Click here for my PhilPapers page. (Pre-print versions of all my papers are freely available there.)
My Academia.edu profile is here.

 

My research takes up problems in the philosophy of art where they intersect with broader issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. In particular, my work has focused on taking seriously the premise that art is a fundamentally social practice whose nature is thoroughly conventional. Yet even though conventions are arbitrary and historically-contingent creatures, I don't think this means that the philosophy of art has to be an exercise in bare conceptual analysis. Instead, I think that we have no privileged epistemic access to the ontology of art and other social kinds, and that it is our best reflective understanding of our social practices that should constrain our theorizing. To my mind, the philosophy of art is first and foremost an explanatory enterprise, and its main concern should be to ground the explanatory hypotheses of empirical art scholarship. Below, you’ll find descriptions of my publications and works in progress.

(amazon.ca) (amazon.com) (amazon.co.uk)
Reviewed in Metascience

Analytic aesthetics has long been characterized by a heavy reliance on puzzle cases, usually drawn from the artworld. These are typically real-life cases of artworks which defy our intuitions about some philosophically-relevant feature, such as our art-kind categorizations, or the importance we attach to intention. But the last several decades of analytic aesthetics has seen imaginative cases (in the form of paradoxes, puzzles, and thought experiments) play an increasingly important, driving role in philosophical research.

This book aims to highlight the contributions that imaginative scenarios have made to the development of contemporary aesthetics by collecting together 50 of the most important such cases in an accessible teaching and research aid.



Translations

Of the Causes of the Corruption of Taste
by Anne Le Fèvre Dacier
(1714)
with James Young
(Forthcoming, OUP)

Anne Le Fèvre Dacier (1645-1720) was one of Europe’s most renowned women of letters, and esteemed by the likes of Voltaire and Addison. Yet today, her work is virtually unknown and almost entirely ignored by philosophers of art, despite having played a significant role in the development of modern aesthetics. In particular, she was one of the first writers to champion an empiricist, rather than a rationalist, art criticism and to defend art’s power for moral education. This is her most important theoretical work, and ours will be its first English translation.

On the Ideal in the Pictorial Arts
by Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy
(1805)

(Lexington Books, November 2024)

Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849) was the leading art theorist of his day, and a principal exponent of Neoclassicism. In this previously untranslated essay he argues, against the prevailing wisdom of the day, that the mimetic theory of Plato and Aristotle, which animated Classical Greek statuary, aims at imitation of the idealized subject, rather than mere verisimilitude with the model. In doing so, he argues that the imagination has a special role to play in the creation of art.


Dissertation Abstract

It is a truism among philosophers that art is intention-dependent—i.e., art-making is an activity that depends in some way on the maker’s intentions—but not much thought has been given to just what this entails. My dissertation explores this lacuna, arguing that, properly understood, intention-dependence sets a number of important constraints on theories of art. In particular, I argue that taking intention-dependence seriously allows us to supply success- and failure-conditions for art-attempts, to identify artistic practices cross-culturally, and to pinpoint the reference of ‘art’ and art-kind terms. For a more detailed abstract, click here. 








Articles

  1. “The Transparency of War Photography,” Parrhesia (forthcoming)

  2. “The Heaviest Metal,” Philosophia (forthcoming): DOI 10.1007/s11406-024-00761-1

  3. “Distant Dinosaurs and the Aesthetics of Remote Art,“ British Journal of Aesthetics (forthcoming): DOI 10.1093/aesthj/ayad036

  4. “Imagining Dinosaurs,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (forthcoming): DOI 10.1093/jaac/kpae006

  5. “In Defence of Tourists,” Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics, 60.2 (2023), 176–92.

  6. “A Garden of One's Own—or, why are there no great lady detectives?” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 9.1 (2023), 1-20. (co-authored with Shelby Moser)

  7. “Retitling, Cultural Appropriation, and Aboriginal Title,” British Journal of Aesthetics 61.3 (2021), 317-33.

  8. “Exploding Stories and the Limits of Fiction,” Philosophical Studies 178.3 (2021): 675-92.

  9. “Imagining Fictional Contradictions,“ Synthese 199.1-2 (2020): 3169-3188.

  10. “Failures of Intention and Failed-Art,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50.7 (2020), 905-17.

  11. “What makes a kind an art-kind?,” British Journal of Aesthetics 60.4 (2020), 471-88.
    - Winner, 2018 BSA Essay Prize
    - Honourable Mention, 2022 Danto Prize (APA/ASA)

  12. “Inheriting the World,” Journal of Applied Logics, special issue on John Woods’s “Truth in Fiction: Rethinking its Logic” 7.2 (2020), 163-70.

  13. "Entitled Art: what makes titles names?" Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97.3 (2019), 437-50.

  14. “Social Kinds, Reference, and Meta-Ontological Revisionism,” Journal of Social Ontology 4.2 (2019), 137-56.
    - Runner-up, 2018 JSO Essay Prize.

  15. “Fake Views—or why concepts are bad guides to art’s ontology,” British Journal of Aesthetics 58.2 (2018),193-207

  16. “The Trouble with Poetic License,” British Journal of Aesthetics 56.2 (2016), 149-61.

  17. “Willingly disinterested: altruism in Schopenhauer’s ethics,” in Kant und die Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht. Akten des XI. Kant-Kongresses 2010 (Kant and Philosophy in a Cosmopolitan Sense: Proceedings of the XI International Kant Congress 2010). Stefano Bacin (Ed.), Alfredo Ferrarin (Ed.), Claudio La Rocca (Ed.) and Margit Ruffing (Ed.). Boston: De Gruyter (2013).

Chapters

  1. “Tolkien’s Influence and the World of WoT,” in The Wheel of Time and Philosophy (ed. Jacob M. Held), Wiley-Blackwell (forthcoming).

  2. “Schopenhauer’s Aesthetic Ideology,” in David Bather Woods and Timothy Stoll (eds.), The Schopenhauerian Mind. New York: Routledge (2023).

  3. “A Trip to the Zoo,” Aesthetic Literacy: a book for everyone. Valery Vinogradovs (Ed.). vol. 1-3, Melbourne: Mont Publishing (2022).

  4. “Schopenhauer’s Perceptive Invective,” in Jens Lemanski (ed.), Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel, Schweiz: Birkhäuser (2020), 95-107.


Other

  1. “Thinking Through Illustration”: Review of Thomas E. Wartenberg, Thoughtful Images: Illustrating Philosophy Through Art (OUP 2023), Metascience, forthcoming.

  2. “Blood and Phlegm: Deflating Fiction” (January 2023), for a book symposium on Engisch and Lankau’s “The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition” at The Junkyard of the Mind.

  3. “Brains, ectobrains, and the construction of a subgenre”: Review of Fernando Vidal Performing Brains on Screen (Amsterdam 2022), Metascience 32 (1) (March 2023), 87-90.

  4. Review of Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. (trans.) Qua.tremère de Quincy's Moral Considerations on the Place and Purpose of Works of Art (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (forthcoming).

  5. Review of James Young, Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts: A Philosophical Approach (Routledge, 2020), Philosophy in Review 41.1 (February 2021), p. 49-51

  6. “Junk Fiction and the Junkyard of the Imagination” (February 2021), The Junkyard of the Mind.

  7. Review of Tiziana Andina, The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition (Bloomsbury, 2013), Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74.1 (Winter 2016), p. 106-8.

  8. Review of Christy Mag Uidhir, Art & Art-Attempts (Oxford University Press, 2013), Philosophy in Review 35.3 (June 2015), p. 182-4.