ABSTRACTIneffability of musical meaning is a frequent theme in music philosophy. However, talk about musical meaning persists and seems to be not only inherently enjoyable and socially acceptable, but also functionally useful. Relying on a phenomenological account of musical meaning combined with a naturalist explanatory attitude, we argue for a novel explanation of how ineffability is a feature of musical meaning and experience and we show why it cannot be remedied by perfecting language or musico-philosophical study.Musical meaning is seen as (...) an experiential phenomenon that consists of layers, some recent, others archaic. As such, musical meaning is strongly characterized by asubjectivity. It is in-between, in a state where the division of subject and object is not yet valid or valid anymore. A naturalistic interplay of experiential layers in music brings about a non-reified dynamics driving for expressions, interpretations, engenderings of subjects and objects or even for political action. Generally speaking, the in-betweenness of musical meaning can never be universally reified or symbolic nor can it ever be “subjective,” “mine” or present “at the origin.”In this view, ineffability has two primary reasons. First, the criteria offered for defining musical meaning are often too strict, resulting in untenable pretensions of universality. Second, the processual and relational nature of the in-between keeps meaning in flux; any snapshot creates a new situation and new meanings. (shrink)

If we are to preserve qualia, one possibility is to take the current academic, philosophical, and theoretical notion less seriously and current natural science and some pre-theoretical intuitions about qualia more seriously. Dennett (1997) is instrumental in showing how ideas of the intrinsicalness and privacy of qualia are misguided and those of ineffability and immediacy misinterpreted. However, by combining ideas of non-mechanicalness used in contemporary natural science with the pre-theoretical idea that qualia are special because they are unique, we get (...) a notion of qualia that is acceptable to naturalistic philosophy. The notion of unique qualia is not opposed to the idea that some of the characterizations of qualia have to be qualified. It is the folk-philosophical, academic, notions of theoreticity and conceptuality that have to be modified. (shrink)

The Finnish Heidegger translations point to a problem created by the history of the language: words having to do with technology, metaphysics and so on are mostly direct loans from Indo-European languages with little connection to the rest of the vocabulary. This presents the translators with a dilemma: if one wants to retain Heidegger’s poetic and etymologising style, the Finnish tends to miss the essential contact to Greek-German-Western origins.

Slavoj Žižek has persistently traced the revolutionary potential of music by analysing the music-drama of Richard Wagner. In line with his bigger philosophical program, Žižek uses Wagner's works as a test ground for discussing the symbolic structures that facilitate emancipation. However, this analysis of symbolic structures puts Žižek in an uneasy position with regard to the explicit goals of Wagner himself, who wanted to undermine the Enlightenment subject. The decisive question between Žižek and Wagner concerns the role and nature of (...) a collective, and the function of music in building this collective. The way to that question is opened only once we discard the false dilemma of seeing music either as a symbolic structure to be analysed or as a direct expression of pure experience. Music has revolutionary potential when understood as an unbroken natural – or materialistic – continuum with regard to which the extremes are unhelpful idealisations. (shrink)

Critical thinking (CT) is frequently mentioned as a key competence in sustainability curricula. In this context our era is often diagnosed as being ‘post-truth’, indicating an epistemic concern. However, emerging ‘post-sustainable’ views in education indicate that environmental crises are posing increasingly existential concerns, which might partly explain why simple consciousness-raising sometimes faces denial or fails to promote sustainable action. To overcome this challenge, we undertake a philosophical critique of modern (individual, rational, autonomous) subjectivity assumed in CT and much of curricular (...) thinking. We follow the ‘ontological turn’ where criticality means self-reflective questioning of one’s own being-in-the-world. One acute question concerns energy, especially fossil fuels, which constitute much of the autonomous experience of modern, critical subjectivity, while simultaneously endangering the future horizon of that same subjectivity. Climate strikes at schools and the yellow vest movements indicate, in their own ways, how ecologically problematic fossil fuels are bending modern rationality into unpredicted directions. Metaphoric Archimedes and his ‘circles in the sand’ demonstrate the vulnerability of critical thought facing post-sustainability. This vulnerability should be addressed in curriculum theory, since it is interdependent persons—rather than independent subjects—who are open to sustainable transformation and action. (shrink)

