Welcome to the Blog for Philosophy 4460, an Ontology of Art Seminar being offered during the fall of 2012 at The University of Manitoba. I'm Carl Matheson, the instructor for the course.In this blog I'll let you know of the papers that I've assigned you to read and of the topics for the papers you'll be expected to write. The blog will, I hope, mainly provide us with an avenue for conducting discussions between classes. Please feel free to try out ideas. arguments and critiques. And, of course, play nice.

Next week's (September 18) class will concern the relationship between a given statue and the clay from which it is molded. I have already assigned the chapter on constitution from Conee and Sider's Riddles of Existence and have distributed copies of the chapter in class. Let me know if you don't have a copy. I'd also like you to read Ryan Wasserman's wonderful entry on material constitution in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/material-constitution/ I realize that I'm assigning a fairly long paper only two days before class, but please try to find time to at least give it a quick read before Tuesday. It goes far beyond what is presented in Riddles. Because we'll be discussing an issue at the heart of metaphysics,we'll only be able to scratch the surface, but I hope that we'll come away with a decent rough map.