Music and listening, music and consciousness -- Conceptualizing consciousness -- The phenomenology of everyday music listening experiences -- Absorption, dissociation and trancing -- Musical and non-musical trancing in daily life -- Imaginative involvement -- Musical and non-musical trancing : similarities and differences -- Experiencing life and art : ethological and evolutionary perspectives on -- Transformations of consciousness -- Everyday music listening experiences reframed.
This book is an important contribution to the philosophy of music. Whereas most books in this field focus on the creation and reproduction of music, Bruce Benson's concern is the phenomenology of music making as an activity. He offers the radical thesis that it is improvisation that is primary in the moment of music making. Succinct and lucid, the book brings together a wide range of musical examples from classical music, jazz, early music (...) and other genres. It offers a rich tapestry incorporating both analytic and continental philosophy, musicology and performance-practice issues. It will be a provocative read for philosophers of art and musicologists and, because it eschews technicality, should appeal to general readers, especially those who perform. (shrink)
Autobiography and phenomenology: Preface for Germans (1934).--Phenomenology and theory of knowledge: Sensation, construction, and intuition (1913). On the concept of sensation (1913). Consciousness, the object, and its three distances (1916).--Phenomenology and esthetics: An essay in esthetics by way of a preface (1914). Esthetics on the streetcar (1916).--An esthetics of historical reason: The idea of theater: an abbreviated view (1946). Reviving the paintings (Velázquez, chapter I) (1946).
PART ONE 1. Introduction The purpose of this investigation is to explore the relations between myth and music. Although this research may be said to have a ...
The language theory of Mikhail Bakhtin does not fall neatly under any single rubric - 'dialogism,' 'marxism,' 'prosaics,' 'authorship' - because the philosophic foundation of his writing rests ambivalently between phenomenology and Marxism. The theoretical tension of these positions creates philosophical impasses in Bakhtin's work, which have been neglected or ignored partly because these impasses are themselves mirrored by the problems of antifoundationalist and materialist tendencies in literary scholarship. In Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism Michael Bernard-Donals examines (...) various incarnations of phenomenological and materialist theory - including the work of Jauss, Fish, Rorty, Althusser, and Pecheux - and places them beside Bakhtin's work, providing a contextualised study of Bakhtin, a critique of the problems of contemporary critics, and an original contribution to literary theory. (shrink)
Aesthetics, hermeneutics, criticism -- Social Werktreue and the subjectivization of aesthetics -- From musike to metaphysics -- Formalist aesthetics and musical hermeneutics -- Deconstructing the disciplinary divide -- The question of metaphor -- Mimesis and the hermeneutics of music -- Political critique and the politics of music criticism -- Toward a hermeneutics of music criticism.
" Guy Dammann, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, UK "This admirable volume will be welcomed by established philosophers of and especially - by those coming ...
This study explores the relationship between the poetic language of Donne, Herbert, Milton, and other British poets, and the choral music and part-songs of composers including Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes, and Tomkins. The seventeenth century was the time in English literary history when music was most consciously linked to words, and when the mingling of Renaissance and 'new' philosophy opened new discovery routes for the interpretation of art. McColley offers close readings of poems and the musical settings of (...) analogous texts, and discusses the philosophy, performance, and disputed political and ecclesiastical implications of polyphony. She also enters into current discourse about the nature of language, relating poets' use of language and composers' use of music to larger questions concerning the arts, politics and theology. (shrink)
Introduction -- Time and matter: temporality, embodied subjectivity and film phenomenology -- Knowing and nothing: Chris Marker, subjective temporalities and vocalic bodies in the future tense -- Agnès Varda's Trinket box: subjective relationality, affect and temporalised space -- Burlesque gestures and bodily attention: phenomenologies of the ephemeral in Chantal Akerman -- Threatened corporealities: thinking with the films of Philippe Grandrieux -- Conclusion: rethinking cinematic subjectivity and beyond.
Music, according to Sufi teaching, is really a small expression of the overwhelming and perfect harmony of the whole universe--and that is the secret of its amazing power to move us. The Indian Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927), the first teacher to bring the Islamic mystical tradition to the West, was an accomplished musician himself. His lucid exposition of music's divine nature has become a modern classic, beloved only by those interested in Sufism but by musicians of (...) all kinds. (shrink)
Although contemporary Western culture and criticism has usually valued composition over improvisation and placed the authority of a musical work with the written text rather than the performer, this essay posits these divisions as too facile to articulate the complex dynamics of making music in any genre or form. Rather it insists that music should be understood as pieces that are created with specific intentions by composers but which possess possibilities of interpretation that can only be brought out (...) through performance. (shrink)
Music theorists of almost all ages employ a concept of "Nature" to justify observations or statements about music. The understanding of what "Nature" is, however, is subject to cultural and historical differences. In tracing these explanatory strategies and their changes in music theories between c. 1600 and 1900, these essays explore (for the first time in a book-length study) how the multifarious conceptions of nature, located variously between scientific reason and divine power, are brought to bear on (...)music theory and how they affect our understanding of music. (shrink)
Artists inspired by music and musicians -- Composers inspired by art and artists -- Twin talents : artist-musicians and musician-artists -- Musicians pose for the artists : a history of portrait iconography.
