Philosophical Variations: Music as Philosophical Language (Summertalk)

The occasional essays which form the present volume document the author's sense that what he initially thought of as separate intellectual and existential compartments in his life, in which his professional philosophical and literary concerns bore little relation to his love for playing and listening to music, have to be connected if the theories in one area are not to be contradicted by practice in another, and vice versa. The essays rely on crossing disciplinary and thematic boundaries, and on a critical attitude to dominant analytical ways of doing philosophy. They confront philosophical approaches to language with ways of seeing music as a language, investigate the significance of music for ethics and of ethics for music, examine the relationship of theory to practice in musical improvisation, consider Shakespeare as a key theme in modern philosophy, interogate ways of philosophising about the history of philosophy, and question the nature of 'Continental philosophy'. Andrew Bowie is Professor of Philosophy and German at Royal Holloway, University of London.