Is AI art really art? This question has been the subject of much public discussion and is one that philosophical aesthetics should be well-placed to address. Unfortunately, there is no clear consensus within the discipline on how to tackle key definitional questions such as this. In the case of AI, we can add to this the unique challenge of works not made by humans. In this chapter, I argue for the utility of a Wittgensteinian approach to the question of whether AI art is art. This approach typically repudiates the need to provide necessary and sufficient conditions. Using Gaut's cluster account, I show that AI art can indeed count as art. I also demonstrate that the cluster account of art is particularly useful for thinking about art made by AI.

The Cluster Account of Art

The perceived failures of contemporary definitions of art (particularly a failure to garner any broad consensus amongst philosophers) led Berys Gaut to take a Wittgensteinian approach to art. Gaut was not the first to consider Wittgenstein's work in relation to the definition of art. Gaut's theory re-visits the work of philosophers in the 1950s who applied Wittgenstein's family resemblance approach to the question ‘what is art?’, arguing for an anti-definitionalist approach (see Weitz 1956; Ziff 1953; Kennick 1958). These philosophers argue for two key points: first, that art cannot be defined (in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions), and second, that art is a concept best characterized in terms of family resemblance (Gaut 2000). Instead of resemblance-to-paradigm as the model for the concept of art, however, Gaut turns to a ‘cluster account’ construal of family resemblance (Gaut 2000, 26). The cluster version of family resemblance that Gaut adopts comes from Wittgenstein's discussion of proper names (Wittgenstein 2009: PI §79) and was further developed by Searle (1958). As Gaut writes,

Introduction

A key type of reasoning in everyday life and science is reasoning by analogy. Roughly speaking, such reasoning involves the transposition of solutions that work well in one domain to another, on the basis of pre-existing analogous properties between the two domains. If we are to automate scientific reasoning with artificial intelligence (AI), then we need adequate models of analogical reasoning that clearly specify the conditions under which good analogical inferences can be made and bad ones avoided. Two general approaches to such modelling exist: universal and local. In this chapter, we assess the merits and demerits of both approaches. We concede that there are substantial obstacles standing in the way of the universal model view, but that these may be mitigated to some extent by supplementing existing models with additional criteria. One such criterion is defended, particularly against a challenge due to Wittgenstein. We argue that this challenge can be met and thus that there is hope for a one-size-fits-all model in the study of analogical reasoning.

The structure of the chapter is as follows. The section titled ‘Philosophical Models of Analogical Reasoning’ provides an overview of the main philosophical models of analogical reasoning, identifying some of their strengths and weaknesses. The next section, titled ‘AI Models of Analogical Reasoning’, briefly looks at one model of analogical reasoning that originates in the symbolic AI tradition, and offers some very general remarks about the prospects of modelling analogical reasoning with neural AI. Following that, the section titled ‘Norton's Material Challenge’ sets out the key issue of concern for this chapter, namely whether a universal model of analogical reasoning can be constructed. In the section titled ‘Relevant Conceptual Uniformity’, we consider one promising route towards a universal model via the supplementary criterion that the concepts involved are relevantly uniform. The subsequent section, titled ‘A Wittgensteinian Spanner in the Works?’, presents a challenge to this route that can be found in Wittgenstein's family resemblance metaphor, whose ultimate target is the rejection of concept uniformity. An attempt is made to meet this challenge by arguing that some concepts in natural science are uniform, or at least more uniform than others, but also that scientific inquiry strives towards, and manages to increase, uniformity.

Sonia Sanchez is known for her contributions as a poet, activist, dramatist, educationist, and a champion of African American culture. She is regarded worldwide as “a living legend,” a revered female writer of the Black community (Wood 2010, xi). Like Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Jean Toomer and Margaret Walker, with whom she is compared, Sanchez has opened a “space in American letters where the racial self may be heard, affirmed, and strengthened” (Andrews, Foster, and Harris 1997, 643). Her poetics and politics are inseparable. As she recalled in 2000: “The cultural thing, I think, was the existence of us as black folk in a place that did not speak well of us, a country that not only had enslaved us but afterward had ignored us—had segregated us and conspired to keep us from learning even the simplest things” (Sanchez and Kelly 2017, 1034). Sanchez, alongside her fellow revolutionary Black Arts poets, frequently saw her activism questioned: “[People asked,] Why do you agitate? You have brains, talent, education. You can find a nice comfortable niche and forget about others” (quoted in Randall 1970, 9). But to find a nice comfortable niche was to negate or compromise her blackness and to forget about the systematic discrimination of African Americans, her “brothers” and “sisters,” who were deprived of a comfortable niche.

