•  6
    Ein Bett gestalten
    Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 68 (3): 439-450. 2020.
    In the process of making bedsteads, Plato claimed, makers look towards the ‘idea’ of the bed. But what is that idea? Two candidates come to mind: shape and purpose. The fact that we identify objects of very different shape, not even involving a bedstead, as beds seems to render purpose conceptually superior. But, then, what is a bed’s purpose? An obvious response appears tobe: lying down and sleeping. Yet, first, beds are not needed for that. Secondly, precisely when a bed is slept on, it is not…Read more
  •  442
    ‘Metaphysical painting’ (‘pittura metafisica’) is a paradoxical term: extrasensory sensuousness, as it were. Painting is the representation of visible surfaces; metaphysics rejects surfaces, as deceptive, in favour of the deeper essence. But Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) who coined the term ‘pittura metafisica’ in 1919 was a follower of the anti-essentialist Nietzsche. ‘Metaphysics’, then, is not about discovering the essence of things but about shaping their appearances, their ‘physique’. This…Read more
  •  14
    Bodily Expression in Electronic Music: Perspectives on Reclaiming Performativity (edited book)
    with Deniz Peters and Gerhard Eckel
    Routledge. 2012.
    In this book, scholars and artists explore the relation between electronic music and bodily expression from perspectives including aesthetics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, dance and interactive performance arts, sociology, computer music and sonic arts, and music theory, transgressing disciplinary boundaries and established beliefs. The historic decoupling of action and sound generation might be seen to have distorted or even effaced the expressive body, with the retention of performance q…Read more
  •  286
    Die Kosten der Moral. Nachgerechnet an Kant
    Concordia 18 2-25. 1990.
    Acting morally comes at a price. The fewer people act morally, the dearer moral acts will be to those who perform them. Even if it could be proven that a certain moral norm were valid, the question might still be open whether, under certain circumstances, the demand to follow it meant asking too much. The validity of a moral norm is independent from actual compliance. In that regard, moral norms differ from legal rules. A law that nobody obeys has eroded and thus lost validity; a moral norm that…Read more
  • ‚Origin‘ must be counted among the 19th century’s obsessions. Following the lead of 18th century Enlightenment, subverting origins rather than venerating them became a theoretical preoccupation. Yet art – specifically the art of music – dealt with origins in a different way. That way eludes the obvious alternative of either awe or unmasking. It is specifically modern: The work of art attends to its own genesis. The different versions of the beginning of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony disclose a subt…Read more
  • Was ist musikalische Wertungsforschung?
    Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts Für Musikforschung Preußischer Kulturbesitz 371-385. 2004.
  •  606
    Remembrance is constitutive of music. For music emerges not as an isolated physical stimulus. Rather, it is experienced, i.e., a present musical moment is tied to its temporal antecedents. It is tempting to conceive of remembrance as repetition and as thus opposed to oblivion. Yet to memory selectivity is crucial. What is not selected, falls into oblivion. Hence as we remember we have forgotten already. The present moment evokes remembrance, and exhibits what was then in the light of what is now…Read more
  •  2
    The Paradox of Opera
    The Cambridge Quarterly 30 (4): 283-306. 2001.
    Opera is a paradoxical genre. For it seems self-defeating to create an illusion of reality by means of the theatrical apparatus if the art form’s central mode of expression, lavish singing in all kinds of circumstances, defies realism anyway. A solution to the paradox is implied by the 18th century turn of European philosophy of art from mimēsis to aisthēsis. In terms of aesthetics, reality is no longer an object of imitation but rather the impact upon and presence for a consciousness – that are…Read more
  •  2
    Bodily Expression in Electronic Music: Perspectives on Reclaiming Performativity, 2nd. ed. (edited book)
    with Gerhard Eckel and Deniz Peters
    Routledge. 2013.
