ABSTRACTDespite the huge interest in different philosophical questions surrounding literature, particularly analytic philosophers have had relatively little to say about literature’s specifically a...

In this critical study of Julian Dodd’s Being True to Works of Music, I argue that the three-tier normative profile of the work-performance tradition in classical music that Dodd defends should be rejected in favour of a two-tier version. I also argue that the theory of work-performance defended in the book fits much more naturally with a contextualist ontology of musical works than with the Platonist ontology Dodd defends in Works of Music, despite his arguments to the contrary in the (...) afterword of the new book. Finally, I argue that the reasons he gives for preferring a ‘tradition-based’ over a ‘historicized’ theory of the understanding of classical scores are not convincing. (shrink)

I argue that sometimes a group can author a work of art without the work being either co-authored or multiply-authored. Sometimes the group, itself, is an author, rather than any of its members alone or together. I argue that when a group is an author like this, it has mental properties that no individual member of the group possesses. For example, we can consider the groups that authored digital remixes based on a film titled #INTRODUCTIONS created by the artists LaBeouf, (...) Rönkkö & Turner. YouTubers posted their digital remixes online, and the question is: Who authored those remixes? I contend that many digital remixes are authored by groups that are capable of cognition. (shrink)

Many works are attributed to artists after their death, even when someone else has contributed substantively to the content of the work or when the work left by the artist is deemed incomplete by any standard of completion. Call these works posthumous works.1 Consider, for instance, Garden of Eden, Mysterious Stranger, Silmarillion, Symphony No. 10, Symphony No. 7, Sagrada Familia, the film A.I., Woyzeck, to name just a few. These are examples where..

This thesis proceeds from an attempt to articulate the body. At its core, however, is not the attempt to offer a definition of the body but instead to articulate a problem of touching on it. As such, it is motivated by a question at once banal and impossible: ‘Are we nearly here yet?’ Following Jean-Luc Nancy’s engagement with the account of space and being-there proposed by Martin Heidegger, it relates the materiality of the body to a broader role of touch (...) and sense in constructing a world of engagements in which the body is never “here” but always “there”, always exposed in its touch upon the other. Following Nancy, this thesis begins by opening an ontological formulation of space and embodiment in which the materiality of the body allows for sense to pattern a world of bodies always separated from each other but situated in relation to each other. Sense, on Nancy’s account, is both bodily and conceptual; sense is the touch of vision, of the hands, of the body, and of understanding. Emphasising this multiple formulation of touch, this thesis offers an ontology of space as both material and transparent, in which this transparency figures the potential of the world to be continually re-spaced according to the touches and relationships enacted within it. After establishing this ontology of body and touch, the thesis enacts a series of attempts to approach the body, conducted in relation to encounters with bodies through photographs, painting and self-portraiture, as well as encounters with bodies that reveal aspects of their particular embodiment at moments of disruption or in their pathological relationships to the world. In each case, what is explored are figures of approach and withdrawal, turn and return, in which the body is nearly available to touch, but always elusive. (shrink)