Sanchez's lifelong sociopolitical activism has earned diverse praise. Nicole Moore (2010, 2) argues that Sanchez “infuses her writing with the type of historical and cultural significance and power that makes each word sharp as a razor blade and as hard as any Tupac [Shakur] lyric.” Essence magazine has called her poetry “a must for all readers,” while writer, poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, has called Sanchez “a lion in literature's forest” (Leopold 2013, para. 4). Reflecting on herself, Sanchez says, “[a]s a poet, I know that I have sharp words” (quoted in Ballin 2015, 3). The self-appraisal is not unlike Oodgeroo's view of her poetic purpose: “I’d rather hit them with my words than pick up a gun and shoot them” (quoted in Fox 2011, 62). In his introduction to Sanchez's Home Coming, Don L. Lee (1969, 7–8) argues that “Sonia wants us to/live & to/live is not synonymous with to/exist.

Summary of the actual days of work on writing the play, according to Eugene O’Neill's Work Diary and Carlotta Monterey O’Neill's Diary

Total days of writing = 147

Carlotta's typing = 25

Saxe Commins’ typing = 16

Introduction

This chapter describes three cases involving legal claims by extraditees that their surrender would have serious consequences on their physical and mental health. In the case of Julian Assange, extensive delays have contributed to his deteriorating mental health and a high risk of suicide if he is surrendered to the US to face numerous charges of espionage. The case of Dorin Savu introduced evidence that surrender would raise potential exposure to torture in the requesting state, while the extradition proceedings considered the significance of his status and rights as a refugee in Canada. The case of Elias Perez raised arguments against extradition that focused on his potential exposure to violations of the CAT if he was surrendered to face trial in Mexico and related arguments involving the rule of noninquiry. The individual rights arguments in all of these cases were largely rejected because courts considering the request were willing to support the overarching authority of the requesting nation to prosecute each suspect for various crimes. The chapter will describe key factual and legal details raised in each case and demonstrate how they reveal the need for reform to the process of extradition given the limited recognition of the obligation to protect the rights of extraditees, as well as their physical and mental welfare.

Julian Assange, Mental Health and Delay

Australian citizen Julian Assange's attempts to avoid extradition from the UK, first to Sweden to face questioning over alleged sexual offences and then the US on serious espionage charges, spanned a total of 13 years. This includes seven years of self-imposed exile in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid surrender to Sweden, largely due to fears he would be unlawfully sent to the US despite prohibitions against surrender to third-party states in extradition treaties. Assange has repeatedly claimed the legal processes for extradition would lead to his unlawful transfer to the US, resulting in a possible maximum term of 175 years in prison (Australian Associated Press 2021). His charges are linked to the activities of WikiLeaks, a website launched in Sweden by Assange in 2006 as a forum for maintaining accountability for governments throughout the world through the ‘principled leaking’ of confidential documents (Karhula 2011, 1).

(for any reader who needs a reminder)

How does one summarize a play? A play is an experience, which is made as thick as pos¬sible by the theater artists who gather to put it in focus. Anything else is just synopsis, a reduction of a story to its self-evident facts, but no one would pay attention to the art if it consisted only of that. Yet summation is a fair term for what we do in watching a play, bringing its characters and incidents to a totality, even though we know that only in the full-scale experience do we get taken in by the fiction and the effects.

Long Day's Journey unfolds over the course of a single day in August 1912. The setting is described as “James Tyrone's summer house,” and so at once we know of a man, a father, and several pages of scenic and character description will give us an unusually detailed sense of how we should see this place and these characters in relation to him.

(Act 1) It is around 8:30 a.m. The day begins in good humor and affection, with James (65) appreciating the home he shares with his adored wife, Mary (54), and their two adult sons, Jamie (33) and Edmund (23), who are also in good humor. A few dis¬cordant notes are heard. Mary seems troubled by the sense that she is being watched over, and Edmund shows signs of ill health. The tension is broken by a funny anecdote Edmund tells of an Irish tenant farmer on a piece of property owned by the family, but even that bit of humor brings out underlying tensions, like the sons’ cynicism about the father's status as landlord and the father's bitterness about the waywardness of his sons, who both depend on him at the moment.

Jamie has taken up his father's profession as an actor, but he enjoys nothing—not wealth, not art, not pride—of his position, and antagonism has grown between father and son as a result. The younger son has led a vagabond life according to some roman¬tic and decadent fantasies. At a low point, he attempted suicide, but lately he has been working for the local newspaper and publishing some poetry, giving his family hope that he has turned a corner in his life.