Values and the scope of scientific inquiry, by M. Farber.--The phenomenology of epistemic claims: and its bearing on the essence of philosophy, by R. M. Zaner.--Problems of the Life-World, by A. Gurwitsch.--The Life-World and the particular sub-worlds, by W. Marx.--On the boundaries of the social world, by T. Luckmann.--Alfred Schutz on social reality and social science, by M. Natanson.--Homo oeconomicus and his class mates, by F. Machlup.--Toward a science of political economics, by A. Lowe.--Some notes on reality-orientation in contemporary (...) societies, by A. Brodersen.--The eclipse of reality, by E. Voegelin.--Alienation in Marx's Political economy and philosophy, by P. Merlan.--The problem of multiple realities: Alfred Schutz and Robert Musil, by P. L. Berger.--Phenomenology, history, myth, by F. Kersten.--The role of music in Leonardo's Paragone, by E. Winternitz.--Alfred Schutz bibliography (p. [297]-306). (shrink)
In recent years, more and more people have started talking about the necessity of reconciling phenomenology with the project of naturalization. Is it possible to bridge the gap between phenomenological analyses and naturalistic models of consciousness? Is it possible to naturalize phenomenology? Given the transcendental philosophically motivated anti-naturalism found in many phenomenologists such a naturalization proposal might seem doomed from the very start, but in this paper I will examine and evaluate some possible alternatives.
Offering a collection of fifteen essays that deal with issues at the intersection of phenomenology, logic, and the philosophy of mathematics, this book is divided into three parts. Part I, Reason, Science, and Mathematics contains a general essay on Husserl's conception of science and logic, an essay of mathematics and transcendental phenomenology, and an essay oN phenomenology and modern pure geometry. Part II is focused on Kurt Godel's interest in phenomenology. It explores Godel's ideas and also (...) some work of Quine, Penelope Maddy and Roger Penrose. Part III deals with elementary, constructive areas of mathematics. These are areas of mathematics that are closer to their origins in simple cognitive activities and in everyday experience. This part of the book contains essays on intuitionism, Hermann Weyl, the notion of constructive proof, Poincare; and Frege. (shrink)
During the last few decades, most cultural critics have come to agree that the division between "high" and "low" art is an artificial one, that Beethoven's Ninth and "Blue Suede Shoes" are equally valuable as cultural texts. In Who Needs Classical Music?, Julian Johnson challenges these assumptions about the relativism of cultural judgements. The author maintains that music is more than just "a matter of taste": while some music provides entertainment, or serves as background noise, other (...) class='Hi'>music claims to function as art. This book considers the value of classical music in contemporary society, arguing that it remains distinctive because it works in quite different ways to most of the other music that surrounds us. This intellectually sophisticated yet accessible book offers a new and balanced defense of the specific values of classical music in contemporary culture. Who Needs Classical Music? will stimulate readers to reflect on their own investment (or lack of it) in music and art of all kinds. (shrink)
Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons’ work implies four criteria that moral phenomenology must be capable of meeting if it is to be a viable field of study that can make a worthwhile contribution to moral philosophy. It must be (a) about a unifed subject matter as well as being, (b) wide, (c) independent, and (d) robust. Contrary to some scepticism about the possibility or usefulness of this field, I suggest that these criteria can be met by elucidating the very (...) foundations of moral experience or what I call a moral ontology of the human person. I attempt to partially outline such an ontology by engaging with Robert Sokolowski's phenomenology of the human person from a moral perspective. My analysis of Sokolowski's thought leads me to five core ideas of a moral ontology of the human person: well-being, virtue, freedom, responsibility, and phronesis. Though I do not by any means boast a complete moral ontology of the human person, I go on to demonstrate how the account I have presented, or something like it, can go a long way to helping moral phenomenology meet the criteria it requires to be a viable and worthwhile pursuit. (shrink)
Melopoetics, the study of the multifarious relations between music and literature, has emerged in recent years as an increasingly popular field of interdisciplinary inquiry. In this volume, noted musicologists and literary critics explore diverse topics of shared concern such as literary theory as a model for musical criticism, genre theories in literature and music, the criticism and analysis of texted music, and the role of aesthetic, historical, and cultural understanding in concepts of text/music convergence. These fourteen (...) essays - united here not by a common ideology but by common subject matter - demonstrate how musical and literary scholarship can combine forces effectively on the common ground of contemporary critical theory and interpretive practice. The concluding essay by interdisciplinary historian Hayden White locates this ambitious enterprise of contemplating 'music and text' in the larger context of intellectual history. (shrink)
Recent encounters with structuralist and poststructuralist critical theory, linguistics, and cognitive sciences have brought the theory and analysis of music into the orbit of important developments in present-day intellectual history. Without seeking to impose an explicit redefinition of either theory or analysis, this book explores the limits of both. Essays on decidability, ambiguity, metaphor, music as text, and music analysis as cognitive theory are complemented by studies of works by Debussy, Schoenberg, Birtwistle and Boulez.
