Explores listening as a fundamental human endowment connected with language and thought, and its potential for social, personal, and political action. Incorporates historical, literary, intercultural, scientific, musical, and philosophical perspectives"--Provided by publisher.

Through a series of exquisite encounters with children, and through a lucid opening up of new aspects of poststructuralist theorizing, Bronwyn Davies opens up new ways of thinking about, and intra-acting with, children. This book carefully guides the reader through a wave of thought that turns the known into the unknown, and then slowly, carefully, makes new forms of thought comprehensible, opening, through all the senses, a deep understanding of our embeddedness in encounters with each other and with the material (...) world. This book takes us into Reggio-Emilia-inspired Swedish preschools in Sweden, into the author's own community in Australia, into poignant memories of childhood, and offers the reader insights into:new ways of thinking about children and their communities; the act of listening as emergent and alive; ourselves as mobile and multiple subjects; the importance of remaining open to the not-yet-known.Defining research as diffractive, and as experimental, Davies' relationship to the teachers and pedagogues she worked with is one of co-experimentation. Her relationship with the children is one in which she explores the ways in which her own new thinking and being might emerge, even as old ways of thinking and being assert themselves and interfere with the unfolding of the new. She draws us into her ongoing experimentation, asking that we think hard, all the while delighting our senses with the poetry of her writing, and the stories of her encounters with children. (shrink)

Whoosh, crunch, buzz, inhale, exhale... Listening for Learning: Performing a Pedagogy of Sound and Listening presents sound, listening, and pedagogical interactions as performances that create relationships, ways of being and knowing, and that provide an opportunity for transformations of existing and taken-for-granted practices in the classroom. By using performative listening and performative writing this book presents fragments of sound and listening as sites of learning and knowledge production. The written fragments throughout this book are offered (...) as performances that listen for and hear sound as a central feature to educational practices in terms of bodies, classrooms, and pedagogy. The goal in sharing this performance of listening is to create opportunities for recognition, to invite further listening in educational contexts, and to employ listening as an opportunity for transforming and re-imagining educational spaces and interactions. (shrink)

Performance is increasingly important to the poet, which is evidenced by the growing numbers of videos and audio recordings online including YouTube, the National Poetry library, and Poetry Archive. As a result, there are greater opportunities to engage with poets reading their own work and consequently, there is a need to move away from thinking of poetry as primary something that takes shape on the page. Furthermore, by refocusing attention to poetry as an oral artform, in particular to poetry performance, (...) different ways of understanding the value of poetry come to the fore. The live poetry performance, I argue, offers an attempt to reclaim the personal individual expression of language in contemporary society and demands attention by the audience because of the role of voice and body in the performance. Through awareness of ‘uniqueness of voice,’ the performed poem becomes a site of collective meaning making with individual identity intact as a shared endeavour between performer and audience, and necessarily resists appropriation (in the sense that the words experienced cannot be divorced from the performer or the performance space to serve as a proxy for meaning elsewhere). This chapter therefore makes an argument for the need to engage with spoken word and performance poetry in the live performance space. (shrink)

Palliative care seeks to provide holistic care to improve the quality of life for the sick, especially as they approach the end of their lives. Addressing the spiritual dimension of the human person is useful because it provides answers to the meaning of life. Spiritual care has been shown to be of great benefit to patients. Therefore, this paper explores the importance of the spiritual dimension in palliative care; highlight the act of listening as a key part of spiritual (...) care, showing that physician burnout is the main obstacle to improving listening as an appropriate service that is both comforting and healing. -/- Los cuidados paliativos buscan ofrecer una atención holística para brindar una mejor calidad de vida a los enfermos, especialmente cuando se aproximan al fin de su existencia. Profundizar en la dimensión espiritual de la persona humana resulta útil puesto que ofrece respuestas al sentido de la vida. Se ha constatado que la atención espiritual aporta grandes beneficios para el paciente. Es por eso que en este trabajo hemos querido profundizar en la importancia de la dimensión espiritual en los cuidados paliativos; se destaca la actitud de la escucha como pieza clave de dicha atención espiritual, lo que evidencia que el burnout de los médicos es el principal obstáculo para potenciar la escucha como una adecuada disposición que resulte consoladora y sanadora. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to reflect on the place and importance of the question of address and to show how it comes to the fore in Søren Kierkegaard’s writings. What shall be attempted, with regard to Kierkegaard’s already widely recognized renown as an existential thinker, is to catch a glimpse of issues that make up the larger background in which the question of address is embedded. In doing so, the essay explores several features of Kierkegaard’s inquiry into the (...) question of existence in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and connect them with the notion of the reader. This latter notion provides a way of understanding the singularity of voice, while offering an account of the testimony to existence. After a brief recapitulation, the essay identifies in conclusion unresolved issues relating to speech, silence, confidentiality, and listening. (shrink)

