ABSTRACTIneffability of musical meaning is a frequent theme in music philosophy. However, talk about musical meaning persists and seems to be not only inherently enjoyable and socially acceptable, but also functionally useful. Relying on a phenomenological account of musical meaning combined with a naturalist explanatory attitude, we argue for a novel explanation of how ineffability is a feature of musical meaning and experience and we show why it cannot be remedied by perfecting language or musico-philosophical study.Musical meaning is seen as (...) an experiential phenomenon that consists of layers, some recent, others archaic. As such, musical meaning is strongly characterized by asubjectivity. It is in-between, in a state where the division of subject and object is not yet valid or valid anymore. A naturalistic interplay of experiential layers in music brings about a non-reified dynamics driving for expressions, interpretations, engenderings of subjects and objects or even for political action. Generally speaking, the in-betweenness of musical meaning can never be universally reified or symbolic nor can it ever be “subjective,” “mine” or present “at the origin.”In this view, ineffability has two primary reasons. First, the criteria offered for defining musical meaning are often too strict, resulting in untenable pretensions of universality. Second, the processual and relational nature of the in-between keeps meaning in flux; any snapshot creates a new situation and new meanings. (shrink)

If we are to preserve qualia, one possibility is to take the current academic, philosophical, and theoretical notion less seriously and current natural science and some pre-theoretical intuitions about qualia more seriously. Dennett (1997) is instrumental in showing how ideas of the intrinsicalness and privacy of qualia are misguided and those of ineffability and immediacy misinterpreted. However, by combining ideas of non-mechanicalness used in contemporary natural science with the pre-theoretical idea that qualia are special because they are unique, we get (...) a notion of qualia that is acceptable to naturalistic philosophy. The notion of unique qualia is not opposed to the idea that some of the characterizations of qualia have to be qualified. It is the folk-philosophical, academic, notions of theoreticity and conceptuality that have to be modified. (shrink)

The Finnish Heidegger translations point to a problem created by the history of the language: words having to do with technology, metaphysics and so on are mostly direct loans from Indo-European languages with little connection to the rest of the vocabulary. This presents the translators with a dilemma: if one wants to retain Heidegger’s poetic and etymologising style, the Finnish tends to miss the essential contact to Greek-German-Western origins.

Slavoj Žižek has persistently traced the revolutionary potential of music by analysing the music-drama of Richard Wagner. In line with his bigger philosophical program, Žižek uses Wagner's works as a test ground for discussing the symbolic structures that facilitate emancipation. However, this analysis of symbolic structures puts Žižek in an uneasy position with regard to the explicit goals of Wagner himself, who wanted to undermine the Enlightenment subject. The decisive question between Žižek and Wagner concerns the role and nature of (...) a collective, and the function of music in building this collective. The way to that question is opened only once we discard the false dilemma of seeing music either as a symbolic structure to be analysed or as a direct expression of pure experience. Music has revolutionary potential when understood as an unbroken natural – or materialistic – continuum with regard to which the extremes are unhelpful idealisations. (shrink)

The commodification of code demands two preconditions: a belief if the existence of code and a system of ownership for the code. An examination of these preconditions is helpful for resisting the further widening of digital divides. The ontological belief in the relatively independent existence of code is dependent on our understanding of what the “digital” is. Here it is claimed that the digital is not a natural kind, but a concept that is relative to our practices of interpretation. An (...) interpretative system that sees code as something that can or should always be owned implies an increase of social control and threatens vital processes of knowledge creation that are necessary for an open and egalitarian information society. The ontological belief in “digital code” thus provides the backdrop for an ethical view of the information society. Consequently, if we see digital code as an interpretative notion (in the nominalist way), the ethical questions appear in a different light. (shrink)