When I arrived in Australia in late 2014, my original intention was to research African American poetry. However, I soon broadened the scope of my project to consider the impact of African American poetry on Aboriginal Australian poetry. Accordingly, I decided to immerse myself more thoroughly in Aboriginal culture and society to better understand the relationship between Aboriginal politics and poetics. In 2016, I was invited by Lionel Fogarty to attend a poetry reading called “Lost Language Found” at the Queensland Poetry Festival in Brisbane. At this event, several established and emerging Aboriginal poets and activists participated, including Lionel Fogarty, Natalie Harkin, Ellen Van Neerven, Evelyn Araluen Corr, Alison Whittaker, Jeanine Leane, and Melissa Lucashenko. Listening to the readings of these poets, I was astonished by their moving poetics and political resilience.

In me, the event also initiated a transcontinental thinking. As a Middle Eastern researcher who had come to research in the West, I drew connections between the poetries of these poets at the event (and by extension the poetries I selected to study in my thesis) and the poetry of what is commonly known today as the “Arab Spring” or the “Arab Revolutions.” I arrived in Australia after a period in which many of the autocratic regimes in the Middle East had been overthrown by these public revolutions. I had watched its beginning and development while I was in Iraq. Many peoples from different parts of the Arab world had interconnected through social media (notably Facebook) and adopted a common slogan, namely “Al-Shaab Yurid Isqat Al-Nizam” (English: “The People Demand the Overthrow of the Regime”). The Arab peoples were united against a common enemy, oppression or dictatorship, adopting this newly created universal slogan despite the fact that each Arab people/country has distinctive cultures, beliefs (Islamic, Christian, and other religions), and even Arabic accent(s). The poetry of the Arab Spring was also a highly effective weapon which destabilized the autocratic Arabic regimes, in addition to its being used as a unifying force to unite all the oppressed peoples of the Arab world under one banner.

Eugene O’Neill was 50 years old on June 6, 1939, when he first made mention of the work that would become Long Day's Journey. His most recent Broadway premiere, Days Without End, had been five years earlier—a disastrous critical failure. Frustrated by the stand¬ards of theater artistry and the commercial pressures that necessitated compromise, and above all by the sense that his plays were misunderstood even when the tickets sold well, he sought, as he had frequently done in the past, creative refuge as far from New York as he could go within the United States. And so, he came to the Pacific Coast in 1936.

Gene was born in New York City on Longacre Square (now Times Square) in 1888, and his father was one of the more successful actor-managers of the era, so flight from New York always expressed a turn away from his origins, both in terms of geography and lineage. In the 1920s, when his plays were constantly in the New York spotlight, he retreated to places like Provincetown, Bermuda, Nantucket, and Maine, then in 1928 to France with his new wife, Carlotta Monterey. In 1931, he returned to New York to oversee the Theatre Guild's production of Mourning Becomes Electra, but even at that point he preferred Long Island to Manhattan as a residence. The characteristic gesture of his life was leaving New York, but that gesture would mean little without his returning again and again. Broadway needed him (even as it doubted him) as a definer of a new standard of excellence, and in a crazy way he needed Broadway (even as he doubted it) as a definer of his aspirations.

Despite what Carlotta wrote in her diary, which was often self-effacing, she did have an outstanding talent, and it was for home building, also home management. Her specific achievement at Tao House was the shaping of home around Eugene O’Neill's need for home in a way that conformed with her own. Some strange fate brought them together, because her need for home—and him—reacted with his need for home—and her—in such a way that many plays could be written, most extraordinarily Long Day's Journey. As she frequently lamented in later years, she created home after home for their marriage. But Tao House was her masterpiece, just as Long Day's Journey was his.The two acts of creation are interwoven to the degree that they can be seen as a co-creation.

As I argued in my book on O’Neill's previous marriage, to Agnes Boulton, Gene clung to the romantic image of the solitary author who single-handedly struggles to bring forth pure art. The implication for Agnes was that she should not be there, even as he always needed her to be there. In a sense, she had to vanish and enfold him. The end that justified such a contortion of marriage was, for Gene anyway, the creation of a great work of art. The clustered interests of the marketplace—publishers, producers, critics, and audiences—should not get in the way of the poet's genius. Due respect has been given to Gene's resistance to the usual commercial lures of the day and his refusal to treat his art with anything less than dignity. He did not cater to the market, and he stood by the integrity of his work. But a great author who goes unpublished is an anomaly, and a playwright cannot avoid dealing with the commerce of the book trade and theaters and the economic realities of people trying to make a living from their art—actors, directors, designers, and producers. The paying audience drives that whole industry.

The full name of the O’Neills’ Dalmatian dog was Silverdene Emblem O’Neill, which they shortened to Blemie. He was purchased at a price of 75 pounds as a puppy from a first-class breeder in England. “English bred dogs are the best,” said Carlotta. He joined the O’Neills in France on December 11, 1929, and he remained with them until his death on December 17, 1940, “a finer friend than most friends,” as Gene put it.

