2,870 research outputs found
Music, essence and context
Get PDFI defend the application of the notion of essence to music. I appeal to the essences of events rather than objects, and I focus on functional events, such as handshakes, which have historical essences. Musical essences are like that. This allows us to clear up a number of worries about essences in music. I then celebrate and defend Hanslick’s appeal to musical-beauty, and make some interpretative points. I defend the appeal to pleasure in the musically-beautiful against Taruskin’s appeal to the sublime. Next, I turn to the notion of absolute music and characterize it in a certain way. I show how Hanslick can and does allow much non-absolute music. Nevertheless, absolute music retains a certain explanatory priority with respect to the other things that music does for us. Political criticisms of formalism about music are navigated in passing. Lastly, I diagnose Taruskin’s worry that talking about essence gets something wrong about the cultural dimensions of human life. In reply I show how essence is essential for understanding human action, and thus also for understanding cultural human action
Review of: Nick Zangwill, Music and Aesthetic Reality. Formalism and the Limits of Description, Routledge, 2015,
Get PDFReview of: Nick Zangwill, Music and Aesthetic Reality: Formalism and the Limits of Descriptio
Music, essence and context
Get PDFI defend the application of the notion of essence to music. I appeal to the essences of events rather than objects, and I focus on functional events, such as handshakes, which have historical essences. Musical essences are like that. This allows us to clear up a number of worries about essences in music. I then celebrate and defend Hanslick’s appeal to musical-beauty, and make some interpretative points. I defend the appeal to pleasure in the musically-beautiful against Taruskin’s appeal to the sublime. Next, I turn to the notion of absolute music and characterize it in a certain way. I show how Hanslick can and does allow much non-absolute music. Nevertheless, absolute music retains a certain explanatory priority with respect to the other things that music does for us. Political criticisms of formalism about music are navigated in passing. Lastly, I diagnose Taruskin’s worry that talking about essence gets something wrong about the cultural dimensions of human life. In reply I show how essence is essential for understanding human action, and thus also for understanding cultural human action
The Myth of Religious Experience Revisited
No full textThis article replies to Manuel Fasko’s “The Demystification of Nick Zangwill’s ‘Myth of Religious Experience’” (2017), showing how author’s argument against the possibility of religious experience presented in “The Myth of Religious Experience” (2004) remains in tact
Book review: "Scruton’s Aesthetics", by Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill (Palgrave & Macmillan, 2012)
No full textFew philosophers have published at the impressively prolific rate that Roger Scruton has. Of the forty-two books by Scruton listed in a special bibliography at the end of Scruton’s Aesthetics, no fewer than nine of them have been devoted to topics in aesthetics. The present volume, edited by Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill, arises out of a 2008 conference devoted to Scruton’s seminal work in this field. While sympathetic in tone, the majority of the essays critically engage with Scruton’s views on a number of topics in aesthetics, with particular attention devoted to issues of music and of architecture. Although Scruton’s frequently discussed and sometimes provocative views will be familiar to most readers, the contributions to this volume manage well in reconstructing enough of the background to be intelligible to the reader not already well-versed in Scruton’s wide-ranging body of work
Ineffable w filozofii muzyki. Zangwill wobec Jankélévitcha
Get PDFThe Ineffable in Philosophy of Music. Zangwill versus Jankélévitch. The ineffable (l'ineffable) is a fundamental concept for a range of twentieth-century French philosophers (Louis Lavelle, Ferdinand Alquié, Jean Wahl). It plays a particularly important role in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s philosophy of music, being also one of the crucial elements of his thought as a whole, including his ineffabilist metaphysics and moral philosophy. In Nick Zangwill’s latest book (2014), which makes no reference to this continental tradition, the inef-fable reemerges as a key component of a philosophical defence of formalism in musical aes-thetics and of realism with respect to musical aesthetic properties. My aim in this paper is to explore the effective interrelation between these two musical inef-fabilisms, despite the fact that the author of Music and the Ineffable is never mentioned in Zangwill’s text. First, I discuss briefly the triad indicible – ineffable – inexprimable in Janké-lévitch, taking into account his negative metaphysics and ethics, as well as his Neoplatonic roots (Plotinus, Proclus), his dialogue with apophatic theology (Pseudo-Dionysius, Cappado-cian Fathers) and