Jerrold Levinson

Je me fixe deux objectifs dans ce texte. Le premier est de situer l’esthétique ou la philosophie de l’art par rapport à la philosophie en général et d’expliquer pourquoi elle a été la préoccupation centrale de tant de philosophes dans la tradition. Mon second objectif est de définir un courant dominant de l’esthétique des trente dernières années, que je nomme « contextualisme », et d’expliquer son importance en ce qui concerne les réflexions des artistes, critiques, théoriciens et publics à propos de l’art. Le contextualisme, en un mot, est la thèse selon laquelle les oeuvres d’art sont, du point de vue ontologique, épistémologique et de la critique, liées à leur contexte de création et de projection ; en dehors de ce contexte, les oeuvres d’art cessent d’être ce qu’elles sont et n’ont plus les qualités et significations qu’elles possèdent en réalité.This essay has two main objectives. The first is to situate aesthetics or philosophy of art in relation to philosophy as a whole, and to suggest why it has been a primary concern of so many philosophers in the tradition. The second is to identify a dominant strand in philosophical aesthetics of the past thirty years or so, which I label contextualism, and to explain its importance to thinking about art on the part of artists, critics, theorists, and audiences. Contextualism, in brief, is the claim that works of art are ontologically, epistemically, and appreciatively bound up with their contexts of creation and projection, outside of which they cease to be what they are and fail to present the qualities and meanings they in fact possess

Le son musical est vibration, et dépend des instruments utilisés. Être fidèle aux instruments prévus par le compositeur ne répond pas à un simple souci d’authenticité. Notre écoute de l’œuvre musicale dépend des gestes instrumentaux pratiqués par les musiciens (gestes que nous voyons au concert, ou que nous supposons si la musique est enregistrée). Les gestes proprement musicaux (liés à l’expressivité de la musique) sont fonction des gestes effectifs pratiqués par l’instrumentiste. Chaque instrument dispose ainsi d’un véritable répertoire gestuel, plus important quand le bras est engagé (violon) que lorsque ce sont seulement les doigts (flûte à bec). La technique de jeu de l’instrument, sa capacité à produire tel ou tel type d’ornement, jouent un rôle important dans la création musicale. L’orchestre, enfin, peut être considéré comme une sorte de grand corps discontinu dont joue le chef d’orchestre

Stephen Yablo has attempted recently to revive the notion of contingent identity, identifying this with a relation of L coincidence between objects that are "distinct by nature but the same in the circumstances" (296). Yablo argues convincingly for the need of essentialist metaphysics to recognize some relation of this sort, a relation of "intimate identity-like connections between things" (296) if it is to acknowledge properly the intuitive difference between (i) the nonidentity of a bust B and a hunk of wax H of which it is composed, and (ii) the nonidentity of the hunk H and the Treaty of Versailles. (i) and (ii) are clearly not on the same level. Even though B, like the Treaty of Versailles, fails to be strictly identical to H, it is very closely, and quite specially, related to it. What this relation is is certainly worth a general inquiry

Expressive music, almost everyone agrees, evokes an emotional response of some kind in receptive listeners, at least some of the time, in at least some conditions of listening. But is such an emotional response distinctive of or unique to the music that evokes it? In other words, is there such a thing as music-specific emotion? This essay is devoted to an exploration of that question and others related to it. In the main part of the essay a sixpart component model of a standard emotion is set out, and a case is made for the music-specificity of an emotional response to music of a mirroring sort, with respect to four of the six components of such emotion. In the latter part of the essay aspects of the phenomenology of the music-listening experience, and especially that of the inner sounding of music being heard, are explored further, and issues of the value, communicability, and degree of singularity of the emotional response to expressive music are addressed.

In a recent paper devoted to my topic, music and morality, my fellow philosopher of music Peter Kivy makes a helpful tripartite distinction among ways in which music could be said to have moral force. The first is by embodying and conveying moral insight; Kivy labels that epistemic moral force. The second is by having a positive moral effect on behavior; Kivy labels that behavioral moral force. And the third is by impacting positively on character so as to make someone a better human being; Kivy labels that character-building moral force.