What does it mean to say that music is deeply moving? Or that music's aesthetic value derives from its deep structure? This study traces the widely employed trope of musical depth to its origins in German-language music criticism and analysis. From the Romantic aesthetics of E. T. A. Hoffmann to the modernist theories of Arnold Schoenberg, metaphors of depth attest to the cross-pollination of music with discourses ranging from theology, geology and poetics to psychology, philosophy and economics. The book (...) demonstrates that the persistence of depth metaphors in musicology and music theory today is an outgrowth of their essential role in articulating and transmitting Germanic cultural values. While musical depth metaphors have historically served to communicate German nationalist sentiments, Watkins shows that an appreciation for the broad connotations of those metaphors opens up exciting new avenues for interpretation. (shrink)

Literary controversies are instructive both in themselves and by illuminating the historical contexts that surrounded them. The Zurich dispute between Johann J. Bottmer, Johann J. Breitinger, and J...

What does it mean to say that music is deeply moving? Or that music's aesthetic value derives from its deep structure? This study traces the widely employed trope of musical depth to its origins in German-language music criticism and analysis. From the Romantic aesthetics of E. T. A. Hoffmann to the modernist theories of Arnold Schoenberg, metaphors of depth attest to the cross-pollination of music with discourses ranging from theology, geology and poetics to psychology, philosophy and economics. The book (...) demonstrates that the persistence of depth metaphors in musicology and music theory today is an outgrowth of their essential role in articulating and transmitting Germanic cultural values. While musical depth metaphors have historically served to communicate German nationalist sentiments, Watkins shows that an appreciation for the broad connotations of those metaphors opens up exciting new avenues for interpretation. (shrink)

In this book the concept of functionalism, well-known in 20th-century architecture and design, is used to investigate the musical thoughts of two of the leading composers at the time of the Bauhaus, the time of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier. Functionalism may be characterized by the functional treatment of the chosen material, by functional design, and by a focus on the work's intended function. This tripartite requirement also defines the concept of musical functionalism as developed in this study, and it (...) serves as the foundation for a presentation of Schoenberg's and Hindemith's thoughts on the subject. Examined through the lens of musical functionalism, common traits between the two composers become evident, despite all their individual characteristics as artists of noticeable integrity. Discussions of the musical material, of musical form, and of the function of music allow the author to reveal a shared epistemological base underlying the external dissimilarities of the two composers' style and language. (shrink)

Literary controversies are instructive both in themselves and by illuminating the historical contexts that surrounded them. The Zurich dispute between Johann J. Bottmer, Johann J. Breitinger, and J...

This article challenges a widespread assumption, arguing that Wittgenstein and the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg had little in common beyond their shared cultural heritage, overlapping social circles in fin-de-ciecle Vienna. The article explores Wittgenstein's aesthetic inclinations and the intellectual and philosophical influences that may have reinforced them. The article culminates in an attempt to form a Wittgensteinian response to Schoenberg's dodecaphonic language and to answer the question as to why Wittgenstein and Schoenberg arrived at very different ideas about contemporary (...) music and the music of the future. (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” considers how the ultramodernist aesthetics of Central Europe has related to and reacted against the region's political history and cartography. Central Europe has been a rich source of “soluble” realities that can be observed as they emerge, mature, and rapidly decay. Central European modernism, represented here by Adolf Loos in architecture and by Arnold Schoenberg and Leoš Janáček in music, experimented with blurry regions between presence and absence, light and shadow, (...) sound and silence. Loos disrupted the logic of architecture, while Schoenberg and Janáček nearly dissolved the acoustic paradigm of sound. This essay argues that the curious positioning of Central Europe, with its frequently changing borders and national entities, conduced both to positive experiments in cultural vagueness and to a corrosive reaction against existing and potential identities, parameters, distinctions, foci, and logics. (shrink)

