Thought Experiments in Aesthetics: the case of Pierre Menard

提要：
In the burgeoning literature on thought experiments, examples are drawn from almost all areas of philosophy, one exception, however, being aesthetics. There are good reasons why this is so:  there are very few interesting theory-oriented thought experiments in aesthetics, which is unsurprising since there are few well-developed theories to test in this field. In this talk I’ll discuss at some length the one major exception to this rule, namely, a series of anti-Goodmanian thought experiments inspired by a 1939 short story by the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges. I’ll try to show how these argumentative thought experiments have worked. In conclusion I shall briefly discuss a different sort of thought experimentation that is quite prevalent in artistic and aesthetic domains.