Andriy Bilenkyy is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Department of Philosophy. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, his research is situated at the intersection of aesthetics, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. In his dissertation, Andriy focuses on themes, the cognitively and aesthetically significant properties that we seem to predicate of works of literature in describing them as ‘about something’ in some yet-to-be-elucidated sense of ‘aboutness.’ Outside of philosophy, Andriy has an interest in literary studies and visual art, and an affection for coffee and cats.
What are you working on right now?
My dissertation! At this point, my aim is to motivate my focus on literary aboutness. What’s so puzzling about the property being about so-and-so that we attribute to stories, novels, poems, and other works of literature? Analytic philosophers of literature interested in meaning and interpretation have been discussing literary aboutness and other ‘global’ properties of works of literature since Beardsley. Historically, though, these discussions were often overshadowed by the debates regarding sentential content, force, and other ‘local’ properties of works of literature. And although some philosophers of literature did pay attention to the ‘global’ stuff, they usually did that expecting that the ‘global’ stuff will help them shed light on other issues, be it literary cognitivism, the status of literary criticism, or both.
So, what I’m trying to do these days is to show that literary aboutness merits philosophical attention in and of itself. It is a peculiar property, after all, strangely distinct from referential aboutness or sentential aboutness, but in some way similar to the property depicting so-and-so possessed by pictorial representations. For one, literary aboutness is gradable; yet, the degree to which some story f is more about F than about G does not seem easily explainable in terms of the frequency of references to F in the text of f or the saliency of F to some reader of f or the author’s intention to focus the reader’s attention on F. Moreover, disagreements over literary aboutness are common, substantive, and yet are difficult to resolve; it’s not clear, for example, what sort of evidence one can appeal to in order to settle the debate regarding whether some story is more about F than about G.
My goal, at this point, is to systematize these observations to construct a few puzzles of literary aboutness that would motivate my focus on this property. I’m scheduled to present a paper on one of these puzzles at this year’s annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, and I look forward to hearing what my commentator and my audience think about it.
What’s your personal philosophy?
This question reminds me of the first course in philosophy that I took as an undergrad! It was a PHL100 with Peter King, and it began with a series of remarks on the context-sensitive features of the word “philosophy;” among these was the observation that when people say, “my personal philosophy is so-and-so” they don’t always mean the same as when they say, “the core of Kant’s philosophy is so-and-so.” That being my first encounter with philosophy might explain why I find context-sensitivity so philosophically fascinating and cool.
On a more serious note, though: at some point I’ve adopted a (broadly) Aristotelian approach to questions about the good life, according to which to live a good life is, roughly, to live a life that involves exercising some characteristically human capabilities: epistemic, creative, and ethical; basically, it’s the life of knowledge, creativity, and kindness, with pleasure being a product of these, individually or in a combination. It’s been a while since I re-examined this approach, and perhaps if I were to do that, I’d have to revise some of the elements. But it still strikes me as plausible.
What common philosophical dilemma do you think has a clear answer?
I suspect that some puzzles raised by fiction might not be as vexing as people standardly think. Take, for instance, the puzzle of fictional discourse. On the standard presentation by Searle, reconstructed recently and with great care by Predelli, fictional discourse is puzzling because (very roughly) we understand sentences that occur in works of fiction so easily, even though fiction often breaks the grammar-force conventions that we rely on in understanding sentences that occur elsewhere. It seems to me that this puzzle arises only from the force-conventionalist view about linguistic competence peculiar to Searle; for those who do not subscribe to this view, fiction might still be puzzling, but for other reasons.
What books are currently on your ‘to read’ list?
I’ve got two ‘to read’ lists, one for philosophy and another, for literature; needless to say, compiling these lists is one thing but ticking things off them is quite another 🙂 Here are some items that I hope to get to sooner rather than later.
Philosophy:
- Must We Mean What We Say by Stanley Cavell; my adviser, Sonia Sedivy, recommends it as extremely relevant for some of the questions I’m exploring in my dissertation.
- Wise Choices, Apt Feelings by Allan Gibbard; recently, I audited a course on expressivism co-taught by Imogen Dickie and Nate Charlow, and it made me realize how fundamental Gibbard is for some developments in philosophy of language and metaethics, the two areas in which I’d like to improve my competence.
- Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences by Peter Kivy; Kivy’s views have affected all sorts of debates in aesthetics, and I’d like to engage with them more closely and systematically.
Literature:
- Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield
- Shuggie Bain by Douglas Steward
- A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
These were all found on various book prize lists or were recommended by friends, colleagues, or my mom, whose reading suggestions tend to be spot-on 🙂
What cause or charity do you care about most?
In charity and volunteering, I usually prioritize student organizing, mental health, and animal welfare. Over the past few years, I’ve served the University of Toronto’s philosophical community as a co-founder of the Mental Health and Disability Caucus and, currently, as President of the department’s Graduate Philosophy Student Union. But, as a Ukrainian-Canadian, for the past six months I couldn’t get my mind off Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the endless stream of emergencies it generated and continues to generate. So, I’ve been trying to contribute to various efforts to help Ukrainians affected by the war, including Ukrainian scholars in distress, organized by Canadian charities and by the University of Toronto, including my home department.
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