This article addresses the subject of the ekphrastic description of experiencing music. It shows the main differences between ekphrasis and commonly used analysis in music theory and musicology. In approaching the problem of ekphrasis with what is called pure music, I emphasize its ancient understanding, thus differing from Lydia Goehr (2010) and Siglind Bruhn (2000, 2001, 2019). The ekphrastic analysis of the first movement of Arnold Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces Op. 19 conducted in this article uses the methodology (...) developed by Gottfried Boehm (2014) and Georges Didi-Huberman (2005, 2015, 2017, 2018) in the discipline of art history. This article aims to delineate a new way of researching the art of music, an essential feature of which is the combination of the traditions of analytic philosophy and phenomenology. (shrink)

Adorno's philosophical writings on music are notably focused on the new, invested in positioning the challenging avant‐garde works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern as the modernist mainstream. Nevertheless, Adorno's relationship with this “Second Viennese School” of composers was characterized by ongoing complexities, contradictions, and dissonances. His conflicted position is theorized here on multiple levels, considering not only Adorno's mature philosophy of the New Music, but his own musical‐creative output, and his relationships with the members of the Second Viennese School; a (...) group he was intimately connected to and distinct from at once. As his composition teacher, Berg was particularly influential in shaping Adorno's compositional activity and stance as simultaneously a champion and critic of Schoenberg. Adorno attempted to apply Schoenberg's twelve‐tone technique within his own compositions, recognizing its promise, yet from early on he had growing critical and compositional reservations concerning the method's restrictions. Though Adorno's writings from the 1930s defend Schoenberg and the twelve‐tone technique, by the end of the following decade, his Philosophy of New Music (2006 [1949]) expounds his critique of the method for its eschewal of the freedom of Expressionism. The impact of the Philosophy of New Music in the wake of the Second World War was both greater than and different from what Adorno could have expected. His message that the twelve‐tone method came at the cost of expressivity was largely missed by the subsequent generation of avant‐garde composers, the “Darmstadt School,” who understood the book as philosophical and theoretical basis for their extended exploration of music's serial systematization. (shrink)

This is a remarkable book about a man (perhaps the most important and original philosopher of our age), a society (the corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of dissolution), and a city (Vienna, with its fin-de siecle gaiety and corrosive melancholy). The central figure in this study of a crumbling society that gave birth to the modern world is Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker. With others, including Freud, Viktor Adler, and Arnold Schoenberg, he forged his ideas in (...) a classical revolt against the stuffy, doomed, and moralistic lives of the old regime. As a portrait of Wittgenstein, the book is superbly realized; it is even better as a portrait of the age, with dazzling and unusual parallels to our own confused society. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have acted on a striking premise: an understanding of prewar Vienna, Wittgenstein s native city, will make it easier to comprehend both his work and our own problems .This is an independent work containing much that is challenging, new, and useful. New York Times Book Review.". (shrink)

In order to show how Michel Serres’s work diverges from traditional Western philosophy, this article explores a multitude of texts and contexts against which Serres might be better understood. Most starkly, Serres’s work diverges from the eighteenth and nineteenth century Germanic tradition of Bildung, meaning cultivation through introspection, apolitical thought and character building through education. Serres’s moves away from ego-centric thought to eco-centric thought more akin to what Gregory Bateson called an ecology of mind. That is, Serres’s integrates—in a more (...) ecological fashion—poetry, science, the arts, ecology and politics to raise philosophical questions. Further, this author suggests that Serres’s reference to the nineteenth century poem Pierrot Lunaire ) serves as a trope for Serres’s over-arching philosophy. Pierrot is an artist, a sage, an outlier, a Hermes-like figure who breaks with tradition. Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal performance piece, spoken and sung, shattered the boundaries of classical music. Like Schoenberg’s work, Serres’s work, both in style and content, shatters the boundaries of traditional philosophy. Serres’s breaks open a new paradigm in philosophy. (shrink)

