# Generating Philosophy - Section 1 Discussion with Enrico (7 Apr 2026) Cleaned transcript of a discussion between Nick and [[Enrico Terrone]] about Section 1 of the generating philosophy paper. The source transcript was noisy and contained many speech-to-text errors. I have reconstructed the conversation by using the project context, the current draft, and obvious reference points in the discussion. After the initial cleanup, I also checked the description of [[David Davies]] in Terrone's 2026 paper "The Appreciation Game. A Monist Ontology of Works of Art," which makes clear that Davies's view is a form of concrete action monism: artworks are performances, and the appreciative problem is that audiences usually experience the display or structure revealed by the action rather than the action itself. A few genuinely unrecoverable phrases are marked `[unclear]`. --- ## Transcript ENRICO: Some people, like [[David Davies]], think that in a work of art the author is constitutive of the work. In that case the relation is no longer merely external or relational, because the relation is incorporated into the identity conditions of the work. It is an internal, essential relation between the work and the artist. NICK: Do you have something by Davies I could read on this? ENRICO: The book is *Art as Performance* (2004). He repeats the theory in various papers, but that is the main source. The basic idea is action monism: the artwork is the artist's performance, not just the visible or audible product. What the audience directly encounters is the display or structure specified by that performance, but the constitutive work, on this view, includes the artist's action itself. So if you had an ontology like that for the philosophical work, then an LLM could not fit the criteria for being the second half of the work. But people already think that view is quite demanding, even for art, so it may be that for philosophy it is completely implausible. Even so, some people do have a conception of lphilosophy on which it is a kind of outpouring of the philosopher's personality, so in that sense the philosopher is a constitutive ingredient of the work.agr But we can face that challenge, because we can in a sense deal with it stipulatively. And moreover we can point to what looks like a counter-pressure, namely peer review practice. Blind review seems completely in order in philosophy. In art, by contrast, people do not normally say: we do not want to know who painted this, let us just look at the painting. NICK: My soon-to-be sister-in-law did orchestral auditions behind a curtain. ENRICO: Yes, and music is probably the place where formalism is most plausible. Formalism is the opposite view: the properties of the artwork are all in the appearance. I just thought presenting the point like this might be more effective. But if you think it makes the paper weird, then fine. NICK: What you are saying now makes it sound as though I have wasted my whole time trying to make this work. Sorry, I do not have anything else to show you. I feel as though I have done three days of work for nothing. ENRICO: No, no. I think what you already have is good. I just thought this might make the paper stronger, because it frames things as a genuine challenge. So, yes, I would put it this way. In the first case, the challenge is that the relation between philosopher as person and text is a necessary condition. That is the constitutive challenge. The second and third challenges are different. There we can still accept that the value is only in the text, so the ontology of the philosophical work is just the text and not the text plus the performance or action. But even in that case people like [[Luciano Floridi|Floridi]] or [[Tom Zahavy|Zahavy]] argue that certain properties of the text can be caused only by a human subject. In one case because only humans can arrive at the right sort of abduction; in the other because only humans can have the right phenomenology, which then gives certain properties to the text. So I think the constitutive/causal distinction may connect the three objections. In a sense all three challenges concern the relation between the philosopher and the text. But in the first case the relation is constitutive: the work is not just the text; it is the text plus the action or process. You may also find a summary of Davies's position in my recent paper in the *European Journal of Philosophy*. It is a survey of positions in the ontology of art together with a proposal of my own. There I treat Davies as a concrete action monist: artworks are performances, and the pressure point is that appreciators usually experience the display rather than the constitutive action. NICK: I think I have heard you present that ten times. ENRICO: Yes, exactly. Maybe you have heard some version of it in Chicago. NICK: You have not been in the university today, have you? The Wi-Fi seems really bad today. ENRICO: Anyway, yes, this may be the way to do it. In that first objection, the human author is constitutive of the work, or the text. The work is not just text; it is text plus process. NICK: Yes, but then is not that just psychological process or biographical process? And is not that back to intrinsic stuff again? This is one place where I am getting slightly confused. At one point I was thinking that we normally expect philosophical texts