6215
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'Contingent' means that the cause is unperceived, not that there is no cause [Hobbes]
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Full Idea:
For contingent, men do not mean that which hath no cause, but that which hath not for cause any thing that we perceive, as when a traveller meets a shower, they both had sufficient causes, but they didn't cause one another, so we say it was contingent.
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From:
Thomas Hobbes (Of Liberty and Necessity [1654], §95)
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A reaction:
Contingent nowadays means 'might not have happened', or 'does not happen in all possible worlds'. Personally I share Hobbes' doubts about the concept of contingency, and this is quite a good account of the misunderstanding.
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20444
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If paintings could be perfectly duplicated, it would be a multiple art form [Currie, by Bacharach]
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Full Idea:
Currie claims that, in principle, all art forms are multiple. A superxerox machine, duplicating a painting molecule by molecule, would show that paintings are singular only contingently.
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From:
report of Gregory Currie (An Ontology of Art [1988]) by Sondra Bacharach - Arthur C. Danto 3
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A reaction:
This strikes me as correct. An original painting would then have the same status as the manuscript of a poem, giving it an authority, and being moving by its personal contact with the artist. But worth far less than current original paintings.
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