Philosophy, music, and emotion / Geoffrey Madell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Madell, Geoffrey, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Music--Philosophy and aesthetics.

Music.

Emotions in music.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vii, 162 p. ) ill. , music ;

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2002]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Philosophy, Music and Emotion explores two issues which have been intensively debated in contemporary philosophy: the nature of music's power to express emotion, and the nature of emotion itself. It shows how closely the two topics are related and provides a radically new account of what it means to say that music 'expresses emotion'.Geoffrey Madell maintains that most current accounts of musical expressiveness are fundamentally misguided. He attributes this fact to the influence of a famous argument of the nineteenth-century critic Hanslick, and also to the dominant 'cognitivist' approach to the nature of emotion, which sees the essence of emotion to be the entertaining of evaluative judgements and beliefs of a certain sort, an account very much in accord with Hanslick's position. Such an approach results either in the unpersuasive view that musical expressiveness is somehow akin to human expressive gesture, or in the view that music arouses feelings which have no specific object and, unavoidably, no necessary connection with the music.The book argues that the 'cognitivist' account of the nature of emotion is quite false and that it needs to be replaced with a conception of emotions as states of feeling towards - states of intentional feeling - whose objects are often evaluatively characterised states of affairs; however, in the context of the emotions that are aroused by music these objects are always musical events or states. Central to this bold analysis of emotion is a new account of two closely connected mental states, those of desire and of pleasure, and of what role these states have in human motivation and value.

Contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1: Contour and convention

Contour

Convention

Do we 'animate' musical gestures?

Chapter 2: Musics's arousal of emotion

Why Hanslick is wrong

Music's arousal of emotion

Chapter 4: The advantages of the new arousalist position

Conclusion

Chapter 5: Emotion, judgement and desire

Why the standard judgementalist view of emotion is untenable

Desire and intentional feeling

Why not all reason-providing desire have an affective dimension

What is the exact role of intentional feeling?

Chapter 6: Pleasure and emotion

The threat of Hedonism

Hedonistic pleasure and our experience of music pleasure as a mode of attention

A resolution of the conflicting positions

The analysis of pleasure and music's expression of emotion

The indispensability of the notion of intentinal feeling

Reason-following desire, and taking pleasure in what has objective value

Chapter 7: The nature of emotion

The relation between the affective and the intentional components of emotion

The nature of emotion and music's expression of emotion

Chapter 8: Music's expression of emotion

Emotions in musical and in non-musical contexts

Hanslick Again

Are there any emotions that music cannot express?

Some remaining difficulties

Chapter 9: Retrospect.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages 158-160) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-4744-7062-9

0-585-44327-0