Experientialist semantics has contributed to a broader notion of linguistic meaning by emphasizing notions such as construal, perspective, metaphor, and embodiment, but has suffered from an individualist concept of meaning and has conflated experiential motivations with conventional semantics. We argue that these problems can be redressed by methods and concepts from phenomenology, on the basis of a case study of sentences of non-actual motion such as “The mountain range goes all the way from Mexico to Canada.” Through a phenomenological (...) reanalysis of proposals of Talmy, Langacker, and Matlock, we show that non-actual motion is both experientially and linguistically non-unitary. At least three different features of human consciousness—enactive perception, visual scanning, and imagination—constitute experiential motivations for non-actual motion sentences, and each of these could be related to phenomenological analyses of human intentionality. The second problem is addressed by proposing that the experiential motivations of non-actual motion sentences can be viewed as sedimented through “passive” processes of acquisition and social transmission and that this implies an interactive loop between experience and language, yielding losses in terms of original experience, but gains in terms of communal signification. Something that is underestimated by phenomenology is that what is sedimented are not only intentional objects such as states of affairs, but aspects of how they are given, i.e., the original, temporal, bodily experiences themselves. Since cognitive semantics has emphasized such aspects of meaning, we suggest that phenomenology can itself benefit from experientialist semantics, especially when it turns its focus from prepredicative to predicative, linguistic intentionality. (shrink)
Introduction : music and abstraction -- Music and fantasy -- German romanticism and music -- Negative poetics : on skepticism and the lyric voice -- Rethinking the scale of literary history -- Mozart, Bach, and musical abjection -- Moods at mid-century : Handel and English literature, 1740-1760 -- Passion and love : anacreontic song and the roots of romantic lyric -- Haydn's whimsy : poetry, sexuality, repetition -- Non Giovanni : Mozart with Hegel.
The Topos of Music is the upgraded and vastly deepened English extension of the seminal German Geometrie der Töne. It reflects the dramatic progress of mathematical music theory and its operationalization by information technology since the publication of Geometrie der Töne in 1990. The conceptual basis has been vastly generalized to topos-theoretic foundations, including a corresponding thoroughly geometric musical logic. The theoretical models and results now include topologies for rhythm, melody, and harmony, as well as a classification theory (...) of musical objects that comprises the topos-theoretic concept framework. Classification also implies techniques of algebraic moduli theory. The classical models of modulation and counterpoint have been extended to exotic scales and counterpoint interval dichotomies. The probably most exciting new field of research deals with musical performance and its implementation on advanced object-oriented software environments. This subject not only uses extensively the existing mathematical music theory, it also opens the language to differential equations and tools of differential geometry, such as Lie derivatives. Mathematical performance theory is the key to inverse performance theory, an advanced new research field which deals with the calculation of varieties of parameters which give rise to a determined performance. This field uses techniques of algebraic geometry and statistics, approaches which have already produced significant results in the understanding of highest-ranked human performances. The book's formal language and models are currently being used by leading researchers in Europe and Northern America and have become a foundation of music software design. This is also testified by the book's nineteen collaborators and the included CD-ROM containing software and music examples. (shrink)
In this paper, I argue that the negative injunctions against certain ways of conceiving of the ethico-political that we can draw explicitly from the methodological strictures of phenomenology are also consistent with some of the core more positive dimensions of contemporary virtue ethics (especially at the more anti-theoretical end of the virtue ethical spectrum), and that central aspects of virtue ethics are consistent with most of the explicit reflections on ethical matters proffered by canonical phenomenologists.
One is a science, the other an art; one useful, the other seemingly decorative, but mathematics and music share common origins in cult and mystery and have been linked throughout history. Emblems of Mind is Edward Rothstein’s classic exploration of their profound similarities, a journey into their “inner life.” Along the way, Rothstein explains how mathematics makes sense of space, how music tells a story, how theories are constructed, how melody is shaped. He invokes the poetry of Wordsworth, (...) the anthropology of Le;vi-Strauss, the imagery of Plato, and the philosophy of Kant. Math and music, Rothstein shows, apply comparable methods as they create their abstractions, display similar concerns with ratio and proportion, and depend on metaphors and analogies to create their meanings. Ultimately, Rothstein argues, they reveal the ways in which we come to understand the world. They are images of the mind at work and play; indeed, they are emblems of Mind itself. Jacques Barzun called this book “splendid.” Martin Gardner said it was “beautifully written, marvelous and entertaining.” It will provoke all serious readers to think in new ways about the grand patterns in art and life. “Lovely, wistful. . . . Rothstein is a wonderful guide to the architecture of musical space, its tensions and relations, its resonances and proportions. . . . His account of what is going on in the music is unfailingly felicitous.”— New Yorker “Provocative and exciting. . . . Rothstein writes this book as a foreign correspondent, sending dispatches from a remote and mysterious locale as a guide for the intellectually adventurous. The remarkable fact about his work is not that it is profound, as much of the writing is, but that it is so accessible.”— Christian Science Monitor. (shrink)
Concentrating on the music, politics, and philosophy of Richard Wagner, Lydia Goehr addresses some fundamental questions of German Romanticism: Is all music musical? Is music made less musical by the presence of words? What is musical autonomy? How do composers avoid censorship? How are composers affected by exile? Can music articulate a 'politics for the future'? What is the relation between music and philosophy?