In this essay I take the opportunity to recast some insights from my extensive study over the last decade of Wittgenstein’s remarks on music into a coherent and concise portrayal of Wittgenstein’s philosophical underpinning and upshots pertaining to his perception of the modern music scene in interwar Austria. The gist of the present essay is to show that, for better or for worse, Wittgenstein’s personal taste in music was powered by philosophical reasoning, which was organic to his philosophical development, and (...) that ultimately his philosophical attitude to the music scene of interwar Austria manifests a deeply probing gradation. I are argue that we can distinguish between four varieties of the absurd in the music of interwar Austria, according to Wittgenstein. First is the nonsensical absurd of the incapability of seeing that the nonsensicality of the form of progress is incomprehensible. This category pertains to music which straightforwardly tries to emulate the various maxims and formulations derived from the form of progress. Such nonsensically absurd music typifies progressive Romantic composers such as Richard Strauss, Max Reger, and the early Arnold Schoenberg. Second is the vacuous absurd of the incapability of seeing what the form of progress renders incomprehensible. This category pertains to music which denounces the predominantly nonsensical maxims and formulations of modernity, thus destining itself to keeping on groping for something which it cannot express. Such vacuously absurd music is best exemplified, in Wittgenstein’s mind, by Josef Labor. Third is the philosophical absurd of rendering what is incomprehensible (from the perspective of a cultured person) comprehensible within the same purview. For Wittgenstein, Mahler’s music betokens such incommensurability, evoking a relativist philosophical puzzle: whether cultural progress is real, and it is us who have been left behind, or whether culture has really been vanquished, and we are the only ones left to notice it. The very thought of an artwork of “a totally different sort” remains invariably hypothetical. Fourth is the praxeological absurd of giving rise to an auxiliary, praxeologically dislodged musical language, replacing the transparency of human gesture with exact rules of comprehensibility. From Wittgenstein’s perspective, the shunning of the expanse of lived experience in a musical language fit for the meaning-blind would be the inglorious spot assigned to Arnold Schoenberg’s vision of the music of the future. (shrink)

The ambition in what follows is to begin a consideration of the lessons that might be learnt from a reassessment of twentieth-century avant-gardist practice within the domain of musical composition. The goal here will not be an evaluation of the compositional outputs of this period but, rather, some reflections on the place and role of teaching within and among the musicians themselves, remembering that many of them gained a considerable reputation as teachers: Arnold Schoenberg, Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and (...) John Cage being the pre-eminent examples.And, as an aside, before too quickly assuming that the radical newness and futurism associated with much avant-gardism is somehow at odds with our... (shrink)

From the time of the earliest self-conscious emergence of modern painting around 1905, there have not been widely accepted criteria by which to judge the artistic significance and value of the abstract and nonobjective styles that displaced the traditions of representational art. This circumstance has made the education of artists problematic. For the arts of literature and music, modernism was a relatively short-lived phase of innovation and experimentation that was played out in works that defied easy appreciation. The attention of (...) readers was soon exhausted by literary works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, as was the attention of listeners exhausted by Arnold Schoenberg’s serialism. Authors returned to writing... (shrink)

This article undertakes a comparison between Wittgenstein's philosophy of the early and late periods with the musical theories of Wittgenstein's contemporary, Heinrich Schenker, an influential Viennese theorist of tonality, as well as those of their contemporary Arnold Schoenberg. Schenker's reductive analytical procedure was designed to unveil fundamental and uniform ways in which all works of music function, unfolding a deep structure constituting their essence. Schoenberg deplored this line of thought, and for reasons strikingly parallel to those that led Wittgenstein (...) back to what he called the ‘rough ground’ in his Philosophical Investigations. Ultimately, for Wittgenstein, the abstracted picture of the musical work as a platonic entity is nourished by grammatical conflations as well as by the Platonic and Cartesian legacies. (shrink)