Thirteen is an above-average span of life for that breed, and no doubt the loving care he was provided helped prolong his life. There are stories that he enjoyed the wild areas around Tao House, also that he occasionally ventured to downtown Danville. But signs of age became increasingly evident in 1939, and by 1940 it was clear his end was near. He enjoyed a teak bed in Carlotta's bedroom, to which he had to be carried in his final weeks, and it was there he died. His demise coincided with the writing of Long Day’s Journey, and he lived less than two months beyond the completion of the initial draft of that play.

Death and obituary were on Gene's mind when he came up with the idea of a series of one-acts to be called By Way of Obit. The only play he completed from the projected series of eight was Hughie. The last play on his list of possible concepts was “Blemie one.” He added those words on December 2, 1940, and Blemie died two weeks later. So it seems Gene had some idea of creating a play from the death of Blemie before Blemie was put out of his misery by a veterinarian.

The death of Blemie was more emotionally devastating to the O’Neills than any other loss during their marriage. Gene saw Blemie's death as the turning point, after which, “Everything has gone wrong.”1 As an initial gesture to right that wrong—and, one might imagine, the wrong of his own premature aging—Gene wrote The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O’Neill.

Much has been made by Stephen A. Black and others of Gene's dependent relationships and his search for a replacement of his mother, but less thoroughly explored is the story of how Carlotta came to need to be needed in that way, which has its own logic in family history and the culture of that time. She offered several versions of that story at various points in her life, and it is a crafted narrative, but some facts seem stable.

Hazel Neilson Tharsing was born in California on December 28, 1888, the daugh¬ter of Christian Neilson Tharsing and Nellie Gotchett. Carlotta, as Hazel would in her adulthood come to be known, later insisted on referring to the family name of her father (Taasinge) in its Danish form before he became a naturalized U.S. citizen because she felt it pointed to a higher class of origin, associated with land ownership. (There is an island called Taasinge, near Svendborg in Denmark.) Her father trave¬led from Denmark to East Asia at the age of 16 to learn the methods of Japanese and Chinese horticulture. He settled in the Central Valley of California and soon became the proprietor of a 160-acre orchard and eventually co-owner of a 2200-acre ranch with orchard. He was an innovator in the preparation of dried fruits and the railroad deliv¬ery of unripe fruit to distant markets. But his fortunes were mixed, and a broken levee in 1890 drowned out his investment—fish were eating his pear trees! He had a first wife who died in 1884, then he married Nellie Gotchett in 1886. She was 22 years his junior and had been pressured into marriage by her social-climbing mother.

In her “Australian Blackness, the African Diaspora and Afro/Indigenous Connections in the Global South,” Aboriginal (Kukuyalanj) Australian scholar Kiaya Aboahye (2018, 72) identifies the continent of Australia as one of the world's oldest living and continuing “black civilization,” with lines of transnational connections that rhizomatically link it to the rest of the global Black world. Creating a rich, cross-cultural network both within and outside of Australia, these connections include, but are not limited to, first and second-generation continental Africans, African Americans, Black Brits, Haitians, people of Afro-Caribbean and Aboriginal descent, Pacific and Pasifika Islanders: “Each of their experiences of blackness have shared spheres of influence, and often a historical connection to Aboriginal Australia.” Most nota-bly is the connection between Aboriginal Australian and African American peoples due to their suffering from almost shared (post)-colonial experiences. Aboriginal and African American political movements of the second half of the twentieth century, including the Civil Rights movement, Freedom Rides, and the Black Power movement, strived to create a sense of racial or “black” solidarity, not only on the national level, but also transnationally, even though the ethnic groups leading them demanded different sociopolitical rights. Whereas land rights have been specific to the struggle of Aboriginal peoples, as for them country has economic and spiritual significance, the wider spectrum of racist practices imposed on Aboriginal and African American peoples are mutually analogous and have enabled these peoples to consider a coalition-based activism. Consequently, Aboriginal Australian and African American political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s transgressed the national borders and were transnationally interconnected.

However, the lifelong history of political struggle between both peoples has been underestimated by many critics and teachers in both countries. In the United States, to begin with, though the exclusion of the African American history from the schools’ formal curriculum came to an end at the beginning of the 1960s, thanks to the efforts of Civil Rights activists (Smith 2003), since then, “[American] [t]eachers tended to present the ‘civil rights movement’ as a distinctly American event, from ‘Montgomery to Memphis,’ with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as its crowning moment” (Spero 2008, 22). Moreover, most of the literature that had been written about the African American Civil Rights movement since the 1960s denied the movement any long history or international impact or interaction.