Modern philosophers generally assume that music is a problem to which philosophy ought to offer an answer. Andrew Bowie’s Music, Philosophy, and Modernity suggests, in contrast, that music might offer ways of responding to some central questions in modern philosophy. Bowie looks at key philosophical approaches to music ranging from Kant, through the German Romantics and Wagner, to Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Adorno. He uses music to re-examine many current ideas about language, subjectivity, metaphysics, truth, and (...) ethics, and he suggests that music can show how the predominant images of language, communication, and meaning in contemporary philosophy may be lacking in essential ways. His book will be of interest to philosophers, musicologists, and all who are interested in the relation between music and philosophy. (shrink)
The most fundamental debate in the philosophy of music involves the question of whether there is an artistically important connection between music and the ...
Analyzes the meaning expressed in music, the social and psychological sources of meaning, and the methods of musical communication This is a book meant for ...
Bogue provides a systematic overview and introduction to Deleuze's writings on music and painting, and an assessment of their position within his aesthetics as a whole. Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts breaks new ground in the scholarship on Deleuze's aesthetics, while providing a clear and accessible guide to his often overlooked writings in the fields of music and painting.
This is a long-awaited reissue of Jerrold Levinson's 1990 book Music, Art, and Metaphysics, which gathers together the writings that made him a leading figure in contemporary aesthetics. Most of the essays are distinguished by a concern with metaphysical questions about artworks and their properties, but other essays address the problem of art's definition, the psychology of aesthetic response, and the logic of interpreting and evaluating works of art. The focus of about half of the essays is the art (...) of music, the art of greatest interest to Levinson throughout his career. Many of the essays have been very influential, being among the most cited in contemporary aesthetics and having become essential references in debates on the definition of art, the ontology of art, emotional response to art, expression in art, and the nature of art forms. (shrink)
This book is a philosophical study of the relations between hearing and thinking about music. The central problem it addresses is as follows: how is it possible to talk about what a listener perceives in terms that the listener does not recognise? By applying the concepts and techniques of analytic philosophy the author explores the ways in which musical hearing may be described as nonconceptual, and how such mental representation contrasts with conceptual thought. The author is both philosopher and (...) musicologist and uniquely combines the perspectives of both disciplines. Exploring the philosophical questions of mental representation in the relatively neglected, nonverbal domain of music, this study is a major contribution to the philosophical understanding of music perception and cognitive theory. (shrink)
The music in here--. Music as body ; Music as mind ; Music as heart ; Feeling mind, thinking heart -- --out there--. Music as life ; Music as story ; Music as mirror -- --and everywhere--. Music on the Zen elevator ; The enlightened listener ; Living the waves.
Robert Sharpe examines the humanist conception of music as a language--as expressive and intelligible--which has been a dominant theory in Western culture. He argues against the view that music is expressive by causing certain states in us. Rather, he contends that our beliefs about music are integral to our appreciation of it. Differences in musical taste are then not just irresolvable differences in sensitivity, but the result of variations in circumstance and upbringing, of associations and ideology.
Drawing on psychological and philosophical materials as well as the analysis of specific musical examples, Cook here defines the difference between music...
This book is born out of two contradictions: first, it explores the making of meaning in a musical form that was made to lose its meaning at the turn of the nineteenth century; secondly, it is a history of a music that claims to have no history - absolute music. The book therefore writes against that notion of absolute music which tends to be the paradigm for most musicological and analytical studies. It is concerned not so much (...) with what music is, but with why and how meaning is constructed in instrumental music and what structures of knowledge need to be in place for such meaning to exist. From the thought of Vincenzo Galilei to that of Theodore Adorno, Daniel Chua suggests that instrumental music has always been a critical and negative force in modernity, even with its nineteenth-century apotheosis as 'absolute music'. (shrink)
Now in The Music Instinct , award-winning writer Philip Ball provides the first comprehensive, accessible survey of what is known--and still unknown--about how ...
This collection brings together philosophers, sociologists, musicologists and students of culture who theorize music through cultural practices as diverse as ...
The issues tackled in this volume include what sort of thing a work of music is; the nature of the relation between a musical work and versions of it; the ...
What is consciousness? Why and when do we have it? Where does it come from, and how does it relate to the lump of squishy grey matter in our heads, or to our material and social worlds? While neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, historians, and cultural theorists offer widely different perspectives on these fundamental questions concerning what it is like to be human, most agree that consciousness represents a 'hard problem'. -/- The emergence of consciousness studies as a multidisciplinary discourse addressing these (...) issues has often been associated with rapid advances in neuroscience-perhaps giving the impression that the arts and humanities have arrived late at the debating table. The longer historical view suggests otherwise, but it is probably true that music has been under-represented in accounts of consciousness. Music and Consciousness aims to redress the balance: its twenty essays offer a timely and multi-faceted contribution to consciousness studies, critically examining some of the existing debates and raising new questions. -/- The collection makes it clear that to understand consciousness we need to do much more than just look at brains: studying music demonstrates that consciousness is as much to do with minds, bodies, culture, and history. Incorporating several chapters that move outside Western philosophical traditions, Music and Consciousness corrects any perception that the study of consciousness is a purely occidental preoccupation. And in addition to what it says about consciousness the volume also presents a distinctive and thought-provoking configuration of new writings about music. (shrink)
Originally published in 1987, this book forms a conceptual account of the relationship between music and poetry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth ...
Locating stance -- Structures of stance in lived experience -- Stance and others, stance and lives -- The social life of stance and the politics of expressive culture.
