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David Davies

Academic title(s): 

Professor

David Davies
Contact Information
Address: 

855 Sherbrooke St. W.
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 2T7

Phone: 
514-398-6066
Email address: 
david.davies [at] mcgill.ca
Office: 
Leacock 941
Curriculum vitae: 
PDF icon research_cv_dept_website_2024.pdf
Research areas: 
Philosophy of Art
Philosophy of Language
Metaphysics
Philosophy of Mind
Biography: 

David Davies has taught at McGill since 1987. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Western Ontario (1987), following a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (Wadham College, Oxford, 1970) and an MA in Philosophy (Manitoba 1979). His doctoral research and much of his research for the following few years was on the Realism/Anti-Realism debate in contemporary metaphysics, and on related issues in the Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language. For the past 20 years his research has focused mainly on metaphysical and epistemological issues in the Philosophy of Art, where he has also published widely on topics relating to literature, film, photography, music, dance, performance, and the visual arts. He has been a director, since 1998, of the annual Philosophy of Science conference held at the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik, Croatia, and is a founding director of the Philosophy of Art conference held in the same location starting in 2012. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2015, and served as President of the American Society for Aesthetics from 2021-23.

Selected publications: 

Please see link to Research CV for full details.

Books and Monographs

An Ontology of Multiple Artworks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024)

Philosophy of The Performing Arts (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011)

Aesthetics and Literature (London: Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2007). [Albanian translation forthcoming]

Art as Performance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) [Chinese translation by Fong Jun (Nanjing: Jiangsu Meishu Chubanshe (Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House), 2008]

Edited books

Blade Runner, co-edited with Amy Coplan, edited collection of original papers in the series ‘Philosophers on Film’, (London: Routledge, 2015).

The Thin Red Line, edited collection of original papers in the series ‘Philosophers on Film’. (London: Routledge, August 2008).

Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Literature, anthology co-edited with Carl Matheson, (Toronto, April 2008).

Articles Published, Forthcoming, or In Progress

‘Analytic Aesthetics since 2000', to appear in Garry Hagberg, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in progress.

‘Sibleyan objectivism about aesthetic properties’, with Elisabeth Schellekens, in progress.

‘What is the mode of being of the artwork?, in Noel Carroll, ed., Controversies in Contemporary Aesthetics (London: Routledge). In progress.

‘Philosophical aspects of fictional discourse’, in Keith Brown, ed., The Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics 3rd Edition, Vol. 4 (Elsevier: Oxford, forthcoming).

‘What should a nominalist say about multiple artworks?’, forthcoming in Joshua Brown and Otavio Bueno, eds., The Philosophy of Jody Azzouni (Dordrecht: Springer).

‘Theatrical works, theatrical performances, and performance practice’, forthcoming in Philosophy, Analytic Aesthetics, and Theater (Routledge) edited by Michael Y. Bennett.

‘Creativity and imagination in dance’, co-authored with Anna Pakes, forthcoming in Amy Kind & Julie Langkau, eds., Oxford Handbook on the Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity.

‘Collingwood on “painting imaginatively” and the expressive nature of the artwork’, forthcoming in David Collins and Christopher Williams, eds., Interpreting R. G. Collingwood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 204-22.

‘Nine explananda in search of an explanans’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 81.4 (Fall 2023), 444-53.

‘Sculpture’, in Noel Carroll and Jonathan Gilmore, eds., Routledge Companion to the Philosophies of Painting and Sculpture (New York: Routledge, 2023), 17-27.

‘Performance art’, in Noel Carroll and Jonathan Gilmore, eds., Routledge Companion to the Philosophies of Painting and Sculpture (New York: Routledge, 2023), 59-68.

‘Where is the (art)world is Martin Creed?”, in Elisabeth Schellekens and Davide Dal Sasson, eds., Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Martin Creed (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 9-26.

‘The anthropology of art’, in Lydia Goehr, Jonathan Gilmore, and Jonathan Fine, eds., A Companion to Arthur C. Danto (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2022), 102-10.

‘Definition of Fiction: State of the Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 62.2 (April 2022), 241-55.

‘Appreciating Improvisations as Art’, in Alessandro Bertinello and Marcello Ruta, eds., Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts (London: Routledge, 2021), 145-58.

“Puy on ‘Nested Types’”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 79.2 (2021), 251–255.

‘Dance and Technology’, in Rebecca Farinas and Julie van Camp, eds., The Bloomsbury Handbook of Dance and Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 321-29.

‘Analytic philosophy of music’, in Tomas Macauley, Jerrold Levinson, and Nanette Nielsen, eds., Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 2020), 65-88.

‘Imagination in the Philosophy of art’, in Anna Abrahams, ed, Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 565-77.

‘Performance in Anglo-American Philosophy’, co-written with Anna Pakes, in Laura Cull O’Maoilearca and Alice Lagaay, eds., Routledge Companion to Performance Philosoph y (London: Routledge, 2020), 77-87.

‘“Categories of Art” for contextualists’, in a symposium celebrating the 50th anniversary of Kendall Walton’s ‘Categories of art’, in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78.1 (2020), 75-9.

‘Dance seen and dance-screened’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy vol. 43 (2019), 117-32.

‘Animation’, in Noel Carroll, Laura Teresa Di Summa, and Shawn Loht, eds., The Palgrave Handbook for the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (Basingstoke: Palgrave-McMillan, 2019), 165-87.

‘Making sense of “popular art”’, Croatian Journal of Philosophy XIX, no. 56 (2019), 205-27.

‘Artistic crimes and misdemeanours’, British Journal of Aesthetics 59.3 (2019), 305-21.