Although Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his association with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, he began his career as a composer and successful music critic. _Night Music_ presents the first complete English translations of two collections of texts compiled by German philosopher and musicologist Adorno—_Moments musicaux_, containing essays written between 1928 and 1962, and _Theory of New Music_, a group of texts written between 1929 and 1955. In _Moments musicaux_, Adorno echoes Schubert’s eponymous cycle, with its emphasis (...) on aphorism, and offers lyrical reflections on music of the past and his own time. The essays include extended aesthetic analyses that demonstrate Adorno’s aim to apply high philosophical standards to the study of music. _Theory of New Music_, as its title indicates, presents Adorno’s thoughts and theories on the composition, reception, and analysis of the music that was being written around him. His extensive philosophical writing ultimately prevented him from pursuing the compositional career he had once envisaged, but his view of the modern music of the time is not simply that of a theorist, but clearly also that of a composer. Though his advocacy of the Second Viennese School, comprising composer Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, is well known, many of his writings in this field have remained obscure. Collected in their entirety for the first time in English, the insightful texts in _Night Music _show the breadth of Adorno’s musical understanding and reveal an overlooked side to this significant thinker. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno was one of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers. In light of two pivotal developments—the rise of fascism, which culminated in the Holocaust, and the standardization of popular culture as a commodity indispensable to contemporary capitalism—Adorno sought to evaluate and synthesize the essential insights of Western philosophy by revisiting the ethical and sociological arguments of his predecessors: Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Marx. This book, first published in Germany in 1996, provides a succinct introduction to Adorno’s challenging and (...) far-reaching thought. Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, a leading authority on the Frankfurt School of critical theory, explains Adorno’s epistemology, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and theory of culture. After providing a brief overview of Adorno’s life, Schweppenhäuser turns to the theorist’s core philosophical concepts, including post-Kantian critique, determinate negation, and the primacy of the object, as well as his view of the Enlightenment as a code for world domination, his diagnosis of modern mass culture as a program of social control, and his understanding of modernist aesthetics as a challenge to conceive an alternative politics. Along the way, Schweppenhäuser illuminates the works widely considered Adorno’s most important achievements: _Minima Moralia_, _Dialectic of Enlightenment_, and _Negative Dialectics_. Adorno wrote much of the first two of these during his years in California, where he lived near Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, whom he assisted with the musical aesthetics at the center of Mann’s novel _Doctor Faustus_. (shrink)

Most commentators have underplayed the philosophical importance of Wittgenstein's multifarious remarks on music, which are scattered throughout his Nachlass. In this dissertation I spell out the extent and depth of Wittgenstein's engagement with certain problems that are regarded today as central to the field of the aesthetics of music, such as musical temporality, expression and understanding. By considering musical expression in its relation to aspect-perception, I argue that Wittgenstein understands music in terms of a highly evolved, vertically complex physiognomic language-game, (...) in which fine shades of behavior are logically (semantically) connected with the musical experiences themselves. A musical passage conjoins the multifarious language games that are presupposed in it and the emerging gesture that ultimately insinuates itself into our life. Wittgenstein conceives music as a mode of expression, a path leading from the world of our thoughts and feelings, which in itself is not yet music, toward a gesture which is no longer music, but which belongs to the world of thoughts and feelings. A melody can be located at this crossroads of music, language and the world, and is understood in reciprocal action with language. Musical gesture insinuates itself into our life, for, like a human face, it speaks of and reflects our "knowledge of mankind," and it is ultimately understood only against the background of "the bustle of life," as Wittgenstein calls it. I also argue that Wittgenstein's discussion of musical understanding suggests an important model, albeit not an exclusive one, for understanding language. The musicality of language points first and foremost at the way we use words in the vertically complex language game of expression, and at the intransitive understanding that goes with it. Throughout the dissertation I address a number of unique topics that have rarely, if ever, been investigated in this context. These include inter alia Wittgenstein's 1912-1913 experiments on the perception of rhythm, Oswald Spengler's influence on Wittgenstein's remarks on music, Wittgenstein's reaction to Heinrich Schenker's view of music, and the complex, elusive relation between Wittgenstein's later philosophical views and Arnold Schoenberg's dodecaphonic music. (shrink)

