Debugging the case for creationism
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Debugging the case for creationism Patrick Grafton-Cardwell1
Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Repeatable artworks like musical works have presented theorists in the ontology of art with a puzzle. They seem in some respects like eternal, immutable objects and in others like created, historical objects. Creationists have embraced the latter appearances and attempted to compel Platonists to follow them. I examine in detail each argument in a cumulative case for Creationism, showing how the Platonist can respond. The conclusion is that the debate between Platonists and Creationists is a stalemate. In order for progress to be made in the first-order debate, second-order progress on the metaontology of art needs to come first. Keywords Metaphysics Music Platonism Creationism Metaontology
1 Introduction Consider some musical work, say Beethoven’s Eroica. Eroica presents us with a puzzle. First, Eroica has some features that theorists say point in favor of its being an eternally existing, immutable abstract object. For example, Eroica is repeatable: there are many performances and recordings of it all of which are instances of it. Moreover, it’s audible. Repeatability: Dodd (2007) and Kivy (1983, 1987) focus on the repeatability of musical works. Repeatability is something theorists generally claim can only be a feature of abstract objects like types or universals, which they then argue must be eternal and immutable. & Patrick Grafton-Cardwell [email protected] 1
University of Massachusetts Amherst, E305 South College, 150 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
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Audibility: Theorists point to the audibility of musical works as evidence of their being eternal and immutable since certain versions of that view (e.g. the view that musical works are types of which their performances are tokens) seem to make better sense of talk about audibility than certain versions of the view that musical works are historical individuals (e.g. the musical perdurantism explored in Caplan and Matheson (2006)). Audibility of musical works plays an important role in Dodd (2007). On the other hand, Eroica has several features that many contemporary ontologists would say point in favor of its being a created, historical entity. Eroica originated with Beethoven’s compositional activities. It was susceptible to change after Beethoven composed it, according to Beethoven’s decree. Eroica could have gone differently than it does. It was composed by a particular person in a particular music-historical context. Finally, Eroica is meant to be understood by an audience. Temporality: Works come into and go out of existence. Rohrbaugh (2003) stresses this point. His claim is that a work’s existence depends on there being what he calls ‘‘embodiments’’ of it, objects (and events, I take it, for artworks that can be embodied by being performed like musical works) that ground the facts about what the work itself is like. An embodiment of a particular musical work is anything that ‘‘preserves what it is like and leads
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