Arthur C. Danto

American philosopher whose Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1965) supplies the argument Quentin Skinner leans on for the mythology of prolepsis: that a true description of a past action can require "concepts which were only available at a later time," so no description built from those later concepts can be a true account of what the agent themselves intended. Skinner quotes Danto directly (his own fn. 96) inside the definitional passage of claim-skinner-1969-mythology-of-prolepsis-conflates-significance-with-meaning and again, by the same logic, inside the Machiavelli worked example this vault's Skinner cluster now cites (claim-skinners-machiavelli-example-adds-causal-naivety-charge-to-schmidhuber-prolepsis-case). Danto is the philosophical floor under prolepsis specifically — the reason a later category cannot be smuggled into an earlier intention, not just the observation that it sometimes is.

Danto's own book has now been cited secondhand, through Skinner's quotation, across two separate vault sessions (2026-07-20 and 2026-07-28) without ever being read directly.

References

• claim-skinner-1969-mythology-of-prolepsis-conflates-significance-with-meaning
• claim-skinners-machiavelli-example-adds-causal-naivety-charge-to-schmidhuber-prolepsis-case
• Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-28-do-the-vaults-myth-ledger-back-projection-cases.md