Works by Michel-Antoine Xhignesse

Exploding Stories and the Limits of Fiction.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (3):675-692.

It is widely agreed that fiction is necessarily incomplete, but some recent work postulates the existence of universal fictions—stories according to which everything is true. Building such a story is supposedly straightforward: authors can either assert that everything is true in their story, define a complement function that does the assertoric work for them, or, most compellingly, write a story combining a contradiction with the principle of explosion. The case for universal fictions thus turns on the intuitive priority we assign (...)

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138

Failures of Intention and Failed-Art.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (7):905-917.

This paper explores what happens when artists fail to execute their goals. I argue that taxonomies of failure in general, and of failed-art in particular, should focus on the attempts which generate the failed-entity, and that to do this they must be sensitive to an attempt’s orientation. This account of failed-attempts delivers three important new insights into artistic practice: there can be no accidental art, only deliberate and incidental art; art’s intention-dependence entails the possibility of performative failure, but not of (...)

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130

Entitled Art: What Makes Titles Names?Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (3):437-450.

Art historians and philosophers often talk about the interpretive significance of titles, but few have bothered with their historical origins. This omission has led to the assumption that an artwork's title is its proper name, since names and titles share the essential function of facilitating reference to their bearers. But a closer look at the development of our titling practices shows a significant point of divergence from standard analyses of proper names: the semantic content of a title is often crucial (...)

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178

Attempting Art: An Essay on Intention-Dependence.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2017 - Dissertation, McGill University

Attempting art: an essay on intention-dependenceIt is a truism among philosophers that art is intention-dependent—that is to say, art-making is an activity that depends in some way on the maker's intentions. Not much thought has been given to just what this entails, however. For instance, most philosophers of art assume that intention-dependence entails concept-dependence—i.e. possessing a concept of art is necessary for art-making, so that what prospective artists must intend is to make art. And yet, a mounting body of anthropological (...) and art-historical evidence and philosophical argument suggests that not only is such a criterion unsatisfied by most of the art-historical canon, but it also rests on a false premise: concepts of 'art' are not shared between cultures, nor even in the same culture across time. My dissertation aims to rectify this error by first exploring what our commitment to art's intention-dependence actually entails, and then showing that, properly understood, intention-dependence sets a number of important constraints on theories of art with respect to explanatory desiderata such as the success- and failure-conditions of art-attempts, the cross-cultural identification of art, and the reference of 'art' and art-kind terms. I begin by situating art's intention-dependence in the philosophical literature on intentional action, arguing that, properly conceived, intention-dependence is a weak criterion which can be satisfied either directly or indirectly. It therefore does not necessarily entail concept-dependence. I then use this distinction to motivate a new treatment of the success- and failure-conditions for art-attempts, arguing that the extant model's emphasis on compliance with 'the manner intended' is far too restrictive to capture actual artistic practices. I go on to show that Ruth Millikan's model of linguistic conventions supplies an independently plausible explanation of art's concept-independent origins in terms of the development of a system of indirectly intention-dependent conventions called an 'artworld'. I argue that this account of artworld development supplies us with the tools we need to distinguish art-kinds from other artifactual kinds. Finally, I turn my attention to methodological issues, arguing that even though 'art' is a social kind with its roots in arbitrary and historically-contingent networks of conventions, the philosophy of art is not merely an exercise in bare conceptual analysis. In fact, there is now a great deal of evidence to show that the ways we think about 'art' are inconsistent, incomplete, imperialistic, and largely unprincipled. Yet I argue that this does not mean that the artworld data have no bearing on theories of art. Instead, I argue that our best reflective understanding of our artworld practices sets the constraints on the reference of 'art' and art-kind terms. I argue that we have no privileged epistemic access to the ontology of social kinds; our only privilege lies in our ability to determine the proper subject of our inquiries. (shrink)

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72

Andina, Tiziana. The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition—From Hegel to Post‐Dantian Theories, Trans. Natalia Iacobelli, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, 190 Pp., 5 B&W Illus., $37.95 Paperback, $120.00 Cloth. [REVIEW]Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2016 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (1):106-108.

A review of Tiziana Andina's The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition: From Hegel to Post-Dantian Theories (Bloomsbury 2013).

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Christy Mag Uidhir, Art & Art-Attempts. Reviewed By. [REVIEW]Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2015 - Philosophy in Review 35 (3):182-184.

A review of Christy Mag Uidhir's Art & Art-Attempts (OUP 2013).

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103

Fake Views—or Why Concepts Are Bad Guides to Art’s Ontology.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2018 - British Journal of Aesthetics 58 (2):193-207.

It is often thought that the boundaries and properties of art-kinds are determined by the things we say and think about them. More recently, this tendency has manifested itself as concept-descriptivism, the view that the reference of art-kind terms is fixed by the ontological properties explicitly or implicitly ascribed to art and art-kinds by competent users of those terms. Competent users are therefore immune from radical error in their ascriptions; the result is that the ontology of art must begin and (...)

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67

Imagining Fictional Contradictions.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - forthcoming - Synthese:1-20.

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...)

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56

Inheriting the World.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2020 - Journal of Applied Logics 7 (2):163-70.

A critical reflection on John Woods's new monograph, Truth in Fiction – Rethinking its Logic. I focus in particular on Woods’s world-inheritance thesis (what others have variously called ‘background,’ ‘the principle of minimal departure,’ and ‘the reality assumption,’ and which replaces Woods’s earlier ‘fill-conditions’) and its interplay with auctorial say-so, arguing that world-inheritance actually constrains auctorial say-so in ways Woods has not anticipated.

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44

James O. Young, "Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts: A Philosophical Approach.".Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2021 - Philosophy in Review 41 (1):49-51.

A review of James Young's "Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts: A Philosophical Approach" (Routledge 2020).

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142

Schopenhauer's Perceptive Invective.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2020 - In Jens Lemanski (ed.), Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel, Schweiz: Birkhäuser. pp. 95-107.

Schopenhauer’s invective is legendary among philosophers, and is unmatched in the historical canon. But these complaints are themselves worthy of careful consideration: they are rooted in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of language, which itself reflects the structure of his metaphysics. This short chapter argues that Schopenhauer’s vitriol rewards philosophical attention; not because it expresses his critical take on Fichte, Hegel, Herbart, Schelling, and Schleiermacher, but because it neatly illustrates his philosophy of language. Schopenhauer’s epithets are not merely spiteful slurs; instead, they reflect (...)

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59

What Makes a Kind an Art-Kind?Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2020 - British Journal of Aesthetics 60 (4):471-88.

The premise that every work belongs to an art-kind has recently inspired a kind-centred approach to theories of art. Kind-centred analyses posit that we should abandon the project of giving a general theory of art and focus instead on giving theories of the arts. The main difficulty, however, is to explain what makes a given kind an art-kind in the first place. Kind-centred theorists have passed this buck on to appreciative practices, but this move proves unsatisfactory. I argue that the (...)

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