the abundant references to mysticism (St John of the Cross, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius) in this context. Second, I reconstruct and discuss Zangwill’s three fundamental theses on music: formalism, realism and ineffabilism, offering some critical re-marks. Third, I propose an original general classification of the ineffabilist theses on music (three universal and four particular), ordered with respect to the traditional formalist – anti-formalist antithesis. As a result, various distinct ineffabilist theses are made explicit, com-pared and put in order. In the fourth and last part, I argue that both authors characterise the musical ineffable consistently in terms of immanent sense, typical of the ineffabilist theses grouped in my taxonomy as formalist, rejecting anti-formalist sorts of ineffabilism. Thus Jankélévitch, for all the methodological, axiological and stylistic features to which Zangwill is diametrically opposed, can be perfectly catalogued under the label coined by Zangwill for his own view on music: immanent mysticism
Aesthetic Creation
No full textWhat is the purpose of a work of art? What drives us to make art? Why do we value art and consume it? Nick Zangwill argues that we cannot understand the nature of art without first having answers to these fundamental questions. On his view, which he dubs 'the Aesthetic Creation Theory', a work of art is something created for a particular aesthetic purpose. More specifically, the function of art is to have certain aesthetic properties in virtue of its non-aesthetic properties, and this function arises because of the artist's insight into the nature of these dependence relations and her intention to bring them about. In defending this view, Zangwill provides an account of aesthetic action and aesthetic creative thought and shows how the Aesthetic Creation Theory can accommodate two kinds of seeming counterexamples to aesthetic theories of art: narrative art and twentieth-century avant-garde art. Aesthetic Creation also contains a detailed exposition and critique of a range of rival views, including Dickie's institutional theory of art, accounts of art that make essential reference to an audience, and sociological theories which purport to explain the nature of art without recourse to the notion of the aesthetic
Slow culture: an introduction
No full text[Extract] There is a powerful message permeating our social lives today, found in our self-help networks, talkback television and radio shows, and online forums. It is a warning that, through technology and modernisation, our lifestyles have become increasingly hectic, fast, complex and immediate. 'Life', writes online author Leo Babauta (2009, para. 2), 'moves at such a fast pace that it seems to pass us by before we can really enjoy it'. We are encouraged to take a step back, to breathe deeply and 'slow down', in order to recapture the essence of 'real' living. By doing so, we can escape the seemingly endless stresses associated with our multi-tasked, time-compressed and instantaneous speed culture (Tomlinson 2007). This book presents illustrations of how people are beginning to disentangle themselves from a speed culture by embracing slowness. It is not simply a matter of slowing down, as the term implies, but of undertaking changes in the way we do things at an everyday level. Underpinning these transformations is a concern, as Babauta (2009) suggests, with the uniquely stressful lifestyles we are living in contemporary culture
Nick Earls launches 'Wisdom Tree' - a new model for novella publishing, 9 Jun 2016
No full textBrisbane author Nick Earls discusses 'Wisdom Tree' a new model for novella publishing with fellow author and UQ Senior Lecturer in writing Dr Kim Wilkins. In 2013, Nick Earls realised his five best story ideas would need padding to become novels and would lose something if he tried to trim them to short-story size. He had to write them, and they had to be novellas. He also realised it was time to confront head-on the publishing industry's reluctance to work with the novella form. The result is Wisdom Tree, a new model for novella publishing, a PhD project and a chance to turn his best ideas into a series of five novellas to be published as individual paper, e and audiobooks at monthly intervals from May to September 2016.Introductions by Professor Doune Macdonald, Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic)
Nick de Grandmaison Jr. Reading Our Heritage by John Fisher
No full textAn audograph recording of Nick de Grandmaison Junior reading an excerpt from Our Heritage by John Fisher. The text details the author encountering Red Cloud and David Bearspaw, members of the Stoney tribe, in a Banff hotel lobby on their way to sit for Nicholas de Grandmaison. From here, the clip speaks to why he chose to paint Indigenous peoples, the history of the Blackfoot people, language and colonial contact.The University of Lethbridge Library received permission from the University of Lethbridge Archives and the Dr. Margaret (Marmie) Perkins Hess Gallery to digitize and display this content.Not yet availabl
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