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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Methodology Of Musical Ontology: Descriptivism And Its Implications, Andrew Kania
The Methodology Of Musical Ontology: Descriptivism And Its Implications, Andrew Kania
Philosophy Faculty Research
I investigate the widely held view that fundamental musical ontology should be descriptivist rather than revisionary, that is, that it should describe how we think about musical works, rather than how they are independently of our thought about them. I argue that if we take descriptivism seriously then, first, we should be sceptical of art-ontological arguments that appeal to independent metaphysical respectability; and, second, we should give ‘fictionalism’ about musical works—the theory that they do not exist—more serious consideration than it is usually accorded.
Piece For The End Of Time: In Defence Of Musical Ontology, Andrew Kania
Piece For The End Of Time: In Defence Of Musical Ontology, Andrew Kania
Philosophy Faculty Research
Aaron Ridley has recently attacked the study of musical ontology—an apparently fertile area in the philosophy of music. I argue here that Ridley’s arguments are unsound. There are genuinely puzzling ontological questions about music, many of which are closely related to questions of musical value. While it is true that musical ontology must be descriptive of pre-existing musical practices and that some debates, such as that over the creatability of musical works, have little consequence for questions of musical value, none of this implies that these debates themselves are without value.
New Waves In Musical Ontology, Andrew Kania
New Waves In Musical Ontology, Andrew Kania
Philosophy Faculty Research
Since analytic aesthetics began, around 50 years ago, music has perhaps been the art most discussed by philosophers. The reasons for philosophers' attraction to music as a subject are obscure, but one element is surely that music, as a non-linguistic, non-pictorial, multiple-instance, performance art, raises at least as many questions about expression, ontology, interpretation and value as any other art—questions that often seem more puzzling than those raised by other arts.