These free-wheeling, often exhilarating dialogues—which grew out of the acclaimed Carnegie Hall Talks—are an exchange between two of the most prominent figures in contemporary culture: Daniel Barenboim, internationally renowned conductor and pianist, and Edward W. Said, eminent literary critic and impassioned commentator on the Middle East. Barenboim is an Argentinian-Israeli and Said a Palestinian-American; they are also close friends. As they range across music, literature, and society, they open up many fields of inquiry: the importance of a sense of (...) place; music as a defiance of silence; the legacies of artists from Mozart and Beethoven to Dickens and Adorno; Wagner’s anti-Semitism; and the need for “artistic solutions” to the predicament of the Middle East—something they both witnessed when they brought young Arab and Israeli musicians together. Erudite, intimate, thoughtful and spontaneous, Parallels and Paradoxes is a virtuosic collaboration. (shrink)
Bringing together an international collection of experts, this work explores various philosophical issues surrounding modern music recordings. With perspectives from practicing musicians, musicologists, sound artists, and recordings engineers, this reference asks how theoretical issues related to their work relate to the context of making and using recordings. Additional questions asked by this study include What kind of “spatiality” is generated through recordings, and by what means? What is the nature of “recorded space”? Do recordings reflect musical reality or create (...) one? and What are the philosophical bases of an “ethics” of recording? (shrink)
An outline topography of musical accessibility. What is musical accessibility? ; Society, atonality, psychology -- Accessibility discourse in rock, and cultural change. Case study 1 : 'Prog' rock/punk rock : sophistication, directness and shock ; Zeitgeist : accessibility in flux -- A valiant failure? : new art music and the people. Case study 2 : Vaughan Williams' national music in context ; Art music, vernacular music and accessibility -- Accessibility, identity and social action. Case study 3a (...) : Accessibility in action : Bahia, Brazil ; 3b : Samba in Wales : how is adopted music accessible? -- Part five. Themes. Some key concepts. (shrink)
Apparitions takes a new look at the critical legacy of one of the 20th century's most important and influential thinkers about music, Theodor W. Adorno. Bringing together an international group of scholars, the book offers new historical and critical insights into Adorno's theories of music and how these theories, in turn, have affected the study of contemporary art music, popular music, and jazz. The essays review the impact of Philosophy of New Music a fter World (...) War II, examine Adorno's struggle to adapt his aging philosophy to the new music of the 1950s and 1960s, and trace his influence on recent composers. Several essays in this volume also re-evaluate Adorno's controversial contribution to the study of popular music and jazz, as well as his theories of mass media and mass culture in the context of an increasing consolidation of corporate and political power in the entertainment industry. This volume will be indispensable for both scholars and students of Adorno, who seek a historical context and a critical assessment of some of his most influential as well as most contested writings on music. (shrink)
Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth century and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, from the musicality of sodomy in twelfth-century polyphony to Chaucer's representation of pedagogical violence in the Prioress's Tale, from early Christian writings on the music of the body to the plainchant and poetry of Hildegard of Bingen, the (...) author argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh. The book reveals a medieval world in which erotic desire, sexual practice, torture, flagellation, and even death itself resonated with musical significance and meaning. In its insistence on music as an integral part of the material cultures of the Middle Ages, the book presents a revisionist account of an important aspect of premodern European civilization. (shrink)
I. History. Mainwaring's Handel : its relation to British aesthetics -- Herbert Spencer and a musical dispute -- II. Opera and film. Handel's operas : the form of feeling and the problem of appreciation -- Anti-semitism in Meistersinger? -- Speech, song, and the transparency of medium : on operatic metaphysics -- III. Performance. On the historically informed performance -- Ars perfecta : toward perfection in musical performance? -- IV. Interpretation. Another go at the meaning of music : Koopman, Davies, (...) and the meaning of "meaning" -- Another go at musical profundity : Stephen Davies and the game of chess -- From ideology to music : Leonard Meyer's theory of style change -- Sibley's last paper -- In defense of musical representation : music, representation, and the hybrid arts -- Music, language, and cognition : which doesn't belong? (shrink)
A green philosopher's peripeteia.--Physics and metaphysics of music.--The roots of arithmetic.--Critique of new geometrical abstractions.--The philosophical value of science.
Radio drama is often considered an incomplete or ‘blind’ artform because it creates worlds through sound alone. The charge of incompleteness, I suggest, rests upon the orthodox empiricist conception of sensation as the receipt of separate modalities of sensory impression. However, alternative theories of sensation are offered by phenomenology and—of particular importance to this study—the restructuring of cognition that takes place in these theories plays a central role in phenomenology's account of artistic expression. The significance of this phenomenological (...) link between cognition and expression is that it can provide the basis for a more positive evaluation of the aesthetics of radio drama. From a phenomenological perspective, the alleged ‘incompleteness’ of sound becomes an -exemplary form of the process whereby material elements in an artwork interact with or beckon towards one another to express a world. In this paper, I (i) show how Merleau-Ponty's ‘invitational’ account of the senses meets the charge of ‘blindness’, (ii) -demonstrate how radio drama employs the aesthetic interactions that, from the theoretical standpoints of Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne, are definitive of expression in art, and (iii) indicate how some of my claims for the aesthetics of radio drama are supported by recent accounts of metaphor in music. (shrink)
From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles (the urinal is a violin!), Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. In Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art form in isolation, even though many of the most important artistic experiments of the Modernists were collaborations involving several media--Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is a ballet, Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts is an (...) opera, and Pablo Picasso turned his cubist paintings into costumes for Parade. Focusing on collaborations with a musical component, Albright views these works as either figures of dissonance that try to retain the distinctness of their various media (e.g. Guillaume Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tiresias ) or figures of consonance that try to lose themselves in some total effect (e.g. Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung ). In so doing he offers a fresh picture of Modernism, and provides a compelling model for the analysis of all artistic collaborations. Untwisting the Serpent is the recipient of the 2001 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship of the Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. (shrink)
Parti PHENOMENOLOGICAL CRITICAL THEORY In these first five chapters, I attempt to establish the ground for the critical and metacritical essays to follow in ...