How do we listen to the earth? That is the central question posed in Geosonics: Bodies, Instruments, Interfaces. Through sound studies, media theory, and environmental media studies, Josh Dittrich studies explores who is considered "we" and what is the "earth," as well what counts as sound and the climate implications at play when mediating the environment. In an epoch of climate crisis, environment is no longer a neutral background, site or a simple "surrounding": environment is immanently implicated in the chains (...) of mediation that make up the material and imaginative infrastructure of our lives. (shrink)

Listening and Voice is an updated and expanded edition of Don Ihde's groundbreaking 1976 classic in the study of sound.

Listening After Nature questions the reality of auditory natures. It argues that the line between wilderness and industrial culture is dull, and the natural world is presently a critical construct that entangles humans, animals, sites and technologies. Bringing new insights to the field of environmental sound arts in areas such as field recording, acoustic ecology and soundscape studies, Wright examines contemporary and archival audio works and calls for a 'post-natural' approach to sound. The book propels sounds arts discourse into (...) critical relationship with the environmental humanities and contemporary approaches dealing with the consequences of Anthropogenic change. Critical and imaginative, this is a book that forges urgent debate between sound, ethics, aesthetics and ecology. (shrink)

This chapter demonstrates that the Seventh Letter, explicitly and throughout its entirety, thematizes hearing and listening, and it comprises an exhortation to listen well. After laying down groundwork showing that logos must include listening, not merely assertion or expression, the chapter first demonstrates the political significance of the exhortation to listen based on a unified reading of the Letter that conjoins the concerns of the so-called digression with the rest of its content. It situates the “weakness of logos” (...) taken up in the digression, which most scholars treat in an ontological-linguistic weakness, as an aural phenomenon within the Letter’s distinctly political aims. That is to say, the “weakness of logos,” referred to in the so-called digression is also a weakness of hearers and hearing and is thus a political weakness, as well. The chapter then goes on to argue that the politics of listening in the Seventh Letter, as well as in some aspects of Socratic dialectic, rely necessarily on certain forms of domination or compelled listening, and I therefore consider the links between hearing and tyranny in the Letter. Finally, I speculate on what a more liberated politics of listening and hearing might look like and what role the Platonic writings might play as a propaedeutic to better listening in the city. I conclude by arguing that because of the “weakness of logos,” Plato’s task is inherently paradoxical: Plato calls us to hear what we are not yet able to hear, tyrannizing in order to liberate our sense of hearing. (shrink)

My argument in this paper is that humility is implied in the concept of teaching, if teaching is construed in a strong sense. Teaching in a strong sense is a view of teaching as linked to students’ embodied experiences (including cognitive and moral-social dimensions), in particular students’ experiences of limitation, whereas a weak sense of teaching refers to teaching as narrowly focused on student cognitive development. In addition to detailing the relation between humility and strong sense teaching, I will also (...) argue that humility is acquired through the practice of teaching. My discussion connects to the growing interest, especially in virtue epistemology discourse, in the idea that teachers should educate for virtues. Drawing upon John Dewey and contemporary virtue epistemology discourse, I discuss humility, paying particular attention to an overlooked aspect of humility that I refer to as the educative dimension of humility. I then connect this concept of humility to the notion of teaching in a strong sense. In the final section, I discuss how humility in teaching is learned in the practice of teaching by listening to students in particular ways. In addition, I make connections between my concept of teaching and the practice of cultivating students’ virtues. I conclude with a critique of common practices of evaluating good teaching, which I situate within the context of international educational policy on teacher evaluation. (shrink)