to have understanding behind them, as evidence of somebody else's understanding of these issues. But then I wonder whether that is just another intrinsic quality these systems do not have: the understanding state itself. ENRICO: That worry is close to the abduction point, because abduction is often treated as a route to understanding. If one says that the text cannot be good enough because the AI lacks understanding as a psychological process, that is very similar to the Floridi objection. What we are discussing in Section 1 seems more like a prior issue: whether we need to be explicit about a challenge of this sort. Maybe it is a stupid objection and can just appear in the introduction. But to me it does not seem stupid at all. It is really the same sort of issue one finds in aesthetics. There is the thought that art depends on a creative subject, and therefore on an ontological dependency between the work and the process of making. In that sense the process of making is a constituent of the work. That is how people answer the indiscernibility question: if two things are indiscernible, why is one art and the other not? Whereas what Floridi and Zahavy say is different. They say, in effect, that we will never get indiscernible cases, precisely because the AI cannot make something of that sort. The problem is not: what if an AI somehow ended up having the relevant experience, like Einstein in the elevator? Their point is rather that the AI will never succeed in making the right kind of text, so we never reach the case of two indiscernible texts, one human-made and one machine-made. So in the first case the challenge concerns indiscernibles. That is why the analogy with art is useful. It is a widespread or at least respectable view in aesthetics. Think of [[Arthur Danto|Danto]]'s familiar cases: if the [[Mona Lisa]] came out of a washing machine, that would not be the *Mona Lisa*. Or the [[Rembrandt]] case: if something indiscernible from a Rembrandt came out of a washing machine, it still would not be a work by Rembrandt. People argue that what matters is the right history of making, and that this is a human history involving psychological process, intention, feelings, and so on. We do not need to enter all the details, but we can cite that debate, including the AI art and creativity literature. But for us there is a reply. At least for the purposes of this paper, we adopt a conception of philosophy that focuses on the text and not on the process of making. And we have at least one piece of evidence that seems compelling, namely blind review practice. That might be a nice way of pivoting into Sections 2 and 3. We can say: these stronger views are out there, and they would not even allow indiscernible cases. But here are the views we are actually going to examine. NICK: Yes, that sounds promising. ENRICO: Then we can say: look, in art this is a very familiar issue. If something is indiscernible from a work of art and yet lacks the right history, many people say it is not art. But for philosophy we have a practice that pushes the other way. Blind review suggests that, for us, work and text are treated as one thing. It is a reductio of a strongly provenance-sensitive view. If a philosophical text had to be tied to a philosopher in that constitutive way, blind review would be a very strange practice indeed. NICK: That might also be a nice way of moving into Sections 2 and 3: say that, on these stronger views, we would not even get indiscernible texts. ENRICO: Exactly. NICK: I do want to do the section the way you suggest. I just do not want to go away from this conversation thinking everything is fine and then start working again and discover it is not. How about I try one more time? I will not have much time in the next couple of days, but I can try one more time before I present it for the Hong Kong thing. Then maybe, if needed, you can have a go at the section. I think now we have clarified it a bit. Could I also ask: where should the practitioner-focused philosophy material go? We mention it early on at the moment. Should that go into the same fragment, the same Section 1 material, or should it come earlier? ENRICO: I think those views, the ones you associate with [[Wittgenstein]], can also be traced back to the indiscernibility case. Suppose you had one piece of philosophy and another piece of philosophy, and the texts were the same. They would say the two are not the same, because one is the outcome of self-transformation or therapy, and the other cannot be that, because it is machine-generated. It is basically the same pattern. NICK: So theoretically, if it was made by an LLM, they would say it is not philosophy. ENRICO: Exactly. They put the value not just in the text but in the process, the connection, the journey. So in that case the indiscernible case does not go through, because the journey is missing. The text is only half the thing. But there is also another way to read these views. Someone like [[Wittgenstein]] could be read in a constitutive way, but also in a causal way. One might say not that the journey is part of the work, but that only a person who goes through that journey can produce a text like that. In that case the objection is not solved simply by saying that philosophy is in the text, because it would become an objection of the same sort as Floridi's. NICK: