“Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago.”
Really? When I look at Aquinas or Plato or Aristotle, I see people mostly asking questions that we no longer care about because we have found better ways of dealing with the issues that made those questions worth thinking about.
Scholastic discourse about the Bible or angels makes much less sense when you have a historical-critical context to explain how it emerged in the way that it did, and a canon of contemporaneous secular works to make sense of what was going on in their world at the time.
Philosophical atomism is irrelevant once you’ve studied modern physics and chemistry.
The notion that we have Platonic a priori knowledge looks pretty silly without a great deal of massaging as we learn more about the mechanism of brain development.
Also, not all new perspectives on the world have value. Continental philosophy and post-modernism are to philosophy what mid-20th century art music is to music composition. It is a rabbit hole that a whole generation of academics got sucked into and wasted their time on. It turned out that the future of worthwhile music was elsewhere, in people like Elvis and the Beatles and rappers and Nashville studios and Motown artists and ressurrections of the greats of the classical and romantic periods in new contexts, and the tone poems and dissonant musics and other academic experiements of that era were just garbage. They lost sight of what music was for, just as the continental philosophers and post-modernist philosophers lost sight of what philosophy was for.
The language in impenatrable because they have nothing to say. I know what it is like to read academic literature, for example, in the sciences or economics, that is impenetrable because it is necessarily so, but that isn’t it. People who use sophisticated jargon when it is really necessary are also capable of speaking much more clearly about the essence of what is going on—people like Richard Feynman. But, our modern day philosophical sophisticates are known to no one but each other and are not adding to large understanding. Instead, all of the other disciplines are busy purging themselves of all that dreck so that they can get back on solid ground.
mid-20th century art music [...] tone poems and dissonant musics [...] were just garbage
wat?
Here are a few pieces of mid-20th century art music. I’m taking “mid-20th-century” to mean 1930 to 1970. Some of them are quite dissonant. None of them is actually a tone poem, as it happens. They are all pieces that (1) I like, (2) are well regarded by the classical music “establishment”, (3) are pretty accessible even to (serious) listeners of fairly conservative taste, (4) are still being performed, recorded, etc., (5) are clearly part of the mainstream of mid-20th-century art music, and (6) seem to me to show no lack of awareness of what music is for.
1930: Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms
1936: Barber, Adagio for strings
1941: Tippett, A child of our time
1942: Prokofiev, Piano sonata #7
1945: Britten, Peter Grimes
1948: Strauss, Four last songs
1960: Shostakovich: String quartets #7,8
1965: Bernstein, Chichester Psalms
(I make no claim that these are the best or most important works by their composers. I wanted things reasonably well spread out over the period in question, and subject to that picked fairly randomly.)
Are these all garbage? Perhaps you had in mind only music “weirder” than those: Second Viennese School twelve-tone music (though I’d call that early rather than mid 20th century), Cage-style experimentalism, and so forth. I’m not at all convinced that that stuff had no value or influence, but in any case it’s far from all that was happening in western art music in the middle of the 20th century.
Great list of 20th century compositions! 20th century art music gets an undeservedly bad rap, IMO.
I would add a few more composers:
1930: Kurt Weill: Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
1935: George Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
1940-1941: Olivier Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps
1944: Aaron Copeland: Appalachian Spring
Kurt Weill’s work might be considered theater music rather than art music, but I would argue that it is both of those things. Messiaen is admittedly avant garde and a bit outside of the mainstream, but is approachable by a wide range of audiences, including many who would not care for the composers of the Second Viennese School. Many of Messiaen’s compositions could have been added to the list, so I picked one of the best known.
For what it’s worth, I omitted Weill and Gershwin because I thought ohwilleke might not consider them arty enough, Messiaen becase I wasn’t confident enough ohwilleke would concede that his music sounds good, and Copeland because Appalachian Spring was the obvious work to use and I already had enough from around that time :-). Of course I agree that otherwise those works are all worthy of inclusion in any list like mine.
“Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago.”
See the paper on the Heideggerian critique of AI I posted earlier.
The notion that we have Platonic a priori knowledge looks pretty silly without a great deal of massaging as we learn more about the mechanism of brain development.
Oh? I would think that one of the lessons of neuroscience is that we are in fact hardwired for a great many things.
The language in impenatrable because they have nothing to say.