In this book, Sarah Mayberry Scott analyzes contemporary films to investigate how the history and values of the Deaf world provides opportunities for how the concepts of voice, silence, and listening can be expanded to include a diverse plurality of embodied experiences.

Quarantine and spatial distancing measures associated with COVID-19 resulted in substantial changes to individuals’ everyday lives. Prominent among these lifestyle changes was the way in which people interacted with media—including music listening. In this repeated assessment study, we assessed Australian university students’ media use throughout early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, and determined whether media use was related to changes in life satisfaction. Participants were asked to complete six online questionnaires, capturing pre- and during-pandemic experiences. The results (...) indicated that media use varied substantially throughout the study period, and at the within-person level, life satisfaction was positively associated with music listening and negatively associated with watching TV/videos/movies. The findings highlight the potential benefits of music listening during COVID-19 and other periods of social isolation. (shrink)

Sense of agency refers to the ability to influence one’s functioning and environment, relating to self-efficacy and wellbeing. In youth, agency may be challenged by external demands or redefinition of self-image. Music, having heightened relevance for the young, has been argued to provide feelings of self-agency for them. Yet, there is little empirical research on how music impacts adolescents’ daily sense of agency. The current study investigated whether music listening influences adolescents’ perceived agency in everyday life and which individual (...) and contextual determinants would explain such an influence. Participants were 44 adolescents (48% female, 36% with training in music, mean age 14), recruited through local schools. The mobile Experience Sampling app MuPsych was used to collect brief self-reports of personal music listening experiences during daily life. This method assessed the change in the listener’s perceived control over both their emotional states (Internal Agency), and their external environment (External Agency), over five minutes of music listening. Also measured were changes in mood states, and contextual variables (social situation, concurrent activity, and reason for listening). The impact of music on the sense of agency was analyzed using multilevel structural equation modelling. There was no general increase of agency across all music episodes, but agency fluctuations were determined by specific individual and contextual factors. Music training predicted increases in both internal and external agency during music listening, and external agency increased more for male participants. Certain context features such as listening alone, paying attention to music, and listening for enjoyment were related to greater increases in agency. Increases in agency significantly correlated with increases in mood valence. Our findings confirmed the plasticity and situational embeddedness of the sense of agency. Music indeed can support agency, but the impact is dependent on specific individual and contextual factors. Sense of agency can be seen as a health resource and significant part of youth development, and current findings provide new insight into when and by whom such affordance is likely to be employed. (shrink)

This book examines the role of note-taking in ancient education as a pedagogical method, by taking readers on a stimulating analysis of lectures by ancient philosophers that were recorded by their students.

Listening appears as elusive as it is crucial to democratic life, particularly in conditions of structural injustice. Dominant groups benefit from histories and habits of inattention and, when enlisted, common responses of denial, defensiveness, and resentment. What lies behind this pervasive and persistent failure to listen to claims of structural injustice by more advantaged groups, and what does this mean for democratic engagement? This paper addresses this question via three interventions: first, it develops a novel account of listening (...) that reveals why listening to claims of structural injustice often proves difficult. Second, it examines how inhabiting positions of relative advantage shapes whether and how people listen to such claims. Finally, it explores the implications these challenges have for the design of democratic processes that seek to engage advantaged groups regarding structural injustice. To develop this account, I draw together current scholarship regarding listening and structural injustice with original fieldwork of recent and current efforts to engage more advantaged communities regarding a specific form of structural injustice: specifically, interviews and observation of the ten organizations across Aotearoa New Zealand most active in efforts to engage communities regarding socio-economic inequality in the country. (shrink)

The importance of ethical listening -- The power of difference and values that unite -- Take off your armor and bring down the walls: adopting a listening posture -- Dolls and cages: listening as investment and care -- Deep listening: remembering and responding with intentional focus -- Hyenas and chickens: listening as invitation -- Hope for sustainable hospitality -- References -- About the author.

