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Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2009

Andrew Bowie
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
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Summary

This is not a book about the ‘philosophy of music’ in the sense which that term generally has within academic philosophy. Rather than seeing the role of philosophy as being to determine the nature of the object ‘music’, it focuses on the philosophy which is conveyed by music itself. This idea is explored via the interaction between philosophy and music in modernity which is largely ignored, not only in most of the philosophy of music, but also in most other branches of philosophy. The consequences of my exploration are, I suspect, more important for philosophy than for the practice of music, but musicians, and especially musicologists – who these days seem increasingly interested in philosophy – may find what I say instructive. If they do, it will be because I want, via a consideration of music's relationship to verbal language, to question some of the ways in which philosophy has conceived of the meaning and nature of music.

The ideas for this book have been a long time in germinating, beginning during work on Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus for my PhD in the 1970s (Bowie 1979), and continuing with my work on the relationship of German Idealist and Romantic philosophy to contemporary concerns in the humanities during the 1980s and 1990s and beyond, and the ideas are, of course, by no means exhausted by what I have been able to say. Such a book is necessarily interdisciplinary, and the attempt to cover all the issues touched on in it in any detail would have resulted in an impossibly large volume.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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  • Preface
  • Andrew Bowie, Royal Holloway, University of London
  • Book: Music, Philosophy, and Modernity
  • Online publication: 15 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511487569.001
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  • Preface
  • Andrew Bowie, Royal Holloway, University of London
  • Book: Music, Philosophy, and Modernity
  • Online publication: 15 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511487569.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Preface
  • Andrew Bowie, Royal Holloway, University of London
  • Book: Music, Philosophy, and Modernity
  • Online publication: 15 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511487569.001
Available formats
×