Skip to content
  • News
  • Blueprints
  • Events
  • Teach
  • Contribute
  • Volunteer
  • Support us
  • About

Diversity Reading List

Helping you include authors from under-represented groups in your teaching

We Did It: From Mere Contributors to Coauthors

Posted on January 20, 2020December 3, 2024 by Simon Fokt

Abstract: The diversity and increasing number of recent artistic collaborations raise new and substantive philosophical questions about the nature of authorship. In the past, the problems surrounding the authorship of collaboratively produced art were tackled primarily by film theorists, who defended the conservative view that films were on a par with other artworks, having a single author. Fortunately, this is starting to change. Recently, a number of theorists, including Berys Gaut, Paisley Livingston, and C. Paul Sellors, have argued, contra auteur theory, that films (and many other artworks) are the product of multiple authors.1 Livingston and Sellors draw on recent theories of collective intentionality, specifically theories of shared intention, in order to develop their theories of coauthorship. Although we agree entirely with this anti?individualistic movement, we think there are problems with the accounts of coauthorship on offer. Some of the accounts are too weak, failing to distinguish between mere contributors and genuine coauthors, while others rely on a theory of shared intention that does not adequately account for the range and complexity of artistic collaborations present in contemporary art. Fortunately, there is an alternative theory of collective intentionality that has yet to be considered as a point of departure in developing an account of coauthorship: Margaret Gilbert’s plural subject theory. We argue that her theory provides for an account of coauthorship that successfully distinguishes between mere contributors and coauthors. It also makes sense of a number of actual cases of collaboratively produced art in which intuitively the group, rather than any set of individuals, is the author. In Section I, we rehearse Gaut’s arguments against auteur theory and explain why Gaut’s account of multiple authorship is problematically overpermissive. In Section II, we consider Livingston and Sellors’s attempts to develop an account of coauthorship that relies on the theories of shared intentions by Michael Bratman and John Searle, respectively. Both accounts are ultimately problematic in different ways. In Section III, we turn to Margaret Gilbert’s plural subject theory. At the heart of Gilbert’s theory is the notion of a joint commitment. We develop a theory of coauthorship that appeals to the notion of a joint commitment, and then we show how it helps us to distinguish between mere contributors and genuine coauthors. We also present a number of actual cases of collaboratively produced art and show how Gilbert’s plural subject theory can accommodate these cases in a way that other accounts of coauthorship cannot.

Posted in Aesthetic Experience and Judgement, Aesthetic Normativity and Value, Individual Arts and Crafts, Metaphysics of AestheticsTagged art objects, auteur theory, collaboration, joint authorship, moviesLeave a comment

Categories

.
(20)
Aesthetics
(230)
Aesthetic Experience and Judgement
(106)
Aesthetic Normativity and Value
(117)
Artistic Movements
(7)
Artistry and Creativity
(16)
Ethics and Socio-Politics of Aesthetics
(90)
Individual Arts and Crafts
(95)
Metaphysics of Aesthetics
(92)
Epistemology
(257)
Applied Epistemology
(53)
Formal Epistemology
(16)
Metaepistemology
(27)
Social Epistemology
(82)
Standpoint Epistemology
(13)
Theoretical Epistemology
(156)
Metaphilosophy
(157)
Ethics and Socio-Politics of Philosophy
(56)
Historiography of Philosophy
(52)
Philosophical Biography
(15)
Philosophical Media and Methodology
(88)
Philosophical Translation and/or Commentary
(18)
Philosophy Education
(10)
The Nature, Value, and Aims of Philosophy
(22)
Metaphysics
(281)
Causation
(64)
Free Will
(27)
Identity and Change
(56)
Mereology
(7)
Metametaphysics
(7)
Modality
(33)
Ontology and Metaontology
(165)
Properties, Propositions, and Relations
(24)
Space, Time, and Space-Time
(26)
Truth and Truthmaking
(23)
Moral Philosophy
(576)
Applied Ethics
(383)
Descriptive Ethics
(4)
Metaethics
(178)
Moral Psychology
(24)
Normative Ethics
(143)
Philosophy of Action
(20)
Philosophy of Language
(125)
Communication
(45)
Ethics and Socio-Politics of Language
(43)
Grammar and Meaning
(80)
Language and Mind
(46)
Linguistics
(4)
Metaphysics of Language
(1)
Philosophy of Mind
(460)
Artificial Intelligence
(6)
Cognitive Science
(19)
Consciousness
(55)
Intentionality
(115)
Mental States and Processes
(352)
Metaphysics of Mind and Body
(84)
Neuroscience
(18)
Psychiatry
(16)
Psychology
(35)
Philosophy of Religion
(78)
Afterlife
(7)
Creation
(5)
Deities and their Attributes
(48)
Divination, Faith, and Miracles
(7)
Environment
(6)
Ethics and Socio-Politics of Religion
(5)
Religious Development, Experience, and Personhood
(39)
Theodicy
(14)
Philosophy of the Formal, Social, and Natural Sciences
(393)
Anthropology
(11)
Archaeology and History
(24)
Economics
(13)
Geography
(1)
Life Sciences
(109)
Logic and Mathematics
(166)
Physical Sciences
(106)
Psychology
(15)
Sociology
(15)
Political Philosophy
(432)
Equality
(117)
Forms of Government
(71)
Freedom and Rights
(158)
Justice
(270)
Law and Public Policy
(211)
Political Authority and Legitimacy
(37)
Political Economy
(25)
Political Ideologies
(13)
War and Peace
(17)
Social Philosophy
(706)
Class
(68)
Culture
(452)
Disability
(39)
Education
(36)
Gender, Sex, and Sexuality
(315)
Personal and Social Identity
(149)
Race
(165)
Sustainability
(23)
Technology and Material Culture
(12)
Work, Labor, and Leisure
(49)

Keywords

abortion aesthetics art art classification autonomy causation Chinese philosophy colonialism confucianism consciousness consent depiction desire disability epistemology equality ethics experimental philosophy feminism feminist philosophy fiction gender identity imagination justice Kant knowledge logic metaphysics methodology mind models perception philosophy of language philosophy of mind philosophy of religion philosophy of science portrait race representation responsibility science sex truth virtue

Our Sponsors

Arts and Humanities Research Council
American Philosophical Association
British Philosophical Association
Marc Sanders FoundationMarc Sanders Foundation
Society for Applied Philosophy
American Society for Aesthetics
University of St Andrews
University of Manchester
University of Sheffield
The University of Leeds
The University of Edinburgh
EIDYN
British Society of Aesthetics
The White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities
  • Creative Commons Attribution license

    Unless otherwise stated, all elements of the Diversity Reading List licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Derivatives 4.0 International License
    Web Design by TELdesign Limited • Theme: Avant by Kaira

    filtration

Theme: Avant by Kaira
This site is registered on Toolset.com as a development site.