I discuss the social dimension of musical experience. I focus on the question of whether there is joint musical listening. One reason for this focus is that Adorno and those in his tradition give us little in the way of an understanding of what the social dimension of musical experience might be. We need a proper clear conception of the issue, which the issue of joint experience yields. I defend a radically individualistic view, while conceding that such a view, (...) inspired by Hanslick, may have political ramifications. I have two arguments. The first is a principled argument against joint musical listening from the impossibility of perceiving the aesthetic properties of music. I connect this with the privacy of our grounds for aesthetic judgements about music. The second argument accepts that joint listening could in principle span different sense modalities, but draws attention to the fact that the experiences on which aesthetic judgements are based cannot be willed in a way they would have to be if there was joint listening. Lastly, I consider two phenomena, of making music together and dancing together, which seem to involve joint listening, but in fact do not. I end by drawing an individualist conclusion about the nature of musical experience. (shrink)

This chapter offers a short logic lesson as an introduction to what philosophers and other critical thinkers do when they offer and criticize arguments. Logic is the study of the principles of correct reasoning associated with the formation and analysis of arguments. The creators of South Park, for the most part, know these logical principles. They purposely violate them, though, to show the absurdities contained in certain beliefs, opinions, ideas, and arguments. In fact, much of South Park's humor concerns logical (...) violations and the absurdities, contradictions, and problems that result. The authors consider some basics of logic using examples from South Park episodes, and show some differences between correct and incorrect reasoning. There are two main kinds of arguments, deductive arguments and inductive arguments. The authors insist on the need to form good arguments, and the need to evaluate the arguments of others. (shrink)

An examination of the unconscious as it relates to popular music and the first truly interdisciplinary book on philosophy and popular music with equal weight given to each discipline.

The COVID-19 outbreak required diverse strategies, such as social distancing and self-isolation, to avoid a healthcare system crisis. However, these measures have been associated with the onset or increase of anxiety and depression symptoms in the population. Music listening was previously shown to regulate emotion, consequently reducing depression symptoms. Since previous studies with Brazilian samples have already shown a high prevalence of depressive symptoms during the first confinement period, the aim of this study was threefold: (i) to compare groups (...) with severe depression symptoms and no depression in what concerns to demographic and socio-economic factors as well as symptoms of anxiety and resilience levels, (ii) to explore changes in music listening daily routine during the confinement measures by both groups (no depression and severe depression), and (iii) to investigate which were the main factors influencing both two groups to music listening during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-sectional study included 494 Brazilian respondents aged 18 years and above. Our online survey comprised demographics, socio-economic, and COVID-19 related questionnaires, with questions regarding music listening used during social distancing measures on which the participants rated how much each of the 41 potential reasons for listening to music changed in importance compared to the situation before the pandemic and also the evaluation of anxiety, depression, and resilience levels. The respondents with severe depression were younger and showed higher levels of anxiety symptoms and lower resilience level. Furthermore, they were increasingly likely to listen to music to feel emotionally better with the situation, to feel comfort, to forget problems, to be energetic, to decrease sad feelings, to relax, to cheer up, to forget concerns, to express feelings, to reduce anxiety, to remember better times, to relieve boredom, to mentally stimulate themselves, and to ward off stressful thoughts compared to the participants with no depression. The exploratory factor analysis (FA) identified four types of music listening functions during social distancing measures: negative mood management, cognitive functioning, positive mood management, and physical involvement, in which the participants with severe depression revealed significant differences compared to non-depressed participants for the negative mood management factor, which shows the importance of music listening to regulate their negative emotions. As a conclusion, we can argue that most of our respondents used music listening to cope with and regulate their moods during confinement, especially those who presented with severe depression symptoms. (shrink)

This article comments on the article of Thorn and Schurz in this volume and focuses on, what we call, the problem of parasitic experts. We discuss that both meta- induction and crowd wisdom can be understood as pertaining to absolute reliability rather than comparative optimality, and we suggest that the involvement of reliability will provide a handle on this problem.