A few years ago I gave a paper on the aesthetics of ‘noise,’ that is, on the ways in which non-musical sounds can be given aesthetic shape and structure, and thereby form the basis of significant aesthetic experience. Along the way I made reference to Arnold Schoenberg's musical theory, in particular his notion of Klangfarbenmelodie, literally ‘sound colour melody,’ or musical form based on timbre or tonal colour rather than on melody, harmony or rhythm. Schoenberg articulated his ideas about (...) Klangfarbenmelodie in the final section of his Harmonielehre. ‘Pitch is nothing else but tone colour measured in one direction,’ wrote Schoenberg. ‘Now, if it is possible to create patterns out of tone colours that are differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call ‘melodies’…then it must also be possible to make such progressions out of the tone colours of the other dimension, out of that which we simply call “tone colour.”’ In other words, traditional melodies work by abstracting and structuring the dominant pitch characterizing a musical sound, while ‘sound colour melodies’ work, Schoenberg argues, by structuring the combined set of pitches contained in a given musical sound. Schoenberg is emphatic that, although a neglected and underdeveloped possibility within Western classical music, ‘sound colour melody’ is a perfectly legitimate and viable form of musical expression; indeed for Schoenberg it is a musical form with enormous potential. (shrink)

The article examines the use of the concept of mimesis in Adorno’s notes towards a theory of musical performance. In trying to idiosyncratically define the latter as “reproduction”, Adorno relied on a framework elaborating on concepts introduced by Arnold Schoenberg, Hugo Riemann and Walter Benjamin – a framework that the article discusses insofar as it deals with the problem of mimesis. Specific attention is devoted to the relation between Benjamin’s essays on language and translation and Adorno’s theory of notation, (...) that soon became the crucial aspect of his theory of reproduction. Given the shortcomings of Adorno’s theory, which in the end did not achieve its goals, the article proposes to capitalize on his terminology while at the same time rethinking his framework in the light of recent musicological paradigms for the study of musical performance. On the whole, the article shows that it was Adorno’s philosophical assumptions – in particular the theses of music’s non-intentionality and of its non-similarity to language – that prevented him from convincingly theorizing musical performance, and suggests an alternative framework for future research. (shrink)

The twentieth century was a time of dramatic change in the structure, language, and aesthetic purpose of music. Numerous factors came together that led the musical avant-garde toward new artistic paths such as atonality and aleatoricism (use of chance elements) in music, and a shift in the idea of what music should portray away from beauty toward truth, or from idealized to actualized. If the arts are a reflection of the philosophical and aesthetic spirit of the times, then an examination (...) of prominent philosophical and aesthetic regimes of the time should reveal changes that facilitated the aesthetic and artistic innovations of the era. This article will examine the relationship between the philosophical and aesthetic writings of Henri Bergson and the affinities, and in some cases influences, they had on the development of two of the major musical innovations of the twentieth century. Specifically, Arnold Schoenberg's development of atonal compositional technique results partially from Bergson's focus on knowledge as a conveyor of truth, and John Cage's cultivation of aleatoricism as a compositional process arises out of Bergson's critique of nothingness as stated in Creative Evolution. (shrink)

Music can answer questions that often confound more discursive modes of thought. Music takes concepts that are all too familiar, reframes these concepts, and returns them to us with incisive clarity and renewed vision. Unity is one of these "all too familiar concepts," thrown around by politicians, journalists, and pastors as if we all know what it means. By turning to music, especially musical space, the relational structure of unity becomes less abstract and more tangible within our philosophy. Arnold (...) Schoenberg, as an inherently musical thinker, is our guide in this study of unity. His reworking of musical structure, dissonance, and metaphysics transformed the tonal language and aesthetic landscape of twentieth century music. His philosophy of compositional unity helps us to deconstruct and reconceive how unity can be understood and worked with both aesthetically and theologically. This project also critiques Schoenberg's often monadic musical metaphysic by turning to Colin Gunton's conviction that the particularity and unity at the heart of God's triune being should guide all of our theological endeavors. Throughout, music accompanies our thinking, demonstrating not only how theology can benefit the philosophy of music but also how the philosophy of music can enrich and augment theological discourse. (shrink)

