Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Memento, Andrew Kania

Andrew Kania

Within a short space of time, the film Memento has already been hailed as a modern classic. Memorably narrated in reverse, from the perspective of Leonard Shelby, the film’s central character, it follows Leonard’s chaotic and visceral quest to discover the identity of his wife’s killer and avenge her murder, despite his inability to form new long-term memories.

This is the first book to explore and address the myriad philosophical questions raised by the film, concerning personal identity, free will, memory, knowledge, and action. It also explores problems in aesthetics raised by the film through its narrative structure, ontology, and …

The Routledge Companion To Philosophy And Music, Theodore Gracyk, Andrew Kania

Andrew Kania

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers and debates in philosophy and music. Over fifty entries by an international team of contributors are organised into six clear sections:

• general issues
• emotion
• history
• figures
• kinds of music
• music, philosophy and related disciplines

What Is Memento? Ontology And Interpretation In Mainstream Film, Andrew Kania

Andrew Kania

At the end of the flashback, quite late in Memento, when we finally get to see what Leonard remembers of the incident that led to his memory impairment, the camera pans slowly away from a close-up of Leonard's head, oozing blood onto the tiles of his bathroom floor (E, 1:19:27). Just before the flashback fades out, and we return to the present in which Leonard is recounting this memory to Natalie, the frame includes only the bathroom floor, tiled entirely in white with the exception of two black tiles in opposite corners of the screen, like dots begging to …

Piece For The End Of Time: In Defence Of Musical Ontology, Andrew Kania

Andrew Kania

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.

Definition, Andrew Kania

Andrew Kania

Much of the time most of us can tell whether, and which of, the sounds we are currently hearing are music. This is so whether or not what we are listening to is a familiar piece, a piece we have not heard before, or even music from a culture or tradition with which we are unfamiliar. In cases where we are unsure, or initially mistaken in our judgment, we will often change our opinion based on further information. This near-universal agreement suggests that the concept of music is one shared by different people, and has boundaries which we are implicitly …