This dissertation defends the place of representation in music. Music’s status as a representational art has been hotly debated since the War of the Romantics, which pitted the Weimar progressives (Liszt, Wagner, &co.) against the Leipzig conservatives (the Schumanns, Brahms, &co.) in an intellectual struggle for what each side took to be the very future of music as an art. I side with the progressives, and argue that music can be and often is a representational medium. Correspondence (or resemblance) theories (...) of representation, such as the one I offer, have been much maligned in philosophy since the 1960s. Most theories assimilate representation under “meaning,” which has usually been thought to belong primarily to language. As a result, representational content has been taken to be purely conventional in the way that sentential meaning is. People want to know what music “means,” and these theories interpret this as “what does it refer to?” or “what propositions does it express?” I argue that propositional communication is only one (small) part of the issue. Once we overcome the bias of conceiving of musical works as essentially linguistic items, speech acts (performed) or sentence tokens (written), we can begin to take music on its own terms to discover how it represents—one way in which it “means.” The first step is to “naturalize” music’s representational content. Influenced by recent discussions in the philosophies of mind and science, I argue in Chapter 1 that composers represent extra-musical objects, events, and states of affairs through their works by exploiting antecedent relations (such as similarities in pitch, timbre, and structure) in order to secure reference to them. In Chapter 2, I survey and respond to the main challenges that those skeptical of music’s representational possibilities would raise against my theory of musical representation. In Chapter 3, I explore a number of ways through which music has been claimed to represent in order to show how my theory accounts for these diverse phenomena better than its conventionalist rivals, both in terms of the metaphysics and the epistemology. Chapter 4 extends this discussion by offering an account of how we perceive, understand, appreciate, and interpret sophisticated musical representations. I conclude by teasing out some of my theory’s implications and suggesting areas for further research. (shrink)

Many philosophers of music, especially within the analytic tradition, are essentialists with respect to musical experience. That is, they view their goal as that of isolating the essential set of features constitutive of the experience of music, qua music. Toward this end, they eliminate every element that would appear to be unnecessary for one to experience music as such. In doing so, they limit their analysis to the experience of a silent, motionless individual who listens with rapt attention to the (...) sounds produced by either musicians a on stage, a stereo, or a portable device. This approach is illustrated in recent work by Nick Zangwill. Drawing on essentialist assumptions, Zangwill concludes that properly musical experience is effectively disembodied and radically private. While this seems plausible when we consider the essentialists’ paradigm case, Zangwill’s conclusion seems odd once we consider the wide variety of ways that people experience music. One’s body and social situation seem ineluctably enmeshed within the experience of, e.g., hot jazz played in a nightclub, where listeners bob their heads and dance to the music, cheer on the musicians, and socialize with their fellow concertgoers. The question this paper aims to answer is: should we consider this and similar experiences of music properly “musical”? I maintain that we should. Far from the world of pure music that Zangwill and others relegate properly musical experience, I conclude that our musical experiences are fully enmeshed within the somatic, affective, and interpersonal dimensions of human life. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the relationship between the individual and the collective dimensions of reparations, highlighting the gaps and confluences between the two by focusing on symbolic reparations. It argues that massive reparations programs leave a disparity between the individual and the collective dimensions of reparations, i.e., between the needs of victims dealing with extreme trauma, and the social and political needs of a transitional society. Through reparations, the victim seeks some sort of reparation, i.e., a psychological state in which (...) they feel adequate amends have been made. However, whether reparation at an individual level has taken place is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain. The individual and the collective always stand in tension with one another when granting reparations. This dilemma is central to the reparations debate. It is argued that the gap between the micro and macro can be narrowed through a better understanding of the impact of extreme political trauma. Steps can be taken at the social and political level to potentially increase the impact of reparations on individuals as well as the context, process, and discourses surrounding their delivery. (shrink)

Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence (...) levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics’ meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse. (shrink)