The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...
This paper distinguishes between two senses of the term “phenomenology”: a narrow sense (drawn from Nagel) and a broader sense (drawn from Husserl). It claims, with particular reference to the moral sphere, that the narrow meaning of moral phenomenology cannot stand alone, that is, that moral phenomenology in the narrow sense entails moral intentionality. The paper proceeds by examining different examples of the axiological and volitional experiences of both virtuous and dutiful agents, and it notes the correlation (...) between the phenomenal and intentional differences belonging to these experiences. The paper concludes with some reflections on how the focus on the broader sense of “phenomenology” serves to provide a more precise sense of what we might mean by “moral phenomenology.”. (shrink)
Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are a highly complex and rich phenomena, and this has a number of important clinical, theoretical and methodological implications. However, until recently, this fact has not always been incorporated into the experimental designs and theoretical paradigms used by researchers within the cognitive sciences. In this paper, we will briefly outline two recent examples of phenomenologically informed approaches to the study of AVHs taken from a cognitive science perspective. In the first example, based on Larøi and Woodward (...) (Harv Rev Psychiatry 15:109–117, 2007 ), it is argued that reality monitoring studies examining the cognitive underpinnings of hallucinations have not reflected the phenomenological complexity of AVHs in their experimental designs and theoretical framework. The second example, based on Jones (Schizophr Bull, in press, 2010 ), involves a critical examination of the phenomenology of AVHs in the context of two other prominent cognitive models: inner speech and intrusions from memory. It will be shown that, for both examples, the integration of a phenomenological analysis provides important improvements both on a methodological, theoretical and clinical level. This will be followed by insights and critiques from philosophy and clinical psychiatry—both of which offer a phenomenological alternative to the empiricist–rationalist conceptualisation of AVHs inherent to the cognitive sciences approach. Finally, the paper will conclude with ideas as to how the cognitive sciences may integrate these latter perspectives into their methodological and theoretical programmes. (shrink)
We undertake to bring a phenomenological perspective to bear on a challenge of contemporary law and clinical practice. In a wide variety of contexts, legal and medical professionals are called upon to assess the competence or capacity of an individual to exercise her own judgement in making a decision for herself. We focus on decisions regarding consent to or refusal of medical treatment and contrast a widely recognised clinical instrument, the MacCAT-T, with a more phenomenologically informed approach. While the MacCAT-T (...) focuses attention on individual cognitive performance criteria, an approach oriented by second-person phenomenology brings into view the complex role of time, others and identity in constituting the capacity for individual autonomous judgement. Our phenomenological analysis has consequences both for the practice of capacity assessments and for further research in this arena. Good practice in capacity assessment must attend to decision communities, distributed capacity, and temporal competence, while research on mental capacity will miss the phenomenon if it trains its focus ‘between the ears.’ We illustrate our approach by considering two recent cases of contested capacity: one involving cognitive disability in a dysfunctional decision community, the second presenting the possibility of competent decision-making under conditions of paranoid schizophrenia. (shrink)
Introduction -- Navigating the neosurreal : background and premises -- Neosurrealist tendencies in recent films -- Neosurrealist metamusicals, flow and camp aesthetics -- In tandem with the random : loose synchronisation and remediation in Philip Glass's -- La Belle et la Bête and The dark side of Oz -- The surrealism of the virtual band in the digital age : Gorillaz' "Clint Eastwood" and "Feel good inc." -- Back to the garden? Performing the disaffected acoustic imaginary in the digital age (...) -- Concluding thoughts : all that is solid melts into air? (shrink)
A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism is a complete guide to two of the dominant movements of philosophy in the twentieth century. Written by a team of leading scholars, including Dagfinn Føllesdal, J. N. Mohanty, Robert Solomon, Jean-Luc Marion. Highlights the area of overlap between the two movements. Features longer essays discussing each of the main schools of thought, shorter essays introducing prominent themes, and problem-oriented chapters. Organised topically, around concepts such as temporality, intentionality, death and nihilism. Features essays (...) on unusual subjects, such as medicine, the emotions, artificial intelligence, and environmental philosophy. (shrink)
Dennett’s recent defense in this journal of the heterophenomenological method and its supposed advantages over Husserlian phenomenology is premised on his problematic account of the epistemological and ontological status of phenomenological states. By employing Husserl’s philosophy of science to clarify the relationship between phenomenology and evidence and the implications of this relationship for the empirical identification of ‘real’ conscious states, I argue that the naturalistic account of consciousness Dennett hopes for could be authoritative as a science only by (...) virtue of the very phenomenological evidences Dennett’s method consigns to the realm of fiction. Thus heterophenomenology, qua scientific method, is incoherent. (shrink)