'The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.' Matthew Arnold's famous series of essays, which were first published in book form under the title Culture and Anarchy in 1869, debate important questions about the nature of culture and society that are as relevant now as they have ever been. Arnold seeks to find out 'what culture really is, what good it can do, what is our own special need of it' in an age of rapid social (...) change and increasing mechanization. He contrasts culture, 'the study of perfection', with anarchy, the mood of unrest and uncertainty that pervaded mid-Victorian England. How can individuals be educated, not indoctrinated, and what is the role of the state in disseminating 'sweetness and light'? This edition reproduces the original book version and enables readers to appreciate its immediate historical context as well as the reasons for its continued importance today, in the face of the challenges of multi-culturalism and post-modernism. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century Arnold Schoenberg introduced into music an atonal style of polyphonic composition. The artistic success of his and his colleagues' oeuvre insured the wide diffusion of his technique of the twelve tone series. In the period immediately following World War II, the serial technique exercised a dominant influence over advanced musical practice. However, in the decades that followed, composers and theorists alike began to entertain doubts about the relation between the derivation of a composition from (...) a series and its audible musical structure. A reconsideration of the theory of atonal polyphony must rest on rigorous analyses both of the structure of the musical materials, and of the semiotic relation between score and performance, which is constitutive of musical works in the western common practice tradition. ;The aim of this dissertation is to advance the project of founding a reconsideration of the theory of atonal polyphony by constructing the concrete entities needed to provide a phenomenalistic semantic framework for the semiotics of contrapuntal theory. The starting point is Nelson Goodman's logical constructionalism, and, in particular, his theory of signs of Languages of Art, and his phenomenalist system of The Structure of Appearance. Chapter One is a contribution to phenomenalist theory. It introduces a systematic notion of the maximal phenomenal continuity that explicates the concept of the sense content, as it occurs in natural language philosophical discourse. Chapter Two begins with a discussion of the idealizations that are appropriate to a semantics of contrapuntal theory. This discussion results in a systematic notion of the primitive concrete entity of contrapuntal theory, the note, which is shown to be a species of sense content, as defined in Chapter One. By aggregating notes, the construction subsumes under the systematic notion of the sub-polyphony both whole compound polyphonic occurrences and their musically significant melodic and harmonic sub-divisions. The resulting explication of the concrete notions of contrapuntal theory both connects phenomenalist theory with a familiar realm of human experience, and provides a basis for a systematic examination and revision of contrapuntal theory. (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)

This is the first musicological study entirely devoted to a comprehensive analysis of musical Holocaust representations in the Western art music tradition. Through a series of chronological case studies grounded in primary source analysis, Amy Lynn Wlodarski analyses the compositional processes and conceptual frameworks that provide key pieces with their unique representational structures and critical receptions. The study examines works composed in a variety of musical languages - from Arnold Schoenberg's dodecaphonic A Survivor from Warsaw to Steve Reich's minimalist (...) Different Trains - and situates them within interdisciplinary discussions about the aesthetics and ethics of artistic witness. At the heart of this book are important questions about how music interacts with language and history; memory and trauma; and politics and mourning. Wlodarski's detailed musical and cultural analyses provide new models for the assessment of the genre, illustrating the benefits and consequences of musical Holocaust representation in the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

In this dissertation I develop a general theory of coercion that allows one to distinguish cases of interpersonal coercion from cases of persuasion or manipulation, and cases of institutional coercion from cases of oppression. The general theory of coercion that I develop includes as one component a theory of second-order coercion. Second-order coercion takes place whenever one person intentionally impairs the formation of the second-order desires of another person, or constrains them after their formation, in a way that frustrates or (...) eliminates the possibility of the victim fulfilling certain of his or her first-order desires. The concept of second-order coercion is important because it suggests that a person's autonomy may be violated in ways that have not been previously recognized. In this dissertation I argue that the unique feature of all cases of coercion is that the alternatives available to the victim, with regard to the formation of his or her will, are intentionally constrained by another person in a way that violates the victim's autonomy. A general theory of coercion should be able to explain how institutions may be understood as coercive. I argue that if institutions are understood as social practices maintained for the purpose of achieving some end, then they may be properly understood as capable of coercion. ;This theory of coercion allows me to make two arguments concerning moral responsibility. First, I argue that current discussions of moral responsibility are inadequate because they fail to take seriously the claim that a person may be responsible, at least in part, for having the beliefs and desires that make a particular action a case of coercion. Second, I argue that discussions of moral responsibility are inadequate because they fail to recognize that an agent may not be responsible for the state of his or her will because he or she may have been coerced in a way that has not been previously recognized. (shrink)