Abela accepts Fine’s account of realism and instrumentalism, but thinks that we can reject the Natural Ontological Attitude by distinguishing the theoretical attempt to make sense of scientific practice from choosing the attitude we bring to the debate, or to science itself. But Abela’s attitudes are vulnerable to Fine’s criticisms of the philosophical positions. However, if we take attitude as contrastive and as full‐blooded enough to lead to different behaviour we can see a gap in Fine’s position. He cannot tell (...) us why it is science that he trusts. When we look more widely, the philosophical positions might be seen as ways of justifying that trust. (shrink)

Michael Williams has frequently considered and rejected approaches to “our knowledge of the external world”that see it as the best explanation for certain features of experience.This paper examines the salience of his position to approaches such as Mackie’s that do not deny thepresentational directness of ordinary experience but do permit a gap between how things appear and how theyare that allows for sceptical doubts.Williams’ main argument is that, to do justice to its place in a foundationalist strategy, the external world (...) ashypothesis must offer an explicandum that does not invoke concepts of objects but is rather purely experiential.He next claims that no coherent regularities are available at such a level so there is nothing to be explained.Coherence only comes with objects, not as something objects could explain.Confronting this with Mackie’s Lockean theory of perception, we find that Mackie decisively rejects the firstclaim about the nature of the explicandum, since he sees ordinary perception as involving intentional objectswhich are distinct from the persisting objects they present. He is also committed to rejecting Williams’ line onpurely experiential regularities, though this plays a subordinate role in his general position.The crucial issue then becomes the tenability of Mackie’s intentional object analysis and the extent to which itmight yet tilt the argument in favour of realism against a global sceptic.In formulating his own epistemological strategies Williams might appear to countenance a version of Mackie’sview divorced from foundationalism. But while Williams’ contextualism in its minimal version might do so, inpractice it retains the lessons derived from his skirmishes with scepticism and thus disallows certain types ofenquiry.I conclude by contrasting Mackie’s response to scepticism with that of Williams in his diagnostic vein. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1987, examines the notion of truth and then discusses knowledge and the way in which much of our knowledge revises or rejects the common-sense we start from. The author argues that our knowledge is not as secure as some would like to think and that there are important limits to the possibility for explanation. He shows how values permeate our ordinary thinking and argues against the objectivity of these values, showing the practical consequences of this (...) argument for teaching in schools. This stimulating approach to a fundamental educational issue does not require previous experience of formal philosophy and will be useful to both education students and teachers in schools. (shrink)

Informal logicians recognise the frequent use of unstated assumptions; some (e.g. Fisher) also recognise entertained arguments and recommend a suppositional approach (such as Mackie's) to conditional statements. It is here argued that these two be put together to make argument diagrams more accurate and subtle. Philosophical benefits also accrue: insights into Jackson's apparent violations of modus tollens and contraposition and McGee's counterexamples to the validity of modus ponens.

While "A needs X" often calls for supplementation by the Y X is needed for, Thomson, Wiggins and Braybrooke have argued that there is a sense of "need" for which this is unnecessary. But Gricean conventions for conversation allow us to use ellipsis in a unified account of "need" while explaining the data Thomson and Wiggins appeal to: nondetatchment of bare needs from more fully specified ones, avoidance of serious harm as a default filling of the Y-slot, and the apparent (...) normativeness of some need-statements. Their detailed discussions also undermine the utility of demarcating a sense of "fundamental" need. (shrink)

J. Gingell, E. P. Brandon; Popular Culture, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 34, Issue 3, 7 March 2003, Pages 461–485, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-97.