This article is a brief response to Ramsey E. Ramsey’s essay ‘Letters on the hermeneutic education of dwelling’ published in Empedocles (6: 1, pp. 77–90). While it sees Ramsey’s defense of the lecture as a necessary articulation of the specificity of the work professors do in the humanities classroom, it points to the necessity of an enhanced self-awareness given the pervasive sense of crisis in the humanities, and in light of more recent developments on American and British campuses.

The Indian-America philosopher Sri Chinmoy Ghose has distinguished between outer silence, inner silence, and innermost silence. In this paper I explore these distinctions and their educational relevance. My main conclusions are that (a) a deep inner silence, undistracted by questions or other thoughts, is at the root of one paradigm kind of good listening in education, and (b) what Chinmoy refers to as “innermost silence” is the moral virtue of receptivity to others that sustains inner silence, even under challenging (...) conditions, a virtue of importance in teaching and in learning from others. (shrink)

In a study that goes beyond the ego affirmed by Freudian psychology, David Levin offers an account of personal growth and self-fulfillment based on the development of our capacity for listening. Drawing on the work of Dewey, Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg, he uses the vocabulary of phenomenological psychology to distinguish four stages in this developmental process and brings us the significance of these stages for music, psychotherapy, ethics, politics, and ecology. This analysis substantiates his claim that the development of (...) our listening capacity is a process that fits Foucault's conception of a practice of the self, forming our character as social beings and moral agents. David Levin contends that our self- development as auditory beings is necessary for the achievement of a just and democratic society. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the relationship between new technologies and listening, starting from a distinction between two different levels. The first concerns the role new technologies play in the “mere” reproduction and diffusion of music materials that are not necessarily classifiable in the category of the so-called “technological music”; the second concerns the listening modes unavoidably involved in the reception of a music product, due to its very nature. To this end I shall focus my attention on (...) some elements that characterize both music production and reception: historical development of the relationship between technology and music; technologically mediated non-live listening; technologically mediated live listening; ontological oscillation in a musical work of art following its digitalization. These are issues that also bring into play aesthetics in a developmental stage of this discipline, in which a philosophical reflection on technological music may contribute to formulate – as J. Demers wrote – «a theory that acknowledges the interconnectedness of aesthetics with culture and society». (shrink)

This full-length study of Plato's dialogue Phaedrus, now in paperback, is written in the belief that such concerted scrutiny of a single dialogue is an important part of the project of understanding Plato so far as possible 'from the inside' - of gaining a feel for the man's philosophy. The focus of this account is on how the resources both of persuasive myth and of formal argument, for all that Plato sets them in strong contrast, nevertheless complement and reinforce each (...) other in his philosophy. Not only is the dialogue in its formal structure a dovetail of myth and argument, but the philosophic life that it praises is also shaped by an acknowledgement of the limitations of argument and the importance of mythical understanding. By means of this correlation of form and content Plato invites his readers, through the very act of reading, to take a first step along the path of the philosophical life. (shrink)

In this inquiry, I ask what is distinctive about listening as a teacher. I develop the meaning of educative listening as a mode of listening to interruptions in a way that promotes students’ thinking and learning. Interruptions in a teacher’s listening are defined as any unexpected response from a student to the material presented — for example, a challenging viewpoint, a difficult question, or a confusing reply — that opens up possibilities for cultivating learning. To begin, (...) I draw upon Dewey to examine the connections between listening and learning in teacher-student interaction. In the second section, I explicate the implications of Dewey’s theory of learning for a theory of listening in reflective teaching. Here, I contend that reflective teaching entails educative listening. In the final section, I inquire into how teacher education can productively address the connections between learning to listen and learning to teach reflectively. (shrink)