    In this book, scholars and artists explore the relation between electronic music and bodily expression from perspectives including aesthetics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, dance and interactive performance arts, sociology, computer music and sonic arts, and music theory, transgressing disciplinary boundaries and established beliefs. The historic decoupling of action and sound generation might be seen to have distorted or even effaced the expressive body, with the retention of performance q…Read more
  •  32
    Passions of the Intellect: A Study of Polemics
    Philosophy 90 (4): 679-684. 2015.
    Polemics are a sort of critique typically suffused with inimical emotions and passions. But how are these emotions and passions to be construed? Neither authorial expression nor actual arousal properly account for their rôle in polemics. Rather, the polemicist must stage an unequal battle between a polemical self and the polemical target vis-à-vis an anticipated audience, skilfully handling, through his words, the emotions ascribed to each of them.
  •  32
    Ein verschollen geglaubter Brief der Korinther an Paulus
    Merkur 67 (12): 1125-1134. 2013.
    In the December 2013 issue of the periodical ‚Merkur‘, philosopher Andreas Dorschel presents a literary experiment. In the spirit of 18th century Enlightenment, he feigns an apocryphal letter including philological apparatus; it is – mind the boldness – a response letter by the Corinthians to St Paul’s first epistle. The ancient port city, multicultural, of syncretist religiousness and libertine in erotics, rejects the disciplining by the apostle. (Summary by Gustav Seibt, ‚Die Häresie der Abgre…Read more
  • Resonanzen. Vom Erinnern in der Musik (edited book)
    Universal Edition. 2007.
    In "Resonanzen", scholars and artists explore aspects of memory and recollection in music. Composers Georg Friedrich Haas and Isabel Mundry set out how their art involves memory (as well as oblivion). Music historians Laurenz Lütteken, Nicole Schwindt and Klaus Aringer scrutinize the role of memory in early modern music; Anselm Gerhardt, Peter Franklin, László Vikárius and Harald Haslmayr follow up the theme for compositional practice of the 19th and 20th centuries. Aaron Williamon adds a psycho…Read more
  • Arbeit am Kanon: Ästhetische Studien zur Musik von Haydn bis Webern
    with Federico Celestini
    Universal Edition. 2010.
    In 'Arbeit am Kanon', Italian musicologist Federico Celestini and German philosopher Andreas Dorschel discuss aesthetic issues in the work of composers Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, Anton Webern, and Franz Schreker.
  •  567
    Reference to past possibilities is not an additional luxury in writing history, after all facts have been established. For even facts become such only within a field of alternative options. What it means that one path was taken depends in part on answers to the question which other paths once open were not taken. Historical potential unrealized can be conceived of in a number of ways: as unfulfilled intentions, as unresolved problems, as suppressed endeavours, as waived alternatives within a con…Read more
  •  1
    Objective Music: Traditions of Soundmaking without Human Expression
    with Federico Celestini
    In Andreas Dorschel, Deniz Peters & Gerhard Eckel (eds.), Bodily Expression in Electronic Music: Perspectives on Reclaiming Performativity, Routledge. pp. 130-139. 2012.
  •  23
    Denktagebücher: Zur Poetik des philosophischen Journals
    Philosophische Rundschau 60 (4): 264. 2013.
    In philosophers’ diaries the individuality of men and women, their daily pain and pleasure, uniquely meets, and sometimes clashes, with the universal, or at least general, claims bound up with their metier. Following the genre’s history from the later 18th century to the present, Andreas Dorschel distinguishes (by way of ideal types) between (a) experimental diaries, (b) methodical diaries, (c) representative diaries, and (d) intimate diaries.
  •  1
    Das Programm ästhetischer Erziehung bei Schiller und beim frühen Nietzsche
    Vierteljahrsschrift Für Wissenschaftliche Pädagogik 68 (3): 260-284. 1992.
    Friedrich Nietzsche, in his early work, both appropriated and transformed Friedrich Schiller’s idea of aesthetic education. Art must cease to be a mere object of private pleasure and turn into a medium of public communication – this is the vision both philosophers share. As Nietzsche assigns the rôle held by language in Schiller to music, he shifts the project’s meaning. Yet both authors have to address the paradox that art, cut off from political and economic structures they disapprove of, is m…Read more
  •  54
    What is it to understand a directive speech act?
