Aristotle’s account of tragedy in his Poetics is one of the earliest examples of this fashion of theorizing about an art type and is a paradigmatic occasion of it. Aristotle develops his account of tragedy as an art form by identifying the characteristic experience—catharsis—instances of the art type provide for audiences. He is able to develop a selection of claims about how a tragedy must be structured so as to achieve this attribute expertise. Aristotle opens his account of tragedy by discussing what might arguably be thought of the fabric basis of the art form.
By the sixteenth century, there …