music
-
Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 5
The heading of this installment declares it to be the conclusion of the paper, but this isn’t the last installment of “Practices and Practicing in Human Moral Development.” A postscript – or maybe a coda? – is yet to come, with some initial thoughts on what a “mimetic pedagogy” for ethics might look like. V.… Continue reading
-
Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 4
IV. Practicing Throughout his account of moral virtues, Aristotle (2002) often falls back on analogies with more immediately familiar kinds of human endeavor. On the way to his first definition of the highest good, for example, he considers what might be the work – the fundamental, species-defining task or function – of being human by… Continue reading
-
Practices and Practicing (2024), part 3
The third installment of “Practices and Practices in Human Moral Development” is the most direct extension of the “Tuning-In Relationship” paper, building on the connection between music and ethics. III. Practices Part of human sense-making arises from participation in shared ways of doing things. We more readily “tune in” with others who are participating in… Continue reading
-
Practices and Practicing (2024), Part 1
Following hard on the heels of “The ‘Tuning-In’ Relationship” was a second paper on the intertwining of human music-making, human social life, and moral development, this time with an evolutionary twist. In particular, I pick up from and/or expand upon the last section of the previous paper, on practices. There were some loose threads I… Continue reading
-
The Tuning-In Relationship (2023), Part 5
And now, at last, the conclusion to my 2023 paper, “The ‘Tuning-In’ Relationship in Music and in Ethics.” I’ll let it speak for itself. Practices An appeal to embodiment may be necessary to account for the tuning-in relationship, but it is not sufficient. Gestures and other bodily cues that mean one thing in one context… Continue reading
-
The Tuning-In Relationship (2023), Part 4
Digging deeper into the phenomenology of making music together and thence to the phenomenology of social life, the next section of my 2023 paper concerns embodiment. Making music together is something we do as living beings of a species with a peculiar history, a species with a distinctive way of experiencing our own embodiment. Does… Continue reading
-
The Tuning-In Relationship (2023), Part 3
Here’s the part where the paper gets at least a little bit technical, as Schutz draws from Husserl’s account of the internal consciousness of time in establishing the tuning-in relationship at the heart of making music together. The implications for human social interaction in general, and for ethics in particular, are striking. In a nutshell,… Continue reading
-
The Tuning-In Relationship (2023), Part 2
Picking up from the story of the young engineer who needed to find the groove of a fraught meeting at work, I turn to set up the main argument of my 2023 paper on music and ethics. The Tuning-In Relationship These reflections on the plight of the young engineer point toward the possibility that ethical… Continue reading