In the first book to examine the overlooked relationship between musical improvisation and philosophical hermeneutics, Sam McAuliffe asks: what exactly is improvisation? And how does it relate to our being-in-the-world? Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics answers these questions by investigating the underlying structure of improvisation. McAuliffe argues that improvising is best understood as attending and responding to the situation in which one find itself and, as such, is essential to how we engage with the world. Working within the hermeneutic philosophical tradition - drawing primarily on the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jeff Malpas - this book provides a rich and detailed account of the ways in which we are all already experienced improvisers. Given the dominance of music in discussions of improvisation, Part I of this book uses improvised musical performance as a case study to uncover the ontological structure of improvisation: a structure that McAuliffe demonstrates is identical to the structure of hermeneutic engagement. Exploring this relationship between improvisation and hermeneutics, Part II offers a new reading of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, examining the way in which Gadamer's accounts of truth and understanding, language, and ethics each possess an essentially improvisational character. Working between philosophy and music theory, Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics unveils the hermeneutic character of musical performance, the musicality of hermeneutic engagement, and the universality of improvisation.

This book offers the first comprehensive investigation of ethics in the canon of William Faulkner. As the fundamental framework for its analysis of Faulkner's fiction, this study draws on The Methods of Ethics, the magnum opus of the utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick. While Faulkner's Ethics does not claim that Faulkner read Sidgwick's work, this book traces Faulkner's moral sensitivity. It argues that Faulkner's language is a moral medium that captures the ways in which people negotiate the ethical demands that life places on them. Tracing the contours of this evolving medium across six of the author's major novels, it explores the basic precepts set out in The Methods of Ethics with the application of more recent contributions to moral philosophy, especially those of Jacques Derrida and Derek Parfit.

This book fills a gap in the literature of 21st century international visual arts education by providing a structured approach to understanding the benefits of Philosophical Realism in art education, an approach that has received little international attention until now. The framework as presented provides a powerful interface between research and practical reconceptualisations of critical issues and practice in the domains of art, design, and education that involve implications for curriculum in visual arts, teaching and learning, cognitive development, and creativity. The book extends understanding of Philosophical Realism in its practical application to teaching practice in visual arts in the way it relates to the fields of art, design, and education. Researchers, teacher educators and specialist art teachers are informed about how Philosophical Realism provides insights into art, design, and education. These insights vary from clearer knowledge about art to the examination of beliefs and assumptions about the art object. Readers learn how cognitive reflection, and social and practical reasoning in the classroom help cultivate students' artistic performances, and understand how constraints function in students' reasoning at different ages/stages of education.

This edited collection investigates the kinds of philosophical reflection we can undertake in the imaginative worlds of literature. Opening with a look into the relations between philosophical thought and literary interpretation, the volume proceeds through absorbing discussions of the ways we can see life through the lens of literature, the relations between philosophical saying and literary showing, and some ways we can see the literary past philosophically and assess its significance for the present. Taken as a whole, the volume shows how imagined contexts can be a source of knowledge, a source of conceptual clarification, and a source of insight and understanding. And because philosophical thinking is undertaken, after all, in words, a heightened sensitivity to the precise employments of our words - particularly philosophically central words such as truth, reality, perception, knowledge, selfhood, illusion, understanding, falsehood - can bring a clarity and a refreshed sense of the life that our words take on in fully-described contexts of usage. And in these imagined contexts we can also see more acutely and deeply into the meaning of words about words - metaphor and figurative tropes, verbal coherence, intelligibility, implication, sense, and indeed the word "meaning" itself. Moving from a philosophical issue into a literary world in which the central concepts of that issue are in play can thus enrich our comprehension of those concepts and, in the strongest cases, substantively change the way we see them. With a combination of conceptual acuity and literary sensitivity, this volume maps out some of the territory that philosophical reflection and literary engagement share.

