philosophy@lisbon nº10 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy
2020
This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving interdisciplinary field of Western music and philosophy. It seeks to represent this area in all its fullness, including a diverse array of perspectives from music studies (notably historical musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology), philosophy (incorporating both analytic and continental approaches), and a range of cognate disciplines (such as critical theory and intellectual history). The Handbook includes, but does not confine itself to, consideration of key questions in aesthetics and the philosophy of music. Each essay provides an introduction to its topic, an assessment of past scholarship, and a research-driven argument for the future of the research area in question. Taken together, these essays provide a current snapshot of this field and outline an abundance of ways in which it might develop in the future.
Review of "Philosophy of Western Music: A Contemporary Introduction"
New York and Oxon: Routledge). xxii + 337 pp Kania's book is an excellent introduction to the philosophy of music and I wish I had it on hand a couple years ago when I last taught the subject. The prose is clear, accessible, and engaging. The book considers the core issues of contemporary analytic philosophy of music; Kania enthusiastically rounds up some of the central positions on each issue at stake-cogently explaining their differences, the reasons the philosophers have for their views, and potential objections-though he does so "dispassionately", mostly resisting the temptation to weigh in with his own view. This approach has its merits, and I am sure that many discussions in the book would give rise to fruitful classroom exchanges. (To keep up this dispassionateness, Kania refers to himself in the third person when his own published views are surveyed, such as in Chapters 8, 9 and 11, though this usually is not too jarring.
Review: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music
Current Musicology, 2012
At least since Plato the problematic of philosophizing about music, or even conceiving a kind of musical philosophy, has conditioned our discourses. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music shares in this problematic but raises its stakes, encouraging us to renew our attempts to think music philosophically. It accomplishes its primary goal admirably: it could very well accompany discussions of music and philosophy for some time to come. The articles it contains are for the most part emphatically if not explicitly written from the perspective of analytic philosophy, which suggests certain disciplinary alignments: music theory and cognition seem to align easily with analytic philosophy, whereas ethnomusicology and historical musicology seem to align with continental philosophy. One of the strengths of the Companion is its ability to appeal to readers from seemingly every music–academic discipline. The Companion thus provides a new standard of philosophical conversation toward which musicians can aspire.
Can the philosophical quest for the essence of music be informed by the transgressive attempts to make music within the means traditionally proper to other temporal arts, such as literature? What can we learn about the essence of music from such hybrids? And are they hybrids at all? Can musical novels and short stories be legitimate objects of scrutiny for the philosopher of music, alongside with symphonies, Lieder, popular songs and jazz standards? Can they count as (qualified, perhaps) instantiations of the musical art, rather than mere representations and descriptions thereof? In my attempt to address these questions in the lights of the contemporary Philosophy of Music on one hand and the Word and Music Studies on the other I interpret Antoni Libera’s 2012 short story Toccata in C Major as a work of textual music. I comment on some heuristic advantages of such well-defended inclusion for the philosophical study of the essence of music.
Numanities -Arts and Humanities in Progress 7 Of Essence and Context Between Music and Philosophy
Of Essence and Context: Between Music and Philosophy, 2019
The chapters in this volume, by music scholars and philosophers, examine the ideas of the essence and context as they apply to music. In philosophy, the notion of essence has seen a renaissance in the last twenty years, while in many disciplines of the humanities, the notion is still viewed with suspicion. A common worry with thinking of music in terms of essence is about the plurality of music. The disciplines of musicology and philosophy have recently been reaching out to each other in an attempt to overcome the specific interests and intellectual styles of the respective disciplines. The Vilnius conference in 2016, from which the chapters in this volume derive, proceeded in the same spirit. The conference, Essence and Context: A Conference Between Music and Philosophy took place in the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (Vilnius), from the 31st August to 3rd September 2016. The revised and extended keynote lectures and papers selected for the inclusion in this volume are structured into four sections, each containing chapters ranging from theory to practice in various music cultures. The book reflects a diversity of issues and approaches addressing music concepts and practices negotiating between essentialist and contextualist traditions.
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2023
The difficulty of capturing or deciphering music in words is largely why the same questions continue to be asked and the same tensions continue to be explored. Contributors to this special issue add fresh perspectives and new insights to these enduring themes and inquiries, looking at music in both the general sense and examining specific musical pieces, movements, and moments. Each article has its own focus, makes its own arguments, and occupies its own branch(es) of philosophy: ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, politics, and, of course, aesthetics. Beyond the centralizing subject of music, what ties them together and into the best of philosophical traditions is that they not only ask big questions but also, in seeking to answer them, add more questions to the ongoing discourse.