The commodification of code demands two preconditions: a belief if the existence of code and a system of ownership for the code. An examination of these preconditions is helpful for resisting the further widening of digital divides. The ontological belief in the relatively independent existence of code is dependent on our understanding of what the “digital” is. Here it is claimed that the digital is not a natural kind, but a concept that is relative to our practices of interpretation. An (...) interpretative system that sees code as something that can or should always be owned implies an increase of social control and threatens vital processes of knowledge creation that are necessary for an open and egalitarian information society. The ontological belief in “digital code” thus provides the backdrop for an ethical view of the information society. Consequently, if we see digital code as an interpretative notion (in the nominalist way), the ethical questions appear in a different light. (shrink)

One prominent interpretation of Heidegger's thought on issues that are traditionally called “ethical” is that it gives us a formal description of how to reach authenticity or how to gain a free relationship to technology without stating any positive prescriptions. However, as Hubert L. Dreyfus, has argued, there is more than pure formalism to Heidegger's thought: he points again and again to how important rootedness, Boden and Heimat, are in trying to overcome the technological understanding of being. Notoriously, Heidegger sees (...) a special role to the Greek-German linguistic axis in internally challenging the tradition of Western metaphysics. This putative special status is in an unsettling way connected to Heidegger's antidemocratic ideas and to the “closedness” of the tradition that according to him is able to challenge the technological world. We will claim here that there is a way of opening up and thus, in a sense, democratizing the role of tradition and rootedness. However, this democatization has to be done without losing sight of the importance of positive content in overcoming technology. This opening up is connected to the idea of local gods in later Heidegger as interpreted by Dreyfus; however, the democratization comes at the price of making ethics local as opposed to universal. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger and Slavoj Žižek represent the two major anti-liberal European revolutions of the twentieth century, the Nazi and the October revolutions. Both revolutions ended badly, but neither Heidegger nor Žižek retreats from the revolutionary position, simply because it is an indelible part of their philosophy, where the finitude of the world and human being necessitate a partisan truth. By reintroducing the concept of the subject, Žižek wants to present a correction that cures Heidegger’s politics. Unfortunately, the resurrection relies on (...) a sleight of hand: the subject to be reintroduced tries to be at the same time ahistorical and leftist. Žižek finds in Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander signs of ahistorical subjectivity, but this interpretation is based on a misconstrual of Heidegger’s notion of alêtheia. On the other hand, by analysing Heidegger’s two famous passages mentioning the extermination camps, we find the factual blind-spots in Heidegger’s ontological gaze. (shrink)

In a well-known way, Husserl's foundation of phenomenology as a transcendental discipline aspires to universal essences, but collapses back to a form of Euro-centrism. While Žižek's description of the phenomenology of the subject follows the Husserlian line in that the subject is a transcendental structure of experience, it is intended to be interpreted in a materialist sense: there is no Big Other. This materialist twist to the philosophy of the subject is supposed to eliminate two traditional phenomenological dead-ends: the Husserlian (...) mistake of colonialism masquerading as universalism and the post-phenomenological mistake of not being able to take an existential and political stand seriously enough. These mistakes are overcome through the notion of a materialist act that is able to reorganize the given boundaries of a situation. However, as Žižek limits his phenomenology of the act to a communicative transaction between subjects, he is quite close to the Husserlian mistake of promoting European values as universal. This can be seen in a number of conceptual knots that figure in Žižek's work. First, like Husserl, Žižek is unable to satisfactorily bridge the divide between transcendental knowledge and positive science. Second, the Žižekian analysis of the necessary political action against multiculturalist capitalism emphatically belittles the role of local and ethnic identities as revolutionary forces. Correspondingly, the belief in the revolutionary potential of the psychoanalytically and philosophically enlightened subject is over-optimistic. Third, the phenomenology of the act in an unfortunate way describes the transcendental aspect of an authentic act, thus unnecessarily mystifying the essentially mundane and subject-less nature of revolutionary acts. (shrink)

