ABSTRACT
According to legend, the Greek painter Apelles of Kos, famed for his realistic pictures, once tried to paint the myth of Poseidon’s creation of the world. Apelles spent months labouring over his painting, getting every detail just right. Apelles’s story has been told by a number of authors, chief among them Dio Chrysostom, Pliny the Elder, and Sextus Empiricus. Sextus Empiricus uses the anecdote to illustrate what he means by the state of ‘ataraxia’, which he thought of as life’s purpose. It is more or less universally accepted, among philosophers of art, that art-making depends in some way on the artist’s intentions. Apelles’s case is not one which has drawn much attention from philosophers of art. Some have argued that art-making can be an unintentional activity—at least to some extent. Sometimes people ‘unintentionally’ make something in the sense that they set out to make something without realizing that that thing can also be counted as an instance of something else.
