The standard way of thinking about non-repeatable (single-instance) artworks such as paintings, drawings, and non-cast sculpture is that they are concrete things (i.e. material, causally efficacious, located in space and time). For example, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is currently located in Paris, Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc weighs 73 tonnes, Vermeer’s The Concert was stolen in 1990, and Michaelangelo’s David was attacked with a hammer in 1991. By contrast, consider the current location of Melville’s Moby Dick or the weight of Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ or how one might go about stealing Puccini’ ... More

The standard way of thinking about non-repeatable (single-instance) artworks such as paintings, drawings, and non-cast sculpture is that they are concrete things (i.e. material, causally efficacious, located in space and time). For example, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is currently located in Paris, Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc weighs 73 tonnes, Vermeer’s The Concert was stolen in 1990, and Michaelangelo’s David was attacked with a hammer in 1991. By contrast, consider the current location of Melville’s Moby Dick or the weight of Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ or how one might go about stealing Puccini’s La Bohemme. The standard view of repeatable (multiple-instance) artworks such as novels, poems, plays, operas, films, and symphonies is that they must be abstract things (i.e. immaterial, casually inert, outside space-time). Although novels, poems, and symphonies may not appear to be stock abstract objects, most philosophers of art claim that for the basic intuitions, practices, and conventions surrounding such works to be preserved, repeatable artworks must be abstracta. The purpose of this volume is to examine how philosophical enquiry into the nature of art might productively inform or be productively informed by enquiry into the nature of abstracta taking place within other areas of philosophy such as metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind and language. The aim is to provide a general methodological blueprint from which those within philosophy of art and those without can begin building responsible, and therefore mutually informative and productive, relationships between their respective fields.