The Finnish Heidegger translations point to a problem created by the history of the language: words having to do with technology, metaphysics and so on are mostly direct loans from Indo-European languages with little connection to the rest of the vocabulary. This presents the translators with a dilemma: if one wants to retain Heidegger’s poetic and etymologising style, the Finnish tends to miss the essential contact to Greek-German-Western origins.

The principal aim of this essay is to discuss some logical features of the so-called Classical model of cognitive architecture as it is advocated by J. Fodor and Z. Pylyshyn in their much discussed article 'Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis'. It is pointed out that their structural assumptions have consequences of a logical kind which call into question the view that the Classical architecture (in their sense) can be employed to model human cognition. It seems that the consequences (...) have escaped Fodor and Pylyshyn's notice, or else they have failed to appreciate them, since some of their claims evidently conflict with them. It is also investigated whether the human mind can be characterized as being logical in some weaker sense of logic. Furthermore, it is argued that J. H. Fetzer's view that it is a semiotic system is more realistic than the Classical model, but the distinction he suggests between human cognition and other kinds may be problematic. (shrink)

Quantum Closures and Disclosures: Thinking-Together Postphenomenology and Quantum Brain Dynamics (Volume 50 in the series Advances in Consciousness Research).,br> Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Soft Cover (200 pages). €68.00 (ISBN: 978 9 02725 180 0), $81.95 (ISBN: 978 1 58811 371 9) Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 2 August 2006.

One prominent interpretation of Heidegger’s thought on issues that are traditionally called “ethical” is that it gives us a formal description of how to reach authenticity (the early Heidegger) or how to gain a free relationship to technology (the late Heidegger) without stating any positive prescriptions. However, as Hubert L. Dreyfus (1995, 2000) has argued, there is more than pure formalism to Heidegger’s thought: he points again and again to how important rootedness, Boden and Heimat, are in trying to overcome (...) the technological understanding of being. Notoriously, Heidegger sees a special role to the Greek–German linguistic axis in internally challenging the tradition of Western metaphysics. This putative special status is in an unsettling way connected to Heidegger’s antidemocratic ideas and to the “closedness” of the tradition that according to him is able to challenge the technological world. We will claim here that there is a way of opening up and thus, in a sense, democratizing the role of tradition and rootedness. However, this democatization has to be done without losing sight of the importance of positive content (as opposed to formal description) in overcoming technology. This opening up is connected to the idea of local gods in later Heidegger as interpreted by Dreyfus; however, the democratization comes at the price of making ethics local as opposed to universal. (shrink)

One prominent interpretation of Heidegger's thought on issues that are traditionally called “ethical” is that it gives us a formal description of how to reach authenticity (the early Heidegger) or how to gain a free relationship to technology (the late Heidegger) without stating any positive prescriptions. However, as Hubert L. Dreyfus (1995), (2000) has argued, there is more than pure formalism to Heidegger's thought: he points again and again to how important rootedness, Boden and Heimat, are in trying to overcome (...) the technological understanding of being. Notoriously, Heidegger sees a special role to the Greek-German linguistic axis in internally challenging the tradition of Western metaphysics. This putative special status is in an unsettling way connected to Heidegger's antidemocratic ideas and to the “closedness” of the tradition that according to him is able to challenge the technological world. We will claim here that there is a way of opening up and thus, in a sense, democratizing the role of tradition and rootedness. However, this democatization has to be done without losing sight of the importance of positive content (as opposed to formal description) in overcoming technology. This opening up is connected to the idea of local gods in later Heidegger as interpreted by Dreyfus; however, the democratization comes at the price of making ethics local as opposed to universal. (shrink)