This article is the first step in a larger project in which I try to meld insights from aesthetics and social epistemology in order to improve our understanding of how we can learn from art and what this can tell us about collaborative inquiry at large. Stay tuned for more…!

There are lots of problems I try to solve along the way, such as questions about how credit should be allocated between the parties and what to do when you aren't sure exactly which topics an artist is trying to investigate. But you'll have to look at the full paper to see how I solve these 🤓.

I also argue that artworks regularly invite audiences to collaborate with them by providing open-ended 'prompts' such as questions, ambiguities, or hypotheses that motivate us to investigate a topic for ourselves.

I argue against this line of criticism. I propose that what is actually happening is that Greenblatt and Shakespeare are collaborating together, both parties providing the necessary intellectual labour which helps to bring about a shared epistemic achievement.

To some cognitivists, Greenblatt's proposal looks very odd. Since Shakespeare knew nothing of the 2016 election, he can’t be credited with giving us any particular insight into this event. Rather, Greenblatt is reporting on his own intellectual achievements, not Shakespeare's.

Within the philosophy of art, aesthetic cognitivists are particularly interested in these sorts of claims. They try to understand how we learn from art, what we learn from it, and why learning seems to something that many audiences think is integral to the value of art.

This sort of claim isn’t unusual. In fact, you may even think that this is what makes Shakespeare so great. His artworks can still help us understand what is going on, even though Shakespeare couldn't have known what would happen in 2016 in a country that didn't even exist in his own time.

The starting point for this paper was my reflection on a claim made by the Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt: we can learn important things about the 2016 US Presidential election by reading Shakespeare’s Richard III.

www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/o...

Deadline January 9th 2026. All submissions (or any further questions) should be sent to editor@debatesinaesthetics.org. Full submission guidelines available here: debatesinaesthetics.org/submissions/.

Thanks Alex!

I'm very grateful for all the support I've received from the British Society of Aesthetics @britaesthetics.bsky.social and Vid Simoniti @vidsimoniti.bsky.social during my fellowship at The University of Liverpool. Excited to see what's next...

🧑‍🍳 And, for light relief, a piece in which I talk about how Chardin can help us learn things about our kitchens: newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/christophe...)

🌍 Third, a piece that is forthcoming in Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics, in which I argue that artworks become contemporary when they help us understand why, since around 1945, everyone has become our contemporaries. philpapers.org/rec/EARHAH-2

🧨 Second, a piece in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, in which I argue that activist artists may sometimes be so weird that they risk undermining their activism, but that NOT being weird would lead to the production of mediocre art. philpapers.org/rec/EARAEA-3