In this paper I trace Husserl’s transformation of his notion of phantasy from its strong leanings towards empiricism into a transcendental phenomenology of imagination. Rejecting the view that this account is only more incompatible with contemporary neuroscientific research, I instead claim that the transcendental suspension of naturalistic (or scientific) pretensions precisely enables cooperation between the two distinct realms of phenomenology and science. In particular, a transcendental account of phantasy can disclose the specific accomplishments of imagination without prematurely deciding (...) upon a particular scientific paradigm for its experimental investigation; a decision that is best left to the sciences themselves. (shrink)
Fifty years before the present volume appeared, artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science (Cogsci) emerged from a couple of small-scale academic encounters on the East Coast of the United States. Wedded together like Siamese twins, these nascent research programs appeared to rest on some general assumptions regarding the human mind, and closely connected methodological principles, which set them at such a distance from phenomenology that no contact between the two approaches seemed conceivable. Soon however contact was made, in the (...) form of a head-on critique of the AI/Cogsci project mostly inspired by arguments from phenomenology. For a while, it seemed like nothing would come of it: AI/Cogsci bloomed while the small troop of critical phenomenologists kept objecting. Then AI and Cogsci went their separate ways. AI underwent a deep transformation and all but surrendered to the phenomenological critique. Cogsci meanwhile pursued the initial program with a far richer collection of problems, concepts and methods, and was for a long time quite unconcerned by suggestions and objections from phenomenology. The last decade and half has seen a remarkable reversal: on the one hand, a few cognitive scientists have been actively pursuing the goal of reconciliating Cogsci, whether empirically or foundationally, with some of the insights procured by phenomenology; on the other, many cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind who think of themselves as, respectively, mainstream and analytic, and have no or little acquaintance with, and often little sympathy for, phenomenology, have been actively pursuing research programs geared toward some of the key issues identified by phenomenological critics of early AI/Cogsci. It might seem then as if those critics were now vindicated. But while these new directions are undoubtedly promising, it is not yet clear that phenomenology and Cogsci can be truly reconciled. Some suspect that Cogsci must distort beyond recognition those phenomenological themes it means to weave into its fabric, while phenomenology may be losing touch with its roots by tuning onto the logic of Cogsci which is, after all, an empirical science. To the present writer, it is far too early for anything like a verdict, as the task of clarifying the issues and gaining a much deeper understanding of the issues on both sides has barely begun. But whatever emerges from this exploration will probably have deep consequences for both Cogsci and philosophy.. (shrink)
Method and system Francois- Bernard Mdche I want to raise the issue of the possible significance of the use of digital machines for a composer whose work is ...
This is an important piece of work from an influential and highly-acclaimed theorist exploring the New Musicology and other debates in recent philosophy of ...
Alfred Schutz's (Vienna 1899 — New York 1959) research into the philosophy of music certainly cannot be regarded as the most notable aspect of this writer, born and educated in Vienna, later a naturalized American citizen. Nor can it legitimately be maintained that Schutz's writings on the subject form a systematic corpus in his work. Schutz was above all a social scientist, strongly attracted, as were many writers of the first half of this century, to the project of aphilosophical (...) foundation within his field of expertise. In this project, where phenomenology is encountered, the question ofintersubjectivity together with that ofcommunication among individuals, plays a crucial role. It is, therefore, undoubtedly correct to consider Schutz's theoretical interests in music within this framework; thus music tends to assume a paradigmatic value, in the sense that the musical piece in its concrete temporal development, in the presence of performers and listeners, demonstrates in a truly exemplary manner, how the process of social relationship actually functions.Although mindful of this frame of reference, nontheless we feel it can be asserted that the works of Schutz which we are about to examine are in themselves interesting stimuli, independently of any organic connection with the author's general project. These stimuli have furthermore proveked a theoretical debate that is still going on in the USA. (shrink)
Machine generated contents note: 1. Preparing the ground; 2. Early influences and movements; 3. Dialectic, negation and binary oppositions; 4. Boulez, Adorno and serial critique; 5. Deduction and the scientific model; 6. Serialism and structuralism; 7. Post-structuralist encounters; 8. Boulez, difference and repetition; 9. Expanding the virtual; 10. Continuity and discontinuity of space and time; Conclusion; Bibliography.
The Postlude, written for this edition, looks back at the predictions made more than twenty-five years ago and speculates about what the coming decades may hold ...
Translator's introduction: The germinal structure of Derrida's thought -- Translator's note -- Introduction -- Sign and signs -- The reduction of indication -- Meaning as soliloquy -- Meaning and representation -- The sign and the blink of an eye -- The voice that keeps silent -- The originative supplement.
Homo aestheticus -- The Greeks -- The Age of Enlightenment -- A time of consolidation -- A period of expansion -- The present : the use of music : the transformation of aesthetics.
This paper (1) sketches a phenomenological analysis of visual mental imagery; (2) applies this analysis to the mental imagery debate in cognitive science; (3) briefly sketches a neurophenomenological approach to mental imagery; and (4) compares the results of this discussion with Dennett’s heterophenomenology.