One prominent interpretation of Heidegger's thought on issues that are traditionally called “ethical” is that it gives us a formal description of how to reach authenticity or how to gain a free relationship to technology without stating any positive prescriptions. However, as Hubert L. Dreyfus, has argued, there is more than pure formalism to Heidegger's thought: he points again and again to how important rootedness, Boden and Heimat, are in trying to overcome the technological understanding of being. Notoriously, Heidegger sees (...) a special role to the Greek-German linguistic axis in internally challenging the tradition of Western metaphysics. This putative special status is in an unsettling way connected to Heidegger's antidemocratic ideas and to the “closedness” of the tradition that according to him is able to challenge the technological world. We will claim here that there is a way of opening up and thus, in a sense, democratizing the role of tradition and rootedness. However, this democatization has to be done without losing sight of the importance of positive content in overcoming technology. This opening up is connected to the idea of local gods in later Heidegger as interpreted by Dreyfus; however, the democratization comes at the price of making ethics local as opposed to universal. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger and Slavoj Žižek represent the two major anti-liberal European revolutions of the twentieth century, the Nazi and the October revolutions. Both revolutions ended badly, but neither Heidegger nor Žižek retreats from the revolutionary position, simply because it is an indelible part of their philosophy, where the finitude of the world and human being necessitate a partisan truth. By reintroducing the concept of the subject, Žižek wants to present a correction that cures Heidegger’s politics. Unfortunately, the resurrection relies on (...) a sleight of hand: the subject to be reintroduced tries to be at the same time ahistorical and leftist. Žižek finds in Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander signs of ahistorical subjectivity, but this interpretation is based on a misconstrual of Heidegger’s notion of alêtheia. On the other hand, by analysing Heidegger’s two famous passages mentioning the extermination camps, we find the factual blind-spots in Heidegger’s ontological gaze. (shrink)

In a well-known way, Husserl's foundation of phenomenology as a transcendental discipline aspires to universal essences, but collapses back to a form of Euro-centrism. While Žižek's description of the phenomenology of the subject follows the Husserlian line in that the subject is a transcendental structure of experience, it is intended to be interpreted in a materialist sense: there is no Big Other. This materialist twist to the philosophy of the subject is supposed to eliminate two traditional phenomenological dead-ends: the Husserlian (...) mistake of colonialism masquerading as universalism and the post-phenomenological mistake of not being able to take an existential and political stand seriously enough. These mistakes are overcome through the notion of a materialist act that is able to reorganize the given boundaries of a situation. However, as Žižek limits his phenomenology of the act to a communicative transaction between subjects, he is quite close to the Husserlian mistake of promoting European values as universal. This can be seen in a number of conceptual knots that figure in Žižek's work. First, like Husserl, Žižek is unable to satisfactorily bridge the divide between transcendental knowledge and positive science. Second, the Žižekian analysis of the necessary political action against multiculturalist capitalism emphatically belittles the role of local and ethnic identities as revolutionary forces. Correspondingly, the belief in the revolutionary potential of the psychoanalytically and philosophically enlightened subject is over-optimistic. Third, the phenomenology of the act in an unfortunate way describes the transcendental aspect of an authentic act, thus unnecessarily mystifying the essentially mundane and subject-less nature of revolutionary acts. (shrink)

The Finnish Heidegger translations point to a problem created by the history of the language: words having to do with technology, metaphysics and so on are mostly direct loans from Indo-European languages with little connection to the rest of the vocabulary. This presents the translators with a dilemma: if one wants to retain Heidegger’s poetic and etymologising style, the Finnish tends to miss the essential contact to Greek-German-Western origins.

Critical thinking (CT) is frequently mentioned as a key competence in sustainability curricula. In this context our era is often diagnosed as being ‘post-truth’, indicating an epistemic concern. However, emerging ‘post-sustainable’ views in education indicate that environmental crises are posing increasingly existential concerns, which might partly explain why simple consciousness-raising sometimes faces denial or fails to promote sustainable action. To overcome this challenge, we undertake a philosophical critique of modern (individual, rational, autonomous) subjectivity assumed in CT and much of curricular (...) thinking. We follow the ‘ontological turn’ where criticality means self-reflective questioning of one’s own being-in-the-world. One acute question concerns energy, especially fossil fuels, which constitute much of the autonomous experience of modern, critical subjectivity, while simultaneously endangering the future horizon of that same subjectivity. Climate strikes at schools and the yellow vest movements indicate, in their own ways, how ecologically problematic fossil fuels are bending modern rationality into unpredicted directions. Metaphoric Archimedes and his ‘circles in the sand’ demonstrate the vulnerability of critical thought facing post-sustainability. This vulnerability should be addressed in curriculum theory, since it is interdependent persons—rather than independent subjects—who are open to sustainable transformation and action. (shrink)