From the Romantic era onwards, music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. Through its play of themes and recurrence of events, music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity, personal and collective identity, and history. Time, as philosophers, scientists and writers have found throughout history, is notoriously hard to define. Yet music, seemingly bound up so intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes of inquiry, and accordingly was frequently granted a privileged position in nineteenth-century thought. The Melody of Time examines the multiple ways in which music relates to, and may provide insight into, the problematics of human time. Each chapter explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music: the purported timelessness of Beethoven's late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert's music; the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as a medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time; and, a reflection of a particular culture's sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history itself. Moving fluidly between cultural context and historical reception, competing philosophical theories of time and close reading of the repertoire, Benedict Taylor argues for the continued importance of engaging with music's temporality in understanding the significance of music within society and human experience. At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, The Melody of Time provides both fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.

This book situates Ralph Waldo Emerson in the tradition of philosophy as "spiritual exercise", arguing that the defining feature of his literary philosophy is the conviction that there is an inherent link between moral persuasion and literary excellence. Hosseini persuasively argues that the Emersonian project can be viewed as an extension of Socrates' call for a return to the beginning of philosophy, to search for a way of revolutionizing our ways of seeing from within. Examining Emerson's provocative style of writing, Hosseini contends that his prose is shaped by a desire to bring about psychagogia, or influencing the soul through the power of words. This book furthermore examines the evolving nature of Emerson's thoughts on "scholarly action" and its implications, his religious temperament as an aesthetic experience of the world through wonder, and the reasons for a resounding acknowledgment of despair in his essay "Experience." In the concluding chapter, Hosseini explores the depth of Emerson's engagement with the classical Persian poets and argues that what we may call his "literary humanism" is informed by Persian Adab, exemplified in the writings of Rumi, Hafiz, and Saadi. Weaving together themes from Persian philosophy and Emersonian transcendentalism, Hosseini establishes Emerson's way of seeing as refreshingly relevant, showing that the questions he tackled in his writings are as pressing today as they were in his time.

In "Living in the Landscape" Arnold Berleant explores new ways of thinking about how we live--and might live--in the landscapes that enfold us. Through the concepts of "aesthetic engagement" and "environmental continuity," he proposes a new paradigm that offers a holistic approach to the meaning of place and places of meaning in our lives.

Although environmental aesthetics is linked in the popular mind to dramatic vistas and monumental landscapes--the Grand Canyon, for example--Berleant is much more concerned with the commonplace settings of everyday life. He argues that our active appreciation of (or "aesthetic engagement" with) the prosaic landscapes of home, work, local travel, and recreation plays a vital role in our discovery of hidden continuities, as well as pleasure and meaning, in the places we inhabit.

Berleant begins with a general introduction to environmental aesthetics, identifying the kinds of experience, meanings, and values it involves, and describing its historical sources and the issues with which it is concerned. In the rest of the book, he spotlights new directions in the field-as they relate to education, community, creativity, and the sacred-and provides an insightful analysis of "negative environmental aesthetics." Throughout, he is both thoughtful and entertaining, as evidenced in his extended critique of the pop post-modern environment of Disney World.

Berleant addresses issues commonly associated with the environmental movement--e.g., preservation, pollution control, and quality of life. But his study draws from a wide range of disciplines and for that reason should also appeal to scholars and students interested in art and aesthetics, landscape architecture and planning, urban and environmental design, and cultural geography, as well as environmental studies.

This book explores the fascinating and intimate relationship between music and physics. Over millennia, the playing of, and listening to music have stimulated creativity and curiosity in people all around the globe. Beginning with the basics, the authors first address the tonal systems of European-type music, comparing them with those of other, distant cultures. They analyze the physical principles of common musical instruments with emphasis on sound creation and particularly charisma. Modern research on the psychology of musical perception - the field known as psychoacoustics - is also described. The sound of orchestras in concert halls is discussed, and its psychoacoustic effects are explained. Finally, the authors touch upon the role of music for our mind and society. Throughout the book, interesting stories and anecdotes give insights into the musical activities of physicists and their interaction with composers and musicians.

Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings - in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts - this volume proposes a critical intervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined. Diffractive Reading ultimately represents a new reading of reading itself: firstly by critiquing the distanced perspective of critical paradigms such as translation and intertextuality, in which texts encountered, processed or otherwise subdued; secondly, showing how all literary and cultural readings represent different 'agential cuts' in the world-text-reader constellation, which is always both discursive and material; and thirdly, the volume materializes, dynamizes and politicizes the activity of reading by drawing attention to reading's intervention in, and (co)creation of, the world in which we live.

With their insistence that form is a dialectical process in the music of Beethoven, Theodor Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus emerge as the guardians of a long-standing critical tradition in which Hegelian concepts have been brought to bear on the question of musical form. Janet Schmalfeldt's ground-breaking account of the development of this Beethoven-Hegelian tradition restores to the term "form" some of its philosophical associations in the early nineteenth century, when profound cultural changes were yielding new relationships between composers and their listeners, and when music itself-in particular, instrumental music-became a topic for renewed philosophical investigation. Precedents for Adorno's and Dahlhaus's concept of form as process arise in the Athenaum Fragments of Friedrich Schlegel and in the Encyclopaedia Logic of Hegel. The metaphor common to all these sources is the notion of becoming; it is the idea of form coming into being that this study explores in respect to music by Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann. A critical assessment of Dahlhaus's preoccupation with the opening of Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata serves as the author's starting point for the translation of philosophical ideas into music-analytical terms-ones that encourage listening "both forward and backward," as Adorno has recommended. Thanks to the ever-growing familiarity of late eighteenth-century audiences with formal conventions, composers could increasingly trust that performers and listeners would be responsive to striking formal transformations. The author's analytic method strives to capture the dynamic, quasi-narrative nature of such transformations, rather than only their end results. This experiential approach to the perception of form invites listeners and especially performers to participate in the interpretation of processes by which, for example, a brooding introduction-like opening must inevitably become the essential main theme in Schubert's Sonata, Op. 42, or in which tremendous formal expansions in movements by Mendelssohn offer a dazzling opportunity for multiple retrospective reinterpretations. Above all, In the Process of Becoming proposes new ways of hearing beloved works of the romantic generation as representative of their striving for novel, intensely self-reflective modes of communication.

In works of literary fiction, it is a part of the fiction that the words of the text are being recounted by some work-internal "voice": the literary narrator. One can ask similarly whether the story in movies is told in sights and sounds by a work-internal subjectivity that orchestrates them: a cinematic narrator. George M. Wilson argues that movies do involve a fictional recounting (an audio-visual narration) in terms of the movie's sound and image track. Viewers are usually prompted to imagine seeing the items and events in the movie's fictional world and to imagine hearing the associated fictional sounds. However, it is much less clear that the cinematic narration must be imagined as the product of some kind of "narrator" -- of a work-internal agent of the narration. Wilson goes on to examine the further question whether viewers imagine seeing the fictional world face-to-face or whether they imagine seeing it through some kind of work-internal mediation. It is a key contention of this book that only the second of these alternatives allows one to give a coherent account of what we do and do not imagine about what we are seeing on the screen. Having provided a partial account of the foundations of film narration, the final chapters explore the ways in which certain complex strategies of cinematic narration are executed in three exemplary films: David Fincher's Fight Club, von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress, and the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn'tThere.