Can phenomenology contribute to the burgeoning science of consciousness? Dennett’s reply would probably be that it very much depends upon the type of phenomenology in question. In my paper I discuss the relation between Dennett’s heterophenomenology and the type of classical philosophical phenomenology that one can find in Husserl, Scheler and Merleau-Ponty. I will in particular be looking at Dennett’s criticism of classical phenomenology. How vulnerable is it to Dennett’s criticism, and how much of a challenge (...) does his own alternative constitute? I will argue that there are some rather marked differences between these two approaches to consciousness, but as I also hope to make clear, Dennett’s own account of where the differences are located is off target and ultimately based on a somewhat flawed conception of what classical phenomenology amounts to. (shrink)
The neurological discovery of mirror neurons is of eminent importance for the phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity. G. Rizzolatti and V. Gallese found in experiments with primates that a set of neurons in the premotor cortex represents the visually registered movements of another animal. The activity of these mirror neurons presents exactly the same pattern of activity as appears in the movement of one's own body. These findings may be extended to other cognitive and emotive functions in humans. I show how (...) these neurological findings might be “translated” phenomenologically into our own experienced sensations, feelings and volitions. (shrink)
The following text is the first ever translation into English of a writing by German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz (*1928). In it, Schmitz outlines and defends a non-mentalistic view of emotions as phenomena in interpersonal space in conjunction with a theory of the felt body’s constitutive involvement in human experience. In the first part of the text, Schmitz gives an overview covering some central pieces of his theory as developed, for the most part, in his massive System of Philosophy, published in (...) German in a series of volumes between 1964 and 1980. Schmitz’s System is centred on the claim that the contemporary view of the human subject is the result of a consequential historical process: A reductionist and ‘introjectionist’ objectification of lived experience culminating in the ‘invention’ of the mind (or ‘soul’) as a private, inner realm of subjective experience and in a corresponding ‘grinding down’ of the world of lived experienced to a meagre, value-neutral ‘objective reality’. To counter this intellectualist trend, Schmitz puts to use his approach to phenomenology with the aim of regaining a sensibility for the nuanced realities of lived experience—hoping to make up for what was lost during the development of Western intellectual culture. Since both this text and the overall style of Schmitz’s philosophising are in several ways unusual for a contemporary readership, a brief introduction is provided by philosophers Jan Slaby and Rudolf Owen Müllan, the latter of whom translated Schmitz’s text into English. The introduction emphasises aspects of Schmitz’s philosophy that are likely to be of relevance to contemporary scholars of phenomenological philosophy and to its potential applications in science and society. (shrink)
In Consciousness Explained and other works, Daniel Dennett uses the concept of phenomenology (along with his variant, called heterophenomenology) in almost complete disregard of the work of Husserl and his successors in German and French philosophy. Yet it can be argued that many of the most important ideas of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and others (and not just the idea of intentionality) reappear in Dennett's work in only slightly altered form. In this article I try to show this in two ways, (...) first by talking in a general way about Dennett's phenomenology, and second by examining his treatment of the concept of the self. In both cases I argue that Dennett should have read his Husserl and Merleau-Ponty more carefully, since in the end his (hetero-) phenomenology is methodologically incoherent and suffers from something like a weakness of will. This emerges especially in his use of the notion of fiction. (shrink)
Many moral philosophers in the Western tradition have used phenomenological claims as starting points for philosophical inquiry; aspects of moral phenomenology have often been taken to be anchors to which any adequate account of morality must remain attached. This paper raises doubts about whether moral phenomena are universal and robust enough to serve the purposes to which moral philosophers have traditionally tried to put them. Persons’ experiences of morality may vary in a way that greatly limits the extent to (...) which moral phenomenology can constitute a reason to favor one moral theory over another. Phenomenology may not be able to serve as a pre-theoretic starting point or anchor in the consideration of rival moral theories because moral phenomenology may itself be theory-laden. These doubts are illustrated through an examination of how moral phenomenology is used in the thought of Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, Joseph Butler, Francis Hutcheson, and Søren Kierkegaard. (shrink)
Philosophical work on the mind flowed in two streams through the 20th century: phenomenology and analytic philosophy. This volume aims to bring them together again, by demonstrating how work in phenomenology may lead to significant progress on problems central to current analytic research, and how analytical philosophy of mind may shed light on phenomenological concerns. Leading figures from both traditions contribute specially written essays on such central topics as consciousness, intentionality, perception, action, self-knowledge, temporal awareness, and mental content. (...)Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind demonstrates that these different approaches to the mind should not stand in opposition to each other, but can be mutually illuminating. (shrink)
Phenomenology and Marxism in historical perspective Fred Dallmayr (Notre Dame, Indiana) The topic of phenomenology and Marxism immediately confronts us with ...
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE BEGINNING Phenomenology begins in the work of Edmund Husserl; the first of his phenomenological publications ...
Studies of perception have focussed on sensation, though more recently the perception of action has, once more, become the subject of investigation. These studies have looked at acute experimental situations. The present paper discusses the subjective experience of those with either clinical syndromes of loss of movement or sensation (spinal cord injury, sensory neuronopathy syndrome or motor stroke), or with experimental paralysis or sensory loss. The differing phenomenology of these is explored and their effects on intention and agency discussed. (...) It is shown that sensory loss can have effects on the focussing of motor command and that for some a sense of agency can return despite paralysis. (shrink)