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 67 (3). 1989.
    In this paper I want to examine the concept of 'conditions of fulfilment' or 'compliance' or 'satisfaction' which have been introduced by some authors in order to provide analyses of meaning which are just as adequate to directive speech acts as truth-conditional semantics are (claimed to be) adequate to assertive speech acts. It will be argued that this aim is missed. Most analyses (except those of some primitive cases) will remain throughout imcomplete as long as they are not supplemented by a…Read more
  •  16
    Neodarwinian ethology, today above all represented by sociobiology, is conceived of by responsible exponents as a descriptive and explanatory theory that cannot include any normative declarations. Still other, indeed notable, authors belonging to the discipline in question, either underhand or frankly employ prescriptive or evaluative judgments, — or they claim (what is not an insight of natural science) that it is impossible to provide a rational foundation for prescriptive or evaluative judgme…Read more
  •  61
  • “How does music stand to image and concept?” (KSA 1, 104) This query in the aesthetics of media is central to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and related early texts; it shapes both their form and content. Nietzsche searches for a mode of non-conceptual philosophizing; he wishes to organize thought as a sequence of suggestive images – thoughts, that is, about that very relationship. Nietzsche’s success or failure in that endeavour becomes clearer against the foil of the 1795 controversy between Fri…Read more
  •  380
    The work of Richard Strauss has been disparaged as a music designed to be relished (“Genußmusik” was Adorno’s term), lacking any dimension of ‘transcendence’. The notion of ‘relish’ or ‘pleasure’ (“Genuß”), used for characterization rather than disparagement, can disclose crucial aspects of Strauss’s art, though it does not exhaust it. To oppose ‘relish’ or ‘pleasure’ (“Genuß”) to ‘transcendence’, however, either uses hidden theological premises or disregards that ‘relish’ or ‘pleasure’ (“Genuß”…Read more
  • Bilder und Worte
    Weimarer Beiträge: Zeitschrift Für Literaturwissenschaft, Ästhetik Und Kulturwissenschaften 43 (1): 110-122. 1997.
    ‘Logos’ is the Greek term for word, and language is indeed the realm of logic in a way that imagery never will be. While clearly not all use of words is argumentative – in fact, most is not –, their sequentiality brings them closer to argument than images, given the simultaneity of contents within the latter. In images, there is no discrete number of definite signs – the sort of thing language has in its vocabulary. The relations between colour and form are not systematized through rules. There …Read more
  •  495
    Furcht und Angst
    In Dietmar Goltschnigg (ed.), Angst. Lähmender Stillstand und Motor des Fortschritts, Stauffenburg. pp. 49-54. 2012.
    Is fear a ‘deficient mode’ of anxiety? This claim made by Martin Heidegger in ‘Being and Time’ (1927) depends on an analysis of intentionality. Emotions take objects: to love, to hate, to fear is to love, to hate, to fear someone or something. Yet anxiety, Heidegger maintains (‘Being and Time’ § 40), is about “nothing” (“nichts”) rather than “something” (“etwas”). Heidegger then turns lack of knowledge or understanding of what one’s anxiety is about into a revelation of “Nothing” (“Die Angst off…Read more
  •  7
    Die philosophiegeschichtlichen, sprachphilosophischen, rationalitäts- und wissenschaftstheoretischen Versuche einer Transformation der Philosophie, der Karl-Otto Apels Lebenswerk gilt, bezeichnet Apel deshalb als »Transzendentalpragmatik«, weil sie ihren Einheitssinn in dem Gedanken finden, daß nichts außer der menschlichen Praxis des Argumentierens die kontexttranszendierende Gültigkeit unserer Meinungen über Tatsachen und Normen ermöglicht. Die einzelnen Beiträge beleuchten Konsequenzen und Pr…Read more