in recent literature about the topic: the created types’ solution and the created abstract objects’ solution. I argue that none of them is attractive for the type/token theorist because they do not preserve the theoretical advantages of type/token theories to explain musical works’ repeatable nature. Then, I focus on the arguments’ common premise that musical works are modally flexible entities. A deeper analysis of musical practice will show that this premise is not true: our modal claims do not imply that musical works could have had different intrinsic but, instead, extrinsic properties. Finally, I show how the nested types theory may offer a satisfactory explanation of this fact and how it captures the truth of our modal talk about musical works.

Winner of the Fabian Dorsch ESA Essay Prize.Julian Dodd defends the view that, in musical work-performance practice, interpretive authenticity is a more fundamental value than score compliance authenticity. According to him, compliance with a work’s score can be sacrificed in cases where it conflicts with interpretative authenticity. Stephen Davies and Andrew Kania reject this view, arguing that, if a performer intentionally departs from a work’s score, she is not properly instantiating that work and hence not producing an authentic performance of it. I argue that this objection fails. A detailed analysis of work-performance practice reveals, first, that the normative scope of interpretive authenticity encompasses the practice of composing musical versions and that, second, when performers sacrifice score compliance to maximize interpretive authenticity, they are performing the target work by means of performing a version of it. By means of the nested types theory, I then show how performances produced in this way can be properly formed instances, and hence authentic performances, of their target work.

Impure Eliminativism about Categories is the idea that ontological categories are not wholly eliminable insofar as they have epistemic value to understand the nature of ordinary and scientific objects. From the perspective of Impure Eliminativism, different criticisms have been addressed to substantialist approaches in metaphysics and, in particular, to John Heil’s substance-mode two-category ontology. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this critical project by extending its scope to C. B. Martin’s substantialism. The thesis I defend is that Martin’s substratum-trope two-category ontology satisfies the elimination criterion of Impure Eliminativism for ontological categories because either it is inconsistent or else it supplies a non-exhaustive and non-exclusive categorization of ordinary and scientific objects and their properties. First, I introduce Impure Eliminativism and its novel elimination criterion for ontological categories, and I survey recent criticisms of substantialism from that perspective. Second, I show that nothing satisfies Martin’s definition of substratum in a way that is consistent with Martin’s view on tropes. Third, I note that the attempts to avoid the inconsistency make the categorization supplied by Martin’s ontology either non-exhaustive or non-exclusive. I then conclude that Martin’s substratum-trope categorial system should be eliminated in accordance with the criterion of categorial elimination of Impure Eliminativism.

The determination thesis is the idea that art-ontological facts are determined by the folk ontological conception of artworks embedded in our artistic practices. From this thesis, descriptivism in the metaontology of art has been often characterized as the view that the task of art-ontology is to describe that folk conception. Amie Thomasson and Andrew Kania provide two paradigmatic accounts within this path. In this paper, I argue that this descriptivist approach is ungrounded because the determination thesis suffers from presupposition failure. It presupposes that, whenever there is a practice of producing and appreciating artworks, there is also a folk ontological conception about those artworks. This presupposition, an implicit premise in Thomasson's and Kania's accounts, will be revealed as false, paying attention to the way artistic practices have evolved. I will conclude that descriptivism should abandon this approach and embrace metaontological realism if it aims to be a plausible view.