Garry L. Hagberg

Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks on music, when brought together and then related to his similarly scattered remarks on culture, show a deep and abiding concern with music as a repository and conveyer of meaning in human life. Yet the conception of meaning at work in these remarks is not of a kind that is amenable to brief or concise articulation. This paper explores that conception, considering in turn the relational networks within which musical meaning emerges, what he calls a discernible “kinship” between composers and styles, the embodied character of musical content, the close and too-little-appreciated intricate connections between our capacity to make sense in music and in language and the interaction of the musical theme with spoken language, and music as a culturally-embedded phenomenon that is, as he said of language, possible only in what he evocatively, if too briefly, called “the stream of life.”

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) iii-iv [Access article in PDF] Editorial War of the Worldviews With this issue, PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE enters its second quarter century. For many of the past twenty-five years it has enjoyed the sponsorship of Whitman College and the extraordinarily capable coeditorship of Patrick Henry. Bard College now assumes sponsorship, and the journal will be edited jointly by us, with Pat Henry ascending to the empyrean to look down upon us as Editor Emeritus.From its first issue (a mere 124-page wisp of a journal, but with robust essays by Hazel Barnes, Monroe Beardsley, and a smart young thinker named Martha Nussbaum), PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE has provided a home for anyone convinced by the initially counterintuitive notion that a close study of fiction can play an irreplaceable role in epistemology, ethics, philosophy of language, and even metaphysics. Philosophy is about life from the broadest possible human perspective, and so is literature. But how different the perspectives! Plato saw fiction, poetry, drama, and passion dug in on one side of the battle lines, with science, philosophy, and reason on the other. Not for the first time, nor the last, he was right. At this journal, we're on no peace mission, and we don't relish vapid compromises. Both sides in Plato's War of the Worldviews will be discomfited and annoyed to learn that they have features in common. Would-be peacemakers will be disappointed to see fresh hostilities breaking out just when they thought differences were being at last reconciled. We're interested more in the facts, arguments, and the healthy entertainment of battle than we are in making anybody comfortable. And let's admit it: the kinds of scholarly disputes we encourage in this journal can be exciting and fun.Watch these pages, therefore, not only for fresh news of ancient disputes, but also for exciting studies that break old boundaries, exploring the myriad linkages between traditional aesthetics and such empirical disciplines as psychology, anthropology, and biology. The [End Page iii] symposium on jazz in this issue marks as well our intention to publish engaging work on the arts and culture in general, not limiting ourselves to the areas named in our title. All the articles in PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE are, as always, offered in the spirit of expanding the reach and depth of humanistic scholarship. But one thing will stay the same around here: our constant concern to offer prose that is characterized by exactitude, insight, refinement, rigor, and above all, clarity.Heartfelt thanks to the many individual readers and writers who have brought PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE to this stage of its evolution. We welcome your suggestions about future directions. And so we roll up our sleeves and plunge into the next twenty-five years. Denis Dutton University of Canterbury Garry Hagberg Bard College...

One can characterize the relation between philosophy and literature in a number of interestingly different ways: literature provides examples that put flesh on the bones of philosophical ideas; literature shows what philosophy says; literature serves philosophy by displaying the complexity of circumstance that philosophy may oversimplify; literature captures a kind of content that is not amenable to propositional encapsulation; literature offers a portal into an imaginative world and a special kind of vicarious experience within it that philosophy does not and should not try to provide; literature shows what it is like to be another person in another time and place; and..

When we inquire into the nature of works of art we can see at a glance that there is a good deal of evidence against aesthetic idealism, the view that artworks are, in the final analysis, imaginary objects in the minds of their creators. We believe, for instance, that the National Gallery not only contingently but in some sense necessarily weighs more than merely the sum of the empty building, the people in it, and the assorted fixtures. This sum must also include the weight of canvases, the oils on them, carved stone and marble, and so on, all of which add up to substantially more than nothing, which is at least the approximate weight of imaginary things. We know that it takes considerably more than a verbal utterance or acoustical blast to transport an artwork, and we also know that a visit to the gallery is not going to amount to an afternoon spent with wax figures of unicorns, flying horses, present and bald kings of France or, for that matter, talking teapots. In short, intuition protests against the idealist theory that if works of art are imaginary objects, they cannot be the things we go to see in the gallery; and if they are imaginary objects then, like a waxen Peter Pan, they are surely not art. Mellon and Meinong simply have different kinds of collections