How do you know? That is, what evidence other than your lack of understanding do you have for this?
“Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago.”
Really? When I look at Aquinas or Plato or Aristotle, I see people mostly asking questions that we no longer care about because we have found better ways of dealing with the issues that made those questions worth thinking about.
Scholastic discourse about the Bible or angels makes much less sense when you have a historical-critical context to explain how it emerged in the way that it did, and a canon of contemporaneous secular works to make sense of what was going on in their world at the time.
Philosophical atomism is irrelevant once you’ve studied modern physics and chemistry.
The notion that we have Platonic a priori knowledge looks pretty silly without a great deal of massaging as we learn more about the mechanism of brain development.
Also, not all new perspectives on the world have value. Continental philosophy and post-modernism are to philosophy what mid-20th century art music is to music composition. It is a rabbit hole that a whole generation of academics got sucked into and wasted their time on. It turned out that the future of worthwhile music was elsewhere, in people like Elvis and the Beatles and rappers and Nashville studios and Motown artists and ressurrections of the greats of the classical and romantic periods in new contexts, and the tone poems and dissonant musics and other academic experiements of that era were just garbage. They lost sight of what music was for, just as the continental philosophers and post-modernist philosophers lost sight of what philosophy was for.
The language in impenatrable because they have nothing to say. I know what it is like to read academic literature, for example, in the sciences or economics, that is impenetrable because it is necessarily so, but that isn’t it. People who use sophisticated jargon when it is really necessary are also capable of speaking much more clearly about the essence of what is going on—people like Richard Feynman. But, our modern day philosophical sophisticates are known to no one but each other and are not adding to large understanding. Instead, all of the other disciplines are busy purging themselves of all that dreck so that they can get back on solid ground.
wat?
Here are a few pieces of mid-20th century art music. I’m taking “mid-20th-century” to mean 1930 to 1970. Some of them are quite dissonant. None of them is actually a tone poem, as it happens. They are all pieces that (1) I like, (2) are well regarded by the classical music “establishment”, (3) are pretty accessible even to (serious) listeners of fairly conservative taste, (4) are still being performed, recorded, etc., (5) are clearly part of the mainstream of mid-20th-century art music, and (6) seem to me to show no lack of awareness of what music is for.
1930: Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms
1936: Barber, Adagio for strings
1941: Tippett, A child of our time
1942: Prokofiev, Piano sonata #7
1945: Britten, Peter Grimes
1948: Strauss, Four last songs
1960: Shostakovich: String quartets #7,8
1965: Bernstein, Chichester Psalms
(I make no claim that these are the best or most important works by their composers. I wanted things reasonably well spread out over the period in question, and subject to that picked fairly randomly.)
Are these all garbage? Perhaps you had in mind only music “weirder” than those: Second Viennese School twelve-tone music (though I’d call that early rather than mid 20th century), Cage-style experimentalism, and so forth. I’m not at all convinced that that stuff had no value or influence, but in any case it’s far from all that was happening in western art music in the middle of the 20th century.
Great list of 20th century compositions! 20th century art music gets an undeservedly bad rap, IMO. I would add a few more composers:
1930: Kurt Weill: Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
1935: George Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
1940-1941: Olivier Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps
1944: Aaron Copeland: Appalachian Spring
Kurt Weill’s work might be considered theater music rather than art music, but I would argue that it is both of those things. Messiaen is admittedly avant garde and a bit outside of the mainstream, but is approachable by a wide range of audiences, including many who would not care for the composers of the Second Viennese School. Many of Messiaen’s compositions could have been added to the list, so I picked one of the best known.
For what it’s worth, I omitted Weill and Gershwin because I thought ohwilleke might not consider them arty enough, Messiaen becase I wasn’t confident enough ohwilleke would concede that his music sounds good, and Copeland because Appalachian Spring was the obvious work to use and I already had enough from around that time :-). Of course I agree that otherwise those works are all worthy of inclusion in any list like mine.
Eg reinventing logical positivism!
Logical positivism isn’t even one hundred years old yet.
See the paper on the Heideggerian critique of AI I posted earlier.
Oh? I would think that one of the lessons of neuroscience is that we are in fact hardwired for a great many things.
How do you know? That is, what evidence other than your lack of understanding do you have for this?