In this lyrical meditation on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy examines sound in relation to the human body. How is listening different from hearing? What does listening entail? How does what is heard differ from what is seen? Can philosophy even address listening, écouter, as opposed to entendre, which means both hearing and understanding? Unlike the visual arts, sound produces effects that persist long after it has stopped. The body, Nancy says, is itself like an echo chamber, responding (...) to music by inner vibrations as well as outer attentiveness. Since “the ear has no eyelid” (Quignard), sound cannot be blocked out or ignored: our whole being is involved in listening, just as it is involved in interpreting what it hears. The mystery of music and of its effects on the listener is subtly examined. Nancy’s skill as a philosopher is to bring the reader companionably along with him as he examines these fresh and vital questions; by the end of the book the reader feels as if listening very carefully to a person talking quietly, close to the ear. (shrink)

Long histories and entrenched habits of inattention among advantaged groups mean that even minor challenge and concession can provoke subjective perceptions of victimization. How, in such conditions, might claims of structural injustice break through? Drawing on field work with practitioners across conflict mediation, therapy, education, and performance – four sectors that facilitate listening in fraught contexts yet are undertheorized in politics – this article makes the case that among the most overlooked and powerful resources for cultivating receptivity and responsiveness (...) among advantaged groups are the arts of listening. Practices of engagement across these sectors establish listening as potent rather than passive, given the extent to which it constitutes the field of encounter and shapes what emerges within it, both in terms of expression and, more significantly in this context, receptivity of those to whom one listens. Yet this also means that how one listens is a pivotal consideration – particularly when listening might serve to reinforce and normalize unjustly dominant positions. In contrast to progressive politics’ emphasis on finding more forceful forms of voice and conventional reliance on direct communicative practices, this article explores how specific comedic, theatrical, and embodied tactics can generate ‘oblique forms of listening’ potentially useful to social justice struggles. (shrink)

Even though Slavoj Žižek has written many words about music without really saying much about it, his work nevertheless contains much that for the philosophically minded musicologist, or for the musically minded philosopher, can stimulate thinking. For the author of this article, for example, some of the ideas presented in Žižek’s 2006 The Parallax View have stimulated thinking about the possibilities of taking a comparable approach—that is, a metaphorically ‘parallax’ approach that involves considering an object of attention alternately from more (...) than one perspective—not just to music but to sounds in general. Along with summarizing Žižek’s views on music per se, “Focused Listening: The Aesthetics of Parallax” explores various ways in which persons in the presence of a single ‘sound object’ might listen to, and thus perceive and hear, that sonic phenomenon. (shrink)

In Polish historiography on radio in the Stalinist period, the official propaganda broadcast by Polish Radio is very often juxtaposed with the free and unbiased broadcasting of Radio Free Europe (RFE), which can create the impression that RFE was the only source of information in Poland and tends to diminish the importance of Polish Radio. In fact, both broadcasting institutions were crucial players in Cold War warfare, which was described by George F. Kennan in terms of Clausewitz's “fog of war.” (...) Indeed, both RFE and Polish Radio were listening to each other through the Iron Curtain because “white propaganda” (along with the intelligence obtained from political refugees) was one of the most important sources of information. The two broadcasting stations were more alike than we are willing to admit. For instance, the Polish section of RFE mimicked the post-war strategy of Polish Radio. While the latter pretended to be the continuation and successor of the pre-war institution, RFE's propaganda shaped the programme of Polish Radio for many years. Using this case study on RFE's attitude toward Poland's western borders along the Odra and Nysa Rivers, I show how these two opposing broadcasting stations functioned within an endless propaganda feedback loop. (shrink)

Listening is crucial to reaching multicultural understanding. Borrowing from the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer we develop a hermeneutics of listening. To listen we must risk our prejudices, but these prejudices constitute our very identity. In this paper we attempt to answer the question, “Why Listen?” if listening is such a potentially dangerous activity.