This volume gathers a collection of fourteen original articles discussing the concept of drive in classical German philosophy. Its aim is to offer a comprehensive historical overview of the concept of drive at the turn of the 19th century and to discuss it both historically and systematically. From the 18th century onward, the concept of drive started to play an important role in emerging disciplines such as biology, anthropology, and psychology. In these fields, the concept of drive was used to describe the inner forces of organic nature, or, more particularly, human urges and desires. But it was in the period of classical German philosophy that this concept developed into an important philosophical concept crucial to Kant's and post-Kantian idealistic systems. Reflecting the complexity of this concept, the volume first discusses historical sources of drive theories in Leibniz, Reimarus, and Blumenbach. Afterwards, the volume presents the philosophical accounts of drives in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and also gives a systematic overview of other important drive theories that were formed around 1800 by Herder, Goethe, Jacobi, Novalis, Reinhold, Schiller, and Schopenhauer.

This book is one of the first to apply the theoretical tools proposed by French philosopher Bruno Latour to film studies. Through the example of the Hollywood Teen Film and with a particular focus on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the book delineates how Teen Film has established itself as one of Hollywood's most consistent and dynamic genres. While many productions may recycle formulaic patterns, there is also a proliferation of cinematic coming-of-age narratives that are aesthetically and politically progressive, experimental, and complex. The case studies develop a Latourian film semiotics as a flexible analytical approach which raises new questions, not only about the history, types and tropes of teen films, but also about their aesthetics, mediality, and composition. Through an exploration of a wide and diverse range of examples from the past decade, including films by female and African-American directors, urban and rural perspectives, and non-heteronormative sexualities, Actor-Network Theory at the Movies demonstrates how the classic Teen Film canon has been regurgitated, expanded, and renewed.

The Architecture of Theology presents a fresh reading of Christian theology, re-interpreting discussions of theological method and considering them in light of contemporary philosophical debates. A. N. Williams re-evaluates the traditional theological warrants (scripture, tradition, and reason) and the concept of systematic theology, arguing that Christian theology is inherently systematic, reflecting the rationality and relationality of its two chief subjects, 'God and other things as they are related to God'(Aquinas). The roles of the theological warrants are assessed, showing how they are necessarily interdependent. Contemporary philosophical discussions of the structure of reasoning are also examined; these have conventionally contrasted foundationalist and coherentist accounts. A contemporary consensus has emerged, however, of a chastened foundationalism or hybrid foundationalism-coherentism, in light of which arguments are understood both as reasoning from foundational propositions and as gaining plausibility from the coherence of claims with one another.
The Christian tradition anticipated these developments: theological arguments exhibit a dual structure, with propositions underwritten to some extent by their dependence on scripture and tradition and to some extent by their coherence with one another in integrated webs, or systems. Christian theology is therefore shown to be systematic in its fundamental structure, whether or not a given argument forms part of a 'systematic theology'. The systematicity of Christian theology is related to its subject matter, 'God and other things as they are related to God'. Theology's two chief subjects (God and humanity) are characterised by rationality and relationality.
These are also the qualities of Christian theology itself: it is a double mimesis, reflecting in its very structures of reasoning its subject matter.
The order, harmony and coherence of those structures, however, have an aesthetic appeal which has the potential to appeal for its very beauty, rather than its truth. Williams presents a careful examination of the tradition of theological aesthetics, asking whether the beauty of systematic structures counts for or against theological truth.

This exciting new edited collection bridges the gap between narrative and self-understanding. The problem of self-knowledge is of universal interest; the nature or character of its achievement has been one continuing thread in our philosophical tradition for millennia. Likewise the nature of storytelling, the assembly of individual parts of a potential story into a coherent narrative structure, has been central to the study of literature. But how do we gain knowledge from an artform that is by definition fictional, by definition not a matter of ascertained fact, as this applies to the understanding of our lives? When we see ourselves in the mimetic mirror of literature, what we see may not just be a matter of identifying with a single protagonist, but also a matter of recognizing long-form structures, long-arc narrative shapes that give a place to - and thus make sense of - the individual bits of experience that we place into those structures. But of course at precisely this juncture a question arises: do we make that sense, or do we discover it? The twelve chapters brought together here lucidly and steadily reveal how the matters at hand are far more intricate and interesting than any such dichotomy could accommodate. This is a book that investigates the ways in which life and literature speak to each other.