Quantum Closures and Disclosures: Thinking-Together Postphenomenology and Quantum Brain Dynamics (Volume 50 in the series Advances in Consciousness Research).,br> Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Soft Cover (200 pages). €68.00 (ISBN: 978 9 02725 180 0), $81.95 (ISBN: 978 1 58811 371 9) Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 2 August 2006.

One prominent interpretation of Heidegger’s thought on issues that are traditionally called “ethical” is that it gives us a formal description of how to reach authenticity (the early Heidegger) or how to gain a free relationship to technology (the late Heidegger) without stating any positive prescriptions. However, as Hubert L. Dreyfus (1995, 2000) has argued, there is more than pure formalism to Heidegger’s thought: he points again and again to how important rootedness, Boden and Heimat, are in trying to overcome (...) the technological understanding of being. Notoriously, Heidegger sees a special role to the Greek–German linguistic axis in internally challenging the tradition of Western metaphysics. This putative special status is in an unsettling way connected to Heidegger’s antidemocratic ideas and to the “closedness” of the tradition that according to him is able to challenge the technological world. We will claim here that there is a way of opening up and thus, in a sense, democratizing the role of tradition and rootedness. However, this democatization has to be done without losing sight of the importance of positive content (as opposed to formal description) in overcoming technology. This opening up is connected to the idea of local gods in later Heidegger as interpreted by Dreyfus; however, the democratization comes at the price of making ethics local as opposed to universal. (shrink)

One prominent interpretation of Heidegger's thought on issues that are traditionally called “ethical” is that it gives us a formal description of how to reach authenticity (the early Heidegger) or how to gain a free relationship to technology (the late Heidegger) without stating any positive prescriptions. However, as Hubert L. Dreyfus (1995), (2000) has argued, there is more than pure formalism to Heidegger's thought: he points again and again to how important rootedness, Boden and Heimat, are in trying to overcome (...) the technological understanding of being. Notoriously, Heidegger sees a special role to the Greek-German linguistic axis in internally challenging the tradition of Western metaphysics. This putative special status is in an unsettling way connected to Heidegger's antidemocratic ideas and to the “closedness” of the tradition that according to him is able to challenge the technological world. We will claim here that there is a way of opening up and thus, in a sense, democratizing the role of tradition and rootedness. However, this democatization has to be done without losing sight of the importance of positive content (as opposed to formal description) in overcoming technology. This opening up is connected to the idea of local gods in later Heidegger as interpreted by Dreyfus; however, the democratization comes at the price of making ethics local as opposed to universal. (shrink)

The principal aim of this essay is to discuss some logical features of the so-called Classical model of cognitive architecture as it is advocated by J. Fodor and Z. Pylyshyn in their much discussed article 'Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis'. It is pointed out that their structural assumptions have consequences of a logical kind which call into question the view that the Classical architecture (in their sense) can be employed to model human cognition. It seems that the consequences (...) have escaped Fodor and Pylyshyn's notice, or else they have failed to appreciate them, since some of their claims evidently conflict with them. It is also investigated whether the human mind can be characterized as being logical in some weaker sense of logic. Furthermore, it is argued that J. H. Fetzer's view that it is a semiotic system is more realistic than the Classical model, but the distinction he suggests between human cognition and other kinds may be problematic. (shrink)

We go through life, focusing our attention on many things. But how much do we focus on ourselves? We may be aware of many things, but are we self-aware? This is a question our contemporary culture asks us to consider more and more, and words like "self-awareness," "personal identity," "authenticity," and "mindfulness" are becoming not just buzz-words but virtues. The ancient dictum "know thyself" reverberates in all corners of our lives, from Disney characters on our TVs to DISC profiles at (...) our workplaces. Some of the more mindful members of our society may even be tempted to disdain those who are not as mindful as they are. But what if our self-aware culture, hailing us to pursue our true selves, is unaware of itself? What if our definitions of true and false self-understanding are myopic, slanted towards a narrow solipsism that is actually leading people away from authenticity, while all the while championing it? If so, how would we know? Who is best able to define these things and to teach us how to know ourselves truly? Matthew Brett Vaden traces the wisdom of past and modern-day sages to discover how we can truly discover ourselves. (shrink)

