  A second disjunctive hybrid definition, with an historical cast, Robert Stecker’s historical functionalism, holds that an item is an artwork at time t, where t is not earlier than the time at which the item is made, if and only if it is in one of the central art forms at t and is made with the intention of fulfilling a function art has at t or it is an artifact that achieves excellence in achieving such a function (Stecker 2005).  A question for Stecker’s view is whether or not it provides an adequate account of what it is for a function to be an art function, and whether, consequently, it can accommodate anti-aesthetic or non-aesthetic art. The grounds given for thinking that it can are that, while art’s original functions were aesthetic, those functions, and the intentions with which art is made, can change in unforeseeable ways. Moreover, aesthetic properties are not always preeminent in art’s predecessor concepts (Stecker 2000). A worry is that if the operative assumption is that if x belongs to a predecessor tradition of T then x belongs to T, the possibility is not ruled out that if, for example, the tradition of magic is a predecessor tradition of the scientific tradition, then entities that belong to the magic tradition but lacking any of the standard hallmarks of science are scientific entities.