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Composers and ‘composers’: A response to David Rosen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Peter Kivy
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Extract

David Rosen has written a detailed critique of my essay, ‘Opera Talk: A Philosophical “Phantasie”’, which appeared in a recent issue of this journal. I am grateful to him for his interest in what I had to say there. But at the same time I fear that he has misconstrued it. The result is that he has set up a parade of straw men which (not surprisingly) he has knocked – indeed bludgeoned – to the turf. There are a lot of straw men standing in for a lot of real ones, some of the real ones more important than others. It would be a bore for me as well as for my readers were I to run through them all (and if I tried, the vigilant editors of the journal would, quite rightly, put a stop to my profligacy). So I am going to concentrate on a very few of what I take to be the most important ones, and ones that cluster around the same basic issue. In the process, I hope not only to perform the negative task of refuting Rosen's ‘refutation’, but the positive one of pushing my project forward, at least to the extent of clarifying it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , July 1992 , pp. 179 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 Rosen, David, ‘Cone's and Kivy's “World of Opera”’, this journal, 4 (1992), 61–74.Google Scholar

2 Kivy, Peter, ‘Opera Talk: A Philosophical “Phantasie”’, this journal, 3 (1991), 63–77.Google Scholar

3 The childish truculence of the ‘Q.E.D.’ requires no further comment.

4 The paradigm ‘inductive’ argument is usually given as something like this: ‘This raven is black, that raven is black, the other raven is black … therefore all ravens are black.’ Of course there are other kinds of ‘empirical’ argument that might also be termed ‘inductive’. (I assume Rosen is not thinking here of mathematical induction.)