388 vues • 12 juin 2026
I presented a philosophy paper at the 2026 European Society for Aesthetics Conference, here it is in its full unedited version. Please be kind this is my first time doing this.
Full abstract:
This paper revisits Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” in order to examine how recent developments in generative artificial intelligence challenge established ontological frameworks in the philosophy of art. Drawing on Arthur Danto’s indiscernibility argument and contemporary contextualist accounts of artworks as created types, I introduce a new thought experiment: Pierre-Yves Menard, a computer scientist who succeeds in generating an indiscernible version of Don Quixote through a purpose-built large language model (LLM) that has no access to Cervantes’ or Menard’s texts.
The central claim is that the Pierre-Yves Menard case presents a new issue in contemporary aesthetics that cannot be reduced to previous arguments about Pierre Menard’s case. In other words, introducing an LLM into the Menard thought experiment raises new questions about ontology and authorship that we should address. I present two main arguments in response to these questions. First, I argue that Pierre-Yves Menard’s Quixote is ontologically distinct from those of Menard and Cervantes, and that this distinction lies in the discernibility of the created though LLM type, even though the instances are indiscernible. Second, I maintain that questions of authorship in AI-assisted literature are best understood as derivative of ontological structure. Authorship attaches to the agent responsible for instituting and sustaining the relevant artistic type, rather than to the mere production of textual tokens. By extending contextualist ontology to generative technologies, the paper shows how existing philosophical resources can accommodate AI without abandoning core intuitions about artworks, authorship, and literary identity.
References:
Borges, Jorge Luis, 1939, ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’, Sur, 56: 7–16; trans. ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, in Ficciones, Andrew Kerrigan (ed.), New York: Grove Press, 1962, 45–55.
Colella, Silvana. ‘‘The Language of the Digital Air’: AI-Generated Literature and the Performance of Authorship.’ Humanities 14, no. 8 (2025): 164.
Collins, David. ‘Expanding Davies’s Pragmatic Constraint: A Pragmatist Principle for Philosophizing about Art.’ Estetika, 26:1 (2025): 1-16.
Danto, Arthur, 1981, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Davies, David, 2004, Art as Performance, Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Lamarque, Peter V., 1998, ‘Aesthetic Value, Experience, and Indiscernibles’, Nordisk estetisk tidskrift, 17: 61–78.
Laskar, Rizia Begum. "AI Authorship, Co-Creation, and Expanded Paratexts." Literariness Journal 1.2 (2026): 1034-1047.
Levinson, Jerrold, 1980, ‘What a Musical Work Is’, The Journal of Philosophy, 70 (1): 5–28.
Levinson, Jerrold, 2005, ‘Contextualisme esthétique’, Philosophiques, 32 (1): 125–133; ‘Aesthetic Contextualism’ in The Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, 4:3 (2007): 1–12.
Morizot, Jacques, 1999, Sur le problème Borges, Paris: Kimé.
Nath, Rajakishore. ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI): An Evolution Toward an ‘Authorless’ Literature.’ World Futures 81, no. 4 (2025): 291–98.