This book presents a chronology of thirty definitions attributed to the word, term, phrase, and concept of "documentary" between the years 1895 and 1959. The book dedicates one chapter to each of the thirty definitions, scrutinizing their idiosyncratic language games from close range while focusing on their historical roots and concealed philosophical sources of inspiration. Dan Geva's principal argument is twofold: first, that each definition is an original ethical premise of documentary; and second, that only the structured assemblage of the entire set of definitions successfully depicts the true ethical nature of documentary insofar as we agree to consider its philosophical history as a reflective object of thought in a perpetual state of being-self-defined: an ethics sui generis.

Disagreement is common: even informed, intelligent, and generally reasonable people often come to different conclusions when confronted with what seems to be the same evidence. Can the competing conclusions be reasonable? If not, what can we reasonably think about the situation? This volume examines the epistemology of disagreement. Philosophical questions about disagreement arise in various areas, notably politics, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion: but this will be the first book focusing on the general epistemic issues arising from informed disagreement. Ten leading philosophers offer specially written essays which together will offer a starting-point for future work on this topic.

Disgust is among the strongest of aversions, characterized by involuntary physical recoil and even nausea. Yet paradoxically, disgusting objects can sometimes exert a grisly allure, and this emotion can constitute a positive, appreciative aesthetic response when exploited by works of art -- a phenomenon labelled here "aesthetic disgust." While the reactive, visceral quality of disgust contributes to its misleading reputation as a relatively "primitive" response mechanism, it is this feature that also gives it a particular aesthetic power when manifest in art.
Most treatments of disgust mistakenly interpret it as only an extreme response, thereby neglecting the many subtle ways that it operates aesthetically. This study calls attention to the diversity and depth of its uses, analyzing the emotion in detail and considering the enormous variety of aesthetic forms it can assume in works of art and --unexpectedly-- even in foods.
In the process of articulating a positive role for disgust, this book examines the nature of aesthetic apprehension and argues for the distinctive mode of cognition that disgust affords -- an intimate apprehension of physical mortality. Despite some commonalities attached to the meaning of disgust, this emotion assumes many aesthetic forms: it can be funny, profound, witty, ironic, unsettling, sorrowful, or gross. To demonstrate this diversity, several chapters review examples of disgust as it is aroused by art. The book ends by investigating to what extent disgust can be discovered in art that is also considered beautiful.

This book provides a multifaceted view on the relation between the old and the new in music, between tradition and innovation. This is a much-debated issue, generating various ideas and theories, which rarely come to unanimous conclusions. Therefore, the book offers diverse perspectives on topics such as national identities, narrative strategies, the question of musical performance and musical meaning. Alongside themes of general interest, such as classical repertoire, the music of well-established composers and musical topics, the chapters of the book also touch on specific, but equally interesting subjects, like Brazilian traditions, Serbian and Romanian composers and the lullaby. While the book is mostly addressed to researchers, it can also be recommended to students in musicology, ethnomusicology, musical performance, and musical semiotics.

We face a crisis of public reason. Our quest for a politics that is free, moral and rational has, somehow, made it hard for us to move, to change our positions, to visit places and perspectives that are not our own, and to embrace reality. This book addresses this crisis with a model of public reason based in a new aesthetic reading of Hannah Arendt's political theory. It begins by telling the story of Arendt's engagement with the Augenblicke of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Kafka and Benjamin, in order to identify her own aesthetic Moment. Josefson then explicates this Moment, what he calls the freedom of the beautiful, as a third face of freedom on par with Arendt's familiar freedoms of action and the life of the mind. He shows how this freedom, rooted in Jaspers's phenomenology and a non-metaphysical reading of Kant, serves to redress the world-alienation that was a uniting theme across Arendt's works. Ultimately, this volume aims to challenge orthodox accounts of Arendtian politics, presenting Arendt's aesthetic politics as a radically new model of republicanism and as an alternative to political liberal, deliberative and agonistic models of public reason.

