Bryan Parkhurst

ABSTRACT This paper criticizes interpreters who appeal to structural homologies in making claims about the meaning of (classical instrumental) music. Such appeals are prevalent in Marxist and post-Marxist musical aesthetics, where structural correspondences between music and society are accorded great significance, and their prevalence can be traced to Adorno’s use of (what this paper calls) “semantically ambitious homologies,” which can be traced to Freud’s use of them. I lay out this genealogy and argue that homology-based musical semantics, as it has been customarily practiced, is a nonstarter.

In chapter 5 of his Autobiography, John Stuart Mill recounts a crisis in his mental history. The details of Mill’s depression and eventual rehabilitation due to the salutary powers of lyric poetry are well known. But most scholars who have investigated the status of poetry in Mill’s philosophy have overlooked the fact that the story the Autobiography tells about poetry’s contribution to Mill’s spiritual convalescence and moral education raises several interesting interpretive issues and leaves many notable questions unanswered. I begin with an overview of Mill’s psychological case history as presented in the Autobiography. After that I turn my attention to some exegetical difficulties surrounding Mill’s adulation ..

This paper explores the question: does unfree labour produce value? The paper does not answer the question. Rather, it contends that, no matter how Marxists answer the question, they end up either (1) relinquishing the view that labour is the only source of value or (2) appealing to an apparently bogus distinction in order to hang on to the view. Both of these alternatives will be unacceptable to the orthodox Marxian economist. For the choice is between jettisoning the labour theory of value and thus giving up on Marxian orthodoxy, or else frankly conceding that one’s orthodoxy is baseless and dogmatic.

This dissertation is comprised of two big essays. The first seeks to understand what is at stake in the project of music analysis writ large. I argue for adopting a conception of musical analysis as a practical activity oriented toward the having of what Dewey calls "integral experiences." I cash out this idea with help from Wittgenstein's notion of aspect perception ("seeing as"), whose musical applications I demonstrate in a discussion of Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata. I then use my model of music analysis to give a reading of David Lewin's analysis of Schubert's "Morgengruss." The second essay seeks to understand what is at stake in the project of Schenkerian musical analysis in particular. I offer an extended reconstruction of Schenker's theory of organic unity in response to objections to Schenker's "necessitarian" language, i.e. his penchant for claiming that a musical masterwork must be as it is (in some to-be-determined sense of "must"). I accomplish this by giving a normative reading of Schenker's theory of absolute music, a reading which understands Schenker's musical absolutism as at root a theory of the proper norms of musical hearing. I then argue that the observance of these norms induces one to explain musical structures teleologically. Schenker's necessitarian language, I contend, makes sense once it is situated within the context of Kant's theory of biological explanation, as set out in his Critique of Teleological Judgment, the second half of his Critique of the Power of Judgment.

“Aesthetic valuism” maintains that aesthetic properties harbor an ineliminable evaluative component, and that to correctly and sincerely apply an aesthetic predicate to a thing just is to give an appraisal of its aesthetic goodness or badness. Anti-valuism denies this, and holds that even in the identification and ascription of evaluatively-loaded aesthetic properties, such as beautiful or graceful, we may identify a non-evaluative, purely descriptive, and patently aesthetic form of judgment or discrimination. In this essay, I formulate a new definition of aesthetic properties that is consistent with anti-valuism, in order to see how well it serves us, in comparison with a valuist definition that appears in the published philosophical literature. If my definition is at least as intuitively plausible as the valuist’s, it should be preferred. This is because the most complicated concept my definition asks you to understand is perceptual resemblance . Value is harder to understand, and we don’t make it very easy on ourselves if we use one mystery to define another . I end by reflecting on how my definition fits into wider aesthetic concerns