In the course of this book we shall frequently appeal to what we call an Arnoldian filter, a principle we wish to urge for choosing much of what should form part of education in schools. This priniciple is based on a remark in Matthew Arnold's Preface to Culture and Anarchy,1 that culture is a matter of getting ‘to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world’ (1935, p.6, emphasis (...) added). Arnold's work here and elsewhere is often seen as a key monument in English humanist thought. Trilling claims that ‘he established criticism as an intellectual discipline among the people of two nations and set its best tone’ (1949, p.3). It may not be of merely historical interest to consider some of the concerns that drove Arnold to offer culture in his sense as a contribution to contemporary and future society. (shrink)

Defenders of high culture can be found invoking many and various allies. Many are, we think, out of place. These defences raise issues that we do not need to worry about or themselves create unnecessary difficulties for clarity of thought on these matters. In this chapter we will touch upon a number of such irrelevancies. We will begin by examining the assimilation of high culture to religion and religious concerns in the thought of Eliot and Scruton: this will allow us (...) to indicate our stance on the place of religion in schools. We will then examine some psychological and sociological issues that Bantock has invoked in defending his secular vision of the role of culture, and conclude with Barrow's curious identification of culture with general intelligence. (shrink)

This chapter deals with a crucial component of our position, the presumption that there are objective grounds for preferring one thing to another within the various cultural institutions we deal with, that there are better or worse symphonies, soufflés and theories of the atom. The task of showing this is more urgent for some institutions than others. While philosophers can doubt anything, most people are persuaded of the objectivity of our efforts to comprehend the physical world and to weigh, count (...) and measure accurately in many areas of human activity. Again, when we are faced with a choice among functional objects or processes, most people will admit that we can ground a preference for a knife or an exercise routine on objectively established facts: sharpness, or measurable increase in strength. Here, certainly, various conflicting desiderata may enter and make actual decisions more difficult — the sharpest knife may also be the most expensive; we may need to worry about its safety features; it may be ugly; and so on. But many will doubt that our judgements of comparative worth for non-functional objects such as paintings or sonatas can claim a similarly objective basis. We shall, therefore, concentrate our efforts on the most doubted areas, but will begin with the less contentious, where we think it is useful to draw attention to the genuine problems some philosophers have stressed, to show in fact that what we believe to be popular unconcern deserves to be somewhat ruffled. (shrink)

The fact that education is, and must be, a process of enculturation for those being educated gives us some, but by no means enough, guidance as to what we would expect to see going on in our schools. For given that our educational institutions are part of our culture and, given that anything that is part of our culture will transmit cultural messages, if we put children in school and let them play all day, or simply asked teachers to explain (...) their hobbies to the children, then some processes of enculturalisation would be going on. But no one with any real concern for either our children or their education would think such things fulfil a proper role for schools. Certainly if, as Arnold thought, education is a question of passing on, or trying to pass on, the features from our culture that we value, then any such reliance on random processes must be ruled out. Instead we have to select those aspects of our culture which we wish our children to partake of and insist that our educational establishments make sustained and intentional efforts to ensure such participation. (shrink)