‘Philosophical dimensions of film experience’, in Christina Rawls, Diana Neiva, and Steven Goveia, eds. Philosophy and Film: Bridging Divides (London: Routledge, 2019), 135-56.

‘A moderately pessimistic perspective on “cooperative naturalism”’, Projections 12(2) (Winter 2018), 9-18.

‘Misreading Emma’, in E. M. Dadlez, ed., Jane Austen’s Emma: Philosophical Perspectives, in the series Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 184-215.

“Evidence of facture and the appreciative relevance of artistic activity”, in Alberto Voltolini and Jerome Pelletier, eds., The Pleasure of Pictures (London: Routledge, 2018), 286-302.

“Art and thought-experiments”, in Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige, and James Robert Brown, eds., The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments (London: Routledge, 2018), 512-25.

‘The semantics of Sibleyan aesthetic judgments’, in James Young, ed., Semantics of Aesthetic Judgments (Oxford: OUP, 2017), 106-20.

‘Descriptivism and its discontents’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75.2 (2017), 117-29.

‘Applied aesthetics’, in Kasper Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee, and David Coady, (eds), Blackwell Companion to Applied Philosophy (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 487-500.

‘The function of generalisation in art history: understanding art across traditions’, in Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 36.1 (Spring 2016), 8-19.

‘Fictional truth and truth in fiction’, in Noel Carroll and John Gibson, eds., Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature (2015), 372-81.

‘Sibley and the limits of everyday aesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetic Education 49.2 (2015), 50-65.

‘Fictive utterance and the fictionality of narratives and works’, British Journal of Aesthetics 55.1 (2015), 39-55.

‘Blade Runner and the cognitive values of cinema’, in Amy Coplan and David Davies, eds., Blade Runner (London: Routledge, 2015), in the series ‘Philosophers on Film’, 134-54.

‘Varying impressions’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73.1 (2015), 81-92.

‘“This is your brain on art”: what can philosophy of art learn from neuroscience?’, in Gregory Currie, Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin, and Jon Robson, eds., Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 57-74.

‘Watching the unwatchable: IrrĂ©versible, Empire, and the paradox of intentionally inaccessible art’, in Jerrold Levinson, ed., Suffering art gladly: the paradox of negative emotions (London: Macmillan Palgrave, 2013), 246-66.

‘Categories of art’, in Routledge Companion to Aesthetics 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013), 224-34.

‘Dancing around the issues: prospects for an empirically grounded philosophy of dance’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71.2 (2013), 195-202.

‘What type of ‘type’ is a film?’, in Christy Mag Uidhir, ed., Art and Abstract Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 263-283.

‘Pornography, art, and the intended response of the receiver’, in Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson, eds., Aesthetics and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 61-82.

‘The dialogue between words and music in the composition and comprehension of song’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71.1 (2013), 13-22.

‘Can philosophical thought experiments be “screened”?’, in Melanie Frappier, Letitia Meynell, and James Robert Brown, , eds., Thought Experiments in Philosophy, Science, and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2012), 223-38.

‘Enigmatic variations’, The Monist 95.4 (2012), 644-63.

‘“I’ll be your mirror’?: embodied agency, dance, and neuroscience’, in Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens, eds., The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford: OUP, 2011), 346-56.

‘Digital technology, indexicality, and cinema’, Rivista di estetica 46 (2011), special edition on Ontology of Cinema, 45-60.

‘Medium in music’, in Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, eds., Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music. (London: Routledge, 2011), 48-58.

‘Multiple instances and multiple “instances”’, British Journal of Aesthetics 50.4 (2010), 411-26.

‘Learning through fictional narratives in art and science’, in Roman Frigg and Matthew Hunter, eds., Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 262), (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 51-70.

‘Eluding Wilson’s “elusive narrators”’, Philosophical Studies 147.3 (2010), 387-94.

‘Scruton on the inscrutability of photographs’, British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (2009), 341-55.

‘The primacy of practice in the ontology of art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67.2 (2009), 159-71.

‘Dodd on the ‘audibility’ of musical works’, British Journal of Aesthetics 49.2 (2009), 99-108.

‘The artistic relevance of creativity’, in K. Bardsley, D. Dutton. M. Krausz, eds., The Concept of Creativity in Science and Art, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 213-33.

‘On the very idea of “Outsider Art”’, British Journal of Aesthetics 49.1 (2009), 25-41.

‘Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and the ethical dimensions of photography’, in Garry Hagberg, ed., Art and Ethical Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 211-28.

‘Collingwood’s ‘performance’ theory of art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 48.2 (2008), 162-74.

‘How photographs “signify” the world’, in Scott Walden (ed.), Photography and Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 167-86.

‘Telling pictures: The place of narrative in late-modern visual art’, in Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (eds)., Philosophy and Conceptual Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 138-56.

‘Arts and intentions: reflections on Currie’s interdisciplinary turn’, British Journal of Aesthetics 46.2 (2006). 192-203.

‘Against “enlightened empiricism”’, in Matthew Kieran, ed., Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 22-34.

‘The imaged, the imagined, and the imaginary’, in Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes, eds., Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 225-44.

‘Medium’, in Jerrold Levinson, ed., Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 181-91.

‘Fiction’, in Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes, eds., Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 263-73.

‘Artistic intentions and the ontology of art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 39.2 (1999), pp. 148-62.

‘On gauging attitudes’, Philosophical Studies 90 (1998), pp. 129-54.

‘How sceptical is Kripke's “sceptical solution”?’, Philosophia (1998), pp. 119-140.

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