The essays in Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture contribute pioneering and revelatory insights into the phenomenon of invisibility, forging new and multi-disciplinary approaches at the intersection of aesthetics, technology, representation and politics. Importantly, they acknowledge the complex interaction between invisibility and its opposite, visibility, arguing that the one cannot be fully grasped without the other. Considering these entanglements across different media forms, the chapters reveal that the invisible affects many cultural domains, from digital communication and operative images to the activism of social movements, as well as to identity, race, gender and class issues. Whether the subject is comic books, photographic provocations, biometric and brainwave sensing technologies, letters, or a cinematic diary, the analyses in this book engage critically and theoretically with the topic of invisibility and thus represent the first scholarly study to identify its importance for the field of visual culture.

The complex notion of "rasa," as understood by Javanese musicians, refers to a combination of various qualities, including: taste, feeling, affect, mood, sense, inner meaning, a faculty of knowing intuitively, and deep understanding. This leaves us with a number of questions: how is rasa expressed musically? Who or what has rasa, and what sorts of musical, psychological, perceptual, and sociological distinctions enter into this determination? How is the vocabulary of rasa structured, and what does this tell us about traditional Javanese music and aesthetics?
In this first book on the subject, Rasa provides an entry into Javanese music as it is conceived by the people who know the tradition best: the musicians themselves. In one of the most thorough explorations of local aesthetics to date, author Marc Benamou argues that musical meaning is above all connotative - hence, not only learned, but learnable. Following several years performing and researching Javanese music in the regional and national cultural center of Solo, Indonesia, Benamou untangles the many meanings of rasa as an aesthetic criterion in Javanese music, particularly in court and court-derived gamelan traditions. While acknowledging that certain universal psychological tendencies may inspire parallel interpretations of musical meaning, Rasa demonstrates just how culturally specific such accrued, shared meanings can be.

This book, taking its point of departure from Stanley Cavell's claim that philosophy and autobiography are dimensions of each other, aims to explore some of the relations between these forms of reflection, first by seeking to develop an outline of a philosophy of autobiography, and then by exploring the issue from the side of five autobiographical works. Christopher Hamilton argues in the volume that there are good reasons for thinking that philosophical texts can be considered autobiographical, and then turns to discuss the autobiographies of Walter Benjamin, Peter Weiss, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, Edmund Gosse and Albert Camus. In discussing these works, Hamilton explores how they put into question certain received understandings of what philosophical texts suppose themselves to be doing, and also how they themselves constitute philosophical explorations of certain key issues, e.g. the self, death, religious and ethical consciousness, sensuality, the body. Throughout, there is an exploration of the ways in which autobiographies help us in thinking about self-knowledge and knowledge of others. A final chapter raises some issues concerning the fact that the five autobiographies discussed here are all texts dealing with childhood.

In Selected Essays Michael Slote collects some of the most important papers of his career, articles that were both influential as well as those that remain relevant to philosophical debates today. The papers range over a number of important topics--not all of them within or having to do with ethics. Three of the papers have to do with ways in which one might fill out or expand upon traditional utilitarian views--while remaining within the utilitarian tradition. Two of the papers focus on free will, and another pair discuss rational choice and argue that traditional views about individual rationality unduly limit our possibilities.
The papers outside ethics deal with such topics as counterfactuals; Wittgensteinian accounts of "cluster terms;" some familiar concepts we use that cannot apply to reality; and a paradox about the possibility of circumstances where it is linguistically inappropriate to assert what one believes. In addition to the previously published essays, Slote includes more recent and unpublished papers that deal with the uses of empathy in the context of global issues of justice; the limitations of the "moral reasoning" model of normal moral thinking; and the relevance of empathy to the epistemic ideal of objectivity. The final paper of the volume speaks about recent developments in ethical theory and what they may tell us about the possibilities of future progress or lack of progress in that field.