Right, that is a good point. ENRICO: And the same applies to [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]] and even to [[Maurice Merleau-Ponty|Merleau-Ponty]]. These figures can often be read in two ways. On the constitutive reading, the text is just an appendix to a lived process or a life-stance, and then the issue is excluded by definition. On the causal reading, the thought is that only a person with the relevant embodiment, drives, perception, or phenomenology could produce such a text. Then we are back to something structurally close to the Section 2 and Section 3 objections. So this problem actually helps us refine the distinction. We may say that we are adopting the constitutive reading for the purposes of Section 1. But on the causal reading, the arguments from Sections 2 and 3 can be used against these practitioner-focused views as well. NICK: That is really helpful, because it means those cases are less trivial than I thought. ENRICO: Yes, and I think it is worth considering the stronger version, because it is widespread. When I presented this in more continental-leaning settings, the reaction was often just: but you cannot have philosophy without the human being. The philosopher is not the text; the text is just an appendix of the philosopher. This is also why I want to present the challenge the way you suggest: it lets us start pushing back against an intuition a lot of people have. It also lets us say that philosophy might be like art in this respect, though perhaps with exceptions. But we also plainly have a social practice more like science, in which the text is assessed without regard to the person behind it. Nobody in science says: this theory is no good because we do not know who the scientist is. That would be insane. The explanatory power of the theory does not depend on the identity of its author. In art, by contrast, we usually care much more about the connection between the work and the maker. NICK: Though the audition case is not a perfect analogy, because the violinist is not the artist in the same sense; that is more like testing an instrument or a performance. ENRICO: Exactly. The composer is the better analogue. It would be strange to say: I am reading this score but I do not care who the composer is. In art history, questions of authorship matter a great deal. Whereas in science, if people tried to discover who produced a theory, that would be interesting for the history of science, or perhaps for hiring and credit, but not for the epistemic value of the theory itself. NICK: This also reminds me of that practitioner-focused work on citation and philosophical influence. There is a philosopher with a big beard who did work on the most cited philosophers of the last hundred years, and I remember putting my hand up and asking: why are you not looking at the most cited papers? Surely that is what we should care about. And he looked as though he did not understand the question. ENRICO: That might actually be a good target for criticism. NICK: Tell me one more time: Davies's book? ENRICO: *Art as Performance* (2004). And if you look at my paper you will also find the view discussed there. NICK: Have you seen the poster for the Hong Kong conference? I can send it to you on WhatsApp. I still like the title a lot. ENRICO: Yes, send it on WhatsApp. NICK: I also wanted to show you something in ChatGPT which may be useful for this. Have you used Deep Research? ENRICO: No. NICK: It spends a long time searching the web and downloading material, but one useful thing is that you can tell it to search only specific sites. So you can just tell it to search [[PhilPapers]], and it will go through those results. That is very useful. ENRICO: Yes, that sounds useful. NICK: I do not have much more to talk to you about. If I can get the beginning fixed, then I think the next two sections are in reasonably good shape. I have the recording of the previous conversation we had, and I know the other things we need to fix. ENRICO: Yes, there are the smaller points we discussed as well. NICK: Exactly, things like moving the Einstein paragraph and related adjustments. But if we can get this structure in place, the paper will look more unitary. ENRICO: Yes. And if you get a version with this structural change, plus the smaller fixes and the conclusion, then we can really aim to submit it by the end of May. NICK: Yes. After the Hong Kong event, perhaps use the feedback from that and then do one last pass. I would like to get it finished as well. Then we can start working on the aesthetics of functioning paper. ENRICO: Yes. NICK: I had some non-research questions as well. Have you managed to open [unclear app/service] recently? ENRICO: Yes. NICK: Because it kept doing this ridiculous thing when I tried to get money back for the Hong Kong trip. Every time I tried, it said there were no funds. ENRICO: Strange. I opened it yesterday because I wanted to check everything. Maybe it was just a bug at the time. NICK: Maybe. I have not tried for a couple of weeks now. --- ## Note on reconstruction The philosophical content of the exchange is highly recoverable from the transcript and from the current state of the project. The only substantial uncertainty is in the closing administrative exchange, where the source transcript became too garbled to reconstruct the exact app or service being discussed.