Nick Zangwill

In this volume, Zangwill develops a view of the nature of music and our experience of music that foregrounds the aesthetic properties of music. He focuses on metaphysical issues about aesthetic properties of music, psychological issues about the nature of musical experience, and philosophy of language issues about the metaphorical nature of aesthetic descriptions of music. Among the innovations of this book, Zangwill addresses the limits of literal description, generally, and in the aesthetic case. He also explores the social and political issues about musical listening, which tend to be addressed more in continental traditions

onald Dworkin says he does not believe in the metaphysics of morality. He is a 'quietist' about this issue. He thinks that there are no coherent 'external' or 'archimedian' questions that we can raise about the whole discipline of moral thought and talk, and that the only questions we can raise are 'internal' ones about what moral thoughts we should think. Dworkin thinks that some metaphysical debates can go ahead, it is just the metaphysics of morality that is ill-gotten. This is because those other areas of thought involve causal claims about the origins of our thought, as part of their content; but moral thought does not (p. 119). So Dworkin thinks that religious and astrological thought can be assessed in terms of the causal claims they make, but moral thought is not the kind of thought which can be assessed in that way. But is moral thought really answerable to nothing except itself? How convenient for it! Furthermore, does this unanswerability generalize to any form of thought which does not involve causal claims? For example, is the attempt to give mathematics a foundation misguided and worthy of the derision that Dworkin heaps on meta-ethics? Are morality and mathematics as it were free-floating modes of thought held up by nothing? Even if Dworkin is right that some forms of thought are not to be measured in causal terms, the idea that they are answerable to nothing is bizarre.

Aesthetic Formalism has fallen on hard times. At best it receives unsympathetic discussion and swift rejection. At worst it is the object of abuse and derision. But I think that there is something to be said for it. In this paper, I shall try to find and secure the truth in formalism. I shall not try to defend formalism against all of the objections to it.1 Instead I shall articulate a moderate formalist view that draws on aesthetic0nonaesthetic determination and Kant’s distinction between free and dependent beauty. I shall examine four central art forms—painting, sculpture, lit-.