The most common approach in writings on music and Jugendstil has been to isolate several aspects of the visual art, either of technique or of subject matter, and to seek parallels in music of the fin de siècle. Historians of art and design seem to agree on at least three basic elements of Jugendstil: the primacy of the dynamic, flowing line; flatness or two dimensionality ; and the profuseness of ornament. All these features are neatly embodied in a 1900 drawing (...) by Theodor Heine , in which the ostensible subject matter, the dancing lady, is dissolved in the undulating linearity of her dress and the swirling smoke or incense. In this example, as in the celebrated "Cyclamen" tapestry by the Munich artist Hermann Obrist , line and ornament are largely liberated from their representational obligations and are manipulated in an almost abstract fashion. As Robert Schmutzler has remarked, the tapestry is "on the borderline dividing the symbol and the ornament, between abstract dynamism and the representation of a distinctive organism."4This aspect of Obrist's tapestry was realized as early as 1895 by the critic Georg Fuchs, who wrote in the journal Pan, "'These embroideries do not intend to "mean" anything, to say anything.'" Fuchs went on to describe the dynamic motion of the image in terms that have nothing to do with cyclamens per se: "'This racing movement seems like the abrupt, powerful convolution of the lash of a whip. One moment it appears as the image of a forceful outburst of natural elements; it is a lightning bolt. Another moment it resembles the defiant signature of a great man, a conqueror, an intellect who decrees new laws through new documents.''"5 Fuchs's metaphor of the whiplash or Peitschenhieb, has stuck; Obrist's tapestry is today known principally by that name.4. Robert Schmutzler, Art Nouveau , p. 193.5. Georg Fuchs, quoted in Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years , p. 33; hereafter abbreviated KM; translation modified. Walter Frisch is associate professor of music at Columbia University and author of Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation . He is presently completing a book on the early tonal works of Arnold Schoenberg. (shrink)

The Aesthetics of Human Environments is a companion volume to Carlson's and Berleant's The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Whereas the earlier collection focused on the aesthetic appreciation of nature, The Aesthetics of Human Environments investigates philosophical and aesthetics issues that arise from our engagement with human environments ranging from rural landscapes to urban cityscapes. Our experience of public spaces such as shopping centers, theme parks, and gardens as well as the impact of our personal living spaces on the routine activities (...) of our everyday life are discussed in terms of their aesthetic value and the nature of our aesthetic appreciation. This volume will appeal to any reader concerned about the aesthetic quality of the world in which we live. (shrink)

In this book Arnold Berleant develops a bold alternative to the eighteenth-century aesthetic of disinterestedness.

Agents: feigning authority -- Adolescents: appropriating adulthood -- Hoarders: shoring up self -- Shelter workers: finding authenticity -- Marketers: Celebrating community -- Cruelty is good to think.

This essay traces the steps to social aesthetics. It begins by affirming the central place of sense experience for aesthetics and its refinement in the perceptual acuity of a developed sensibility. This leads to associating aesthetic appreciation with such perceptual experience. Rejecting the identification of disinterestedness with such appreciation, the present paper proposes the full participatory involvement in the experience of appreciation as expressed by the concept of aesthetic engagement. This describes the appreciative situation as an aesthetic field in which (...) the perceptual, creative, focusing, and activating factors are in reciprocal interaction. It characterizes not only appreciation in the arts but occurs as well in appreciating natural, built, and social environments. Aesthetic engagement in social aesthetics is exemplified by the gaze in the experience of four well-known paintings I shall consider. Following these a series of related ideas are developed that lead to the concept of a social aesthetics. Finally, the essay returns to the paintings for an enhanced understanding of social aesthetics. (shrink)