This is a book that opens up an area of contemporary experience that rarely sees the light of day. I believe readers from all walks of life and different educational backgrounds will be as excited to read about these experiences as my subjects were delighted to talk about them. One measure of the public's interest in relevant oral history is the current popularity of Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York, Stories, found in museums and bookstores throughout the city. And the (...) fact that the recent Nobel went to Svetlana Alexievich, a writer whose work is grounded in oral history, will expand the market for such books, and is a sign that more and more readers are interested in what ordinary people, whose voices are usually muted, have to say about crucial aspects of modern life. The book's interdisciplinary appeal will attract faculty and students in cultural studies, English, sociology, and other departments and programs interested in aesthetics. The book will have considerable crossover appeal to a wide general audience that especially includes women (most of my subjects are women) and women of color (a third of my subjects are members of a minority). The book is, in fact, eminently "Oprah-ble" because of its undoubted appeal to her vast audience. The challenge for an academic press, of course, will be to gain this audience's attention, a task to which I will be more than happy to devote substantial time and effort. (shrink)

The paper reviews the basics of development and implementation of the debt policy of Ukraine, outlines its formation principles and establishes requirements to normative legal documents which specify administrative measures in the field of the public debt. The research conducted shows that the main normative legal documents which govern activities of state administration bodies responsible for the debt policy implementation are the State Budget and the Program for State Debt Management of the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine. An analysis of (...) the structure of the above documents and ensuing governmental regulations of Ukraine indicates that the national debt policy is not a separate link of the public financial administration, it is shaped subsequent to the results of managerial decisions in the field of monetary relations, changes in the taxation system, operation of the efficiency control system of national taxes, the government deficit level, impacts of foreign economic factors etc. It is proved that debt operations in Ukraine are becoming a factor of economic risk for the state budget whereas the debt budget itself is becoming a destabilization factor. The budgetary policy of Ukraine, which is primarily aimed at maximization of tax collection, results in distortion of the public finance system and aggravates the economic status of numerous industries. The public debt service expenses are however still increasing and require public borrowings which keep growing year by year. The author indicates that the most unsuccessful decisions of the national leadership, which brought about a higher public debt, are the issue of internal public bonds for capitalization of the Privatbank PJSC in 2017 and poor state control over quasi-fiscal operations which may result in default of national Compulsory Social Insurance Funds on their obligations, accumulation of debts on VAT refund, remission of dead tax debts, instalment payment and deferral of money liabilities or tax debts of taxpayers, attraction of sovereign credits by resident economic entities, debt restructuring of such entities with public guarantees, supply of natural gas to heat-and-power engineering companies for generation of thermal energy at preferential prices, accrued receivables of the National Joint-Stock Company 'Naftogaz Ukrainy' for sale of natural gas to the population and heat-and-power engineering companies. (shrink)

У статті розглядаються засади формування основних напрямів політики у сфері державного боргу, спрямованих на зменшення боргових ризиків у середньостроковій перспективі. Визначено вплив макроекономічних чинників на формування управлінських рішень у борговій сфері та проаналізовано наслідки заходів, що впроваджуються для підтримки банківського сектора в умовах глобальної економічної кризи. Сформовано прогнозну модель, за допомогою якої представлено оцінку змін політики у сфері державного боргу за різними сценаріями розвитку економіки України в середньостроковій перспективі.

El texto aborda, a manera de testimonio, el tema de la historia del Grupo de Bogotá –surgido en la Universidad Santo Tomás– y la Filosofía latinoamericana, en las décadas de 1970 y 1980, mediante el comentario de autores y textos que han hecho el análisis y la crítica del mismo grupo. Para hacerlo, se vale de las lecciones de verano de 1988, de Peter Sloterdijk, extraídas de su texto Venir al mundo venir al lenguaje, que aborda el tema del nacimiento (...) como una “poética del comenzar”. (shrink)

"Without God or His Doubles" offers a sympathetic but critical interpretation of the philosophy of Richard Rorty.

