Garry L. Hagberg

The philosophy of literature, a topic on which we publish numerous articles, concerns what we at the journal take to be engaging and interestingly intricate issues; these include the ontology of fictional characters and the precise nature of our emotional responses to fiction. Philosophy as literature, although we perhaps publish fewer works of this kind, considers philosophical writing from a literary standpoint; issues here include the varying stylistics of philosophical writing over the ages and the role of figurative or metaphorical language in the writing of philosophy, as well as the settled tropes those practices have collectively engendered. Philosophy and literature—perhaps our most frequently published...

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] exists, according to Nicholas Wolterstorff in this deeply engaging and exemplary study, a Grand Narrative that runs through much of our thinking about art. That narrative, emerging from and solidified since the eighteenth century, is in essence that art is created for, and remains in museums and galleries as occasions for, abstract and transcendent contemplation of a kind disconnected from life and from the rather messy social practices and embodied interactions that lie far beneath that lofty aesthetic realm. It is Wolterstorff’s chosen task here to identify that narrative, root it out, and rid us of it once and for all. He reports that his moment of realization that art needed...

Puzzlement about how feelings can be put into and expressed by objects has generated expression theories of art. These theories rely upon an analogy between art and language; I examine the ways in which this analogy can be spelled out, discussing both theories of art and corresponding theories of language. ;I begin by considering Locke's view of language and Ducasse's parallel theory of art. On Locke's view the meaning of a word is an idea in the mind which gives life to the signs with which we arbitrarily associate them. The meaning of an artwork is similarly construed by Ducasse. However, upon investigation these ideas and signs, in language and in art, are conspicuously absent. ;I next discuss Collingwood's aesthetic and the notion that language and art share a common origin and that they are both externalizations of "imaginary objects." But imagination, it appears, enters into art--and language--in ways incompatible with and unaccountable by the theory. Moreover, the metaphysics supporting the common-origin view cannot withstand scrutiny. ;A parallel is esbtablished next between a theory of the meaning of emotion-words involving inner ostensive definition and a certain picture of "the creative process." The examination of this parallel includes a review and application of some of Wittgenstein's work on privacy. ;Langer's account of artistic meaning is taken up, and the atomistic referential theory of meaning she relies upon proves unequal to the task of explaining meaning, in art and in language. The relation between symbol and feeling, the content of the symbol itself, the connection between form and feeling, and the requisite special perceptual mode all resist an intelligible formulation. ; Lastly I dicuss the problem of the artist's intentions in connection with the role of the medium. I consider the parallel problem of intention in language: No more do words make preexistent thoughts in a speaker's mind tangible than artworks clothe preexistent images in the artist's mind. ;Throughout the work I find insights from Wittgenstein on the philosophy of language illuminating when considered in connection with aesthetic problems

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 188-198 [Access article in PDF] Symposium: On Ken Burns's "Jazz" On Representing Jazz: An Art Form in Need of Understanding Garry L. Hagberg ALTHOUGH IT WENT ON in smaller numbers in earlier decades, the fact that there were legions of expatriate jazz musicians fleeing to a far more appreciative Europe in the 1960s and 1970s shows how important a cultural event Ken Burns's documentary on the first century of jazz really is. Those expatriate players were all but forced out by a rapidly diminishing audience and a corresponding lack of appreciation for their artistic achievements and abilities. It is in any social context an achievement to gain an audience for an undervalued artform of between three and four million viewers for nineteen hours; to have done so against the backdrop of the fact—one bitter to swallow for so many American players of those years—that the country of origin for this artform was so slow to significantly value it, makes this documentary almost a form of cultural emergency-relief. But it also raises the stakes in how jazz is represented, which of its features are focused upon, and what kind of story is told about its development. In my opinion the film makes deeply serious errors in each of these ways—almost to the point of turning this seemingly magnificent gift to jazz into a Trojan horse—but here I'd like to focus on five of the features of jazz as an art that I think make jazz particularly difficult to portray in a reduced or simplified form. To put the point a bit more strongly: without an awareness of (at the least) these five features of jazz, any attempted portrayal would run the very serious danger of engendering or further nurturing the very incomprehension of the artistic or aesthetic achievements of jazz that drove all those American players to Copenhagen, Paris, London, Munich, Vienna, and Amsterdam in the first place. It is, in short, necessary to provide at least a sense of what is [End Page 188] intrinsically problematic about the artform to illuminate both its distinctive nature and the aesthetic problems—taken by its practitioners as its internally generated artistic challenges—that give this artform its dynamic energy.First, there is the fundamental question concerning the metaphysics of a jazz piece, i.e., what kind of thing it is. At a glance one can see that a familiar attempt to answer this question within the larger field of the aesthetics of music, i.e., the identification of the work with the score, will have precious little plausibility when applied to jazz. As any jazz musician or aficionado knows, jazz pieces that become "standards" are pieces that are performed countless times, in innumerably variegated ways, and what is usually of greatest interest about any given performance of a standard is not, indeed, how well or to what extent it instantiates a predetermined ideal of the piece as specified in the score, but rather how it departs from, or adds distinctive interpretive content, to the basic structure of the piece. This aesthetically significant fact is reflected in the correlated common practice of using, not scores, but rather schematic "lead sheets" that provide the very basic harmonic and melodic material of the piece. Even larger-ensemble pieces, e.g., the scores of Duke Ellington, are notated only in the sectional writing; the improvisational sections—the sections that many would say give the distinctive life to any given performance—are of course not notated. There are fully notated scores of many—to use a dangerously complicated word—classic jazz performances, but in jazz parlance these, here again with aesthetic significance, are not called scores, but rather transcriptions, and in this improvisational artform it would be cause for suspicion rather than congratulation if a player were to perform a given work exactly in accordance with the transcription repeatedly. The nature of the jazz piece, the jazz composition, is thus extraordinarily fluid and only minimally defined. And as one might expect, the degree or the extent...

Seeing Wittgenstein Anew is the first collection to examine Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks on the concept of aspect-seeing. These essays show that aspect-seeing was not simply one more topic of investigation in Wittgenstein's later writings, but, rather, that it was a pervasive and guiding concept in his efforts to turn philosophy's attention to the actual conditions of our common life in language. Arranged in sections that highlight the pertinence of the aspect-seeing remarks to aesthetic and moral perception, self-knowledge, mind and consciousness, linguistic agreement, philosophical therapy, and "seeing connections," the sixteen essays, which were specially commissioned for this volume, demonstrate the unity of not only Philosophical Investigations but also Wittgenstein's later thought as a whole. They open up novel paths across familiar fields of thought: the objectivity of interpretation, the fixity of the past, the acquisition of language, and the nature of human consciousness. Significantly, they exemplify how continuing consideration of the interrelated phenomena and concepts surrounding aspect-seeing might produce a fruitful way of doing philosophy. The volume includes a concordance for the unnumbered remarks in the various editions of Philosophical Investigations, including the latest (4th) edition.

In 1931, in the remarks collected as Culture and Value, Wittgenstein writes: ‘A thinker is very much like a draughtsman whose aim it is to represent all the interrelations between things.’ At a glance it is clear that this analogy might contribute significantly to a full description of the autobiographical thinker as well. And this conjunction of relations between things and the work of the draughtsman immediately and strongly suggests that the grasping of relations is in a sense visual, or that networks or constellations of relations are the kinds of things brought into focus by seeing in the right way.

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..