Arnold wrote in an educational tradition that both lay in a main line of descent from the cultural formations he most valued and equipped him with the tools necessary to appreciate many of the elements in those traditions that are not in his native language. So when he referred, as exemplars of high culture, to Homer and Cicero, Montesquieu and Goethe, he presumed acquaintance with their works in the original languages on his own part and on that of his audience. (...) His own vernacular derived from that of Shakespeare and the Authorised Version of the Bible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. ed. by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. TerryErin R. PinedaTommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry, editors. To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 464. Paperback, $20.00.In the summer of 2020, as cities across the globe erupted (...) in protest after the murder of George Floyd, references to Martin Luther King, Jr. abounded: while a familiar cast of politicians evoked his memory to scold riotous protestors, others issued King's rejoinder that "the riot is the language of the unheard" (King, "The Other America," 1967). Many such invocations no doubt smacked of the "ritual celebration" and "intellectual marginalization" [End Page 339] that, as Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry observe, have long marked King's reception as a political thinker (2). But in another sense, the seemingly inevitable return to King points to the significant stakes of taking his thought seriously and the political danger of laying claim to interpretive mastery. Struggles over King's legacy and the terms of his thought are not just about King but form part of the discursive terrain on which struggles over the demands of racial justice and the means of transformative collective action are waged.Shelby and Terry's ambitious, illuminating volume, To Shape a New World, first published in 2018 (timed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of King's assassination) and released as paperback in 2020 (amidst the George Floyd uprisings), invites us to take King seriously in just this sense: with an acute sensitivity to the stakes and an embrace of an interpretive pluralism that refuses the certainty of a singular, definitive reading. The collection facilitates rigorous engagement with King's thought in its own time and place but also presses the question of what we ought to do with it in this current "age of impunity and mendacity," standing amid the "unraveling" edges of "American empire," as Cornel West puts it (331). In posing and answering this question across its fifteen essays, the collection seeks to do justice to King as both a political philosopher and a political activist—a religious and political thinker whose philosophies were worked out not only behind the pulpit or within the academy, but also (and perhaps primarily) in concert with others on the field of political action. Indeed, one of its primary contributions is to challenge mainstream presumptions about what counts as political philosophy—its boundaries as a genre as well as the spaces where we imagine political philosophizing to happen and the figures we position as its primary producers.The volume is organized into four sections. The first, "Traditions," is devoted to exploring some of King's diverse intellectual influences. Here, the emphasis is less on making the case for particular traditions as the essential ones, and more on exploring the use of different interpretive lenses for shedding new light on his ideas. Three essays put King in context with thinkers he directly engaged: Robert Gooding-Williams places him in conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington to reveal the structure of King's account of dignity amid the constraints of racial injustice; Bernard Boxill shows how King's theory of civil disobedience builds on—and collectivizes—Frederick Douglass's account of comparative freedom; and Karuna Mantena explores the theory of nonviolent action that King, through figures like Benjamin Mays and Howard Thurman, adopted and adapted from Gandhi. In contrast, Paul Taylor argues that we should read King in the company of moral perfectionists Stanley Cavell and Christopher Lebron—as showing us how practices of self-criticism, self-transformation, and experimentation enable "citizens to remain dissatisfied with things as they stand" while remaining "open to the possibility that justice will require reconstructing both society and the self" (41).In the next section, contributors turn their attention to King's "Ideals"—the ethical and political imperatives that shape the ends and means of the struggle for a new world. Like Mantena, Martha Nussbaum reads King alongside Gandhi to focus on King's insistence on channeling righteous... (shrink)

In this paper, I present the beginnings of a resemblance theory of representation. I start by surveying the contemporary philosophical debate surrounding musical representation and reveal that its main interlocutors share a conception of artistic representation as a mode of meaningful communication. I then show how conceiving of artistic representation in this way severely limits music’s possibilities as a medium for representation. Next, I propose an alternative conception of representation that, despite its widespread acceptance outside of the philosophy of art, (...) has been largely denigrated within it: namely, that representation fundamentally depends on structural resemblance. Finally, I demonstrate how conceiving of artistic representation as grounded upon structural resemblances, rather than as a mode of meaningful communication, provides us with a more accurate picture of both (a) how music represents and (b) how we perceive and appreciate musical representations. (shrink)

Major depressive disorder is a highly prevalent psychiatric disorder, and recurrent depression is associated with severe and chronic impairment. Identifying markers of risk is imperative to i...

In this paper, I explore the ways in which human bodies, payback, and comestibility become inescapably entangled in cultures in which honor is the prevailing virtue. Shakespeare was deeply sensitive to the social and psychological processes through which these concepts become entwined when honor is at stake—to the ways in which, as a means of corrective response, men who transgress a code of honor can be rightly reduced to their bodies, similar to how those who are not allowed to be (...) full participants in an honor culture (most particularly women) always already are. I begin by examining Shakespeare’s earliest depictions of honor cultures in Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece, and then briefly discusses how the ideas they trade in are further developed and complicated later in his career, focusing specifically on Othello. -/- . (shrink)