The Subjective Well-Being Scale and its short version were developed and validated to measure life satisfaction and positive affect in a Spanish-speaking population. The aim of the present study was to obtain additional evidence of validity for the EBS-8. To this end, the scale was applied in three successive studies to a total of 2259 Mexicans aged 12 to 81 years. The results of the first study allowed us to confirm its unifactorial structure and its adequate reliability ; in the (...) second its measurement invariance by sex, social group and age was tested. From the psychometric indices obtained, it is concluded that the EBS-8 is an excellent brief instrument constructed in Spanish to assess subjective well-being in adolescents, young people, adults and older adults. (shrink)

This festschrift collects a number of insightful essays by a group of accomplished Christian scholars, all of who have either worked with or studied under Hendrik Hart during his 35-year tenure as Senior Member in Systematic Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto, Canada.

__Cultural Studies and Education_ is a timely introduction to cultural studies and the ways in which it can enrich both education scholarship and practice._ An extensive field that in the last few decades has transformed many academic disciplines, cultural studies has yet to be fully considered by educators and education scholars. Cultural Studies and Education redresses this great shortcoming, bringing cultural studies and its implications for education to the fore. The book aims to serve three main purposes. First, it is (...) an introduction for educators and education researchers to some of the most important theoretical debates and analytic frameworks that have shaped the field of cultural studies. Second, it offers an introduction to and examples of three important areas of inquiry in which education and cultural studies overlap: gender and queer studies; postcolonial and ethnic studies; and popular culture and youth studies. Third, it illustrates how education scholars have dealt with the conceptual challenges of cultural studies and how education offers unique perspectives and contributions to the broader debates in the field.". (shrink)

Contents: IDEALIZATION, APPROXIMATION AND COUNTERFACTUALS IN THE STRUCTURALIST FRAMEWORK. Theo A.F. KUIPERS: The Refined Structure of Theories. C. ULISES and Reinhold STRAUB: Approximation and Idealization from the Structuralist Point of View. Ilkka A. KIESEPPÄ: A Note on the Structuralist Account of Approximation. C. ULISES MOULINES and Reinhold STRAUB: A Reply to Kieseppä. Wolfgang BALZER and Gerhard ZOUBEK: Structuralist Aspects of Idealization. Andoni IBARRA and Thomas MORMANN: Counterfactual Deformation and Idealization in a Structuralist Framework. Ilkka A. KIESEPPÄ: Assessing the Structuralist Theory (...) of Verisimilitude. IDEALIZATION, APPROXIMATION AND THEORY FORMATION. Leszek NOWAK: Remarks on the Nature of Galileo's Methodological Revolution. Ilkka NIINILUOTO: Approximation in Applied Science. Elke HEISE, Peter GERJETS and Rainer WESTERMANN: Idealized Action Phases. A Concise Rubicon Theory. Klaus G. TROITZSCH: Modelling, Simulation, and Structuralism. Veikko RANTALA and Tere VADÉN: Idealization in Cognitive Science. A Study in Counterfactual Correspondence. Matti SINTONEN and Mika KIIKERI: Idealization in Evolutionary Biology. Timo TUOMIVAARA: On Idealization in Ecology. Martti KUOKKANEN and Matti HÄYRY: Early Utilitarianism and Its Idealizations from a Systematic Point of View. IDEALIZATION, APPROXIMATION AND MEASUREMENT. Rainer WESTERMANN: Measurement-Theoretical Idealizations and Empirical Research Practice. Uwe KONERDING: Probability as an Idealization of Relative Frequency. A Case Study by Means of BTL-Model. Reinhard SUCK and Joachim WIENÖBST: The Empirical Claim of Probability Statements, Idealized Bernoulli Experiments and their Approximate Version. Pekka J. LAHTI: Idealizations in Quantum Theory of Measurement. (shrink)