---
title: "Arthur C. Danto"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Arthur C. Danto"
aliases: ["Arthur Danto"]
first_seen: "2026-07-28T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["mythology of prolepsis","Quentin Skinner","philosophy of history","myth ledger"]
---


American philosopher whose *Analytical Philosophy of History* (Cambridge,
1965) supplies the argument [[entity-quentin-skinner|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