YiLi Zhou

Contemporary musical ontology has become fixated on musical works, treating them as the primary—often exclusive—subject of metaphysical inquiry. This paper argues that such work-centrism is methodologically limiting. Musical work is a heterogeneous category that resists unified ontological treatment, while the very concept of a work proves historically contingent and practice-relative. Moreover, work-centrism leaves un(der)theorized vast ranges of musical phenomena that merit ontological consideration. These limitations are diagnosed from testing the work-centric methodology against four desiderata for an ontological theory of music, each motivated by reflecting on musical phenomena and practices. I then propose a compositional approach to musical ontology, focused on musical elements (pitches, rhythms, motifs) and their interrelations under compositional operations, as a promising alternative. This approach not only meets the desiderata but also systematically tracks musical content—what makes something musical—thereby offering a stable foundation for philosophical theorizing about music as such.

Standard deep self views of moral responsibility contend that we are responsible for what we do if and only if our actions issue from our deep selves. This suggests that responsible agency is unified in a crucial sense. In this paper, I identify a tension between a special phenomenon of compartmentalization and unified responsible agency, and elaborate a novel criticism of the deep self view. Given the deep self view’s requirement for unified responsible agency, a severely compartmentalized evildoer is at least less responsible. However, I argue that the reason such an agent is deemed less responsible within the deep self picture commits deep self theorists to judging that all compartmentalized wrongdoers are likewise less responsible. This significantly undermines the plausibility of their views.