The dress-reform movement, often misrepresented as a fad of women's rights leaders, was in fact a distinct movement with roots in nineteenth-century health reform. It represents a different brand of feminism from that of the women's rights movement and a “road not taken” by nineteenth-century feminism. Dress reformers were committed to an exemplary action model of social change that assumed that a few intrepid individuals who had the courage to live according to principle could inspire enough other people to transform (...) the world. The women's rights leaders, on the other hand, were determined to build a movement capable of changing social, political, and economic institutions and believed compromises were necessary to do so. The debate between the two groups illustrates the tension between personal transformation and political change that has often appeared in feminist movements. (shrink)

I doubt that even one of her readers will agree with all of Gutmann's conclusions--but they will all have to take account of the wealth of empirical evidence and stringent reasoning in this book.

Underlying much current work in philosophy of imagination is the assumption that imagination is a skill. This assumption seems to entail not only that facility with imagining will vary from one person to another, but also that people can improve their own imaginative capacities and learn to be better imaginers. This paper takes up this issue. After showing why this is properly understood as a philosophical question, I discuss what it means to say that one imagining is better than another (...) and then discuss the kinds of imagination training and techniques that might be employed in an effort to get better at imagining. The discussion of these techniques draws insight from consideration of other skills-based activities, as well as from consideration of the creation of art and our engagement with literature and poetry. Over the course of this discussion, we also gain further insight into the nature of imagination. (shrink)

Imagination is celebrated as our vehicle for escape from the mundane here and now. It transports us to distant lands of magic and make-believe, and provides us with diversions during boring meetings or long bus rides. Yet the focus on imagination as a means of escape from the real world minimizes the fact that imagination seems also to furnish us with knowledge about it. Imagination seems an essential component in our endeavor to learn about the world in which we live--whether (...) we're planning for the future, aiming to understand other people, or figuring out whether two puzzle pieces fit together. But how can the same mental power that allows us to escape the world as it currently is also inform us about the world as it currently is? Ten original essays grapple with this neglected question; in doing so, they present a diverse array of positions ranging from cautious optimism to deep-seated pessimism. Blending perspectives from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, Knowledge Through Imagination sheds new light on the epistemic role of imagination. (shrink)

This essay meditates on the short film American Reflexxx and the violent laughter directed at a non-trans woman in public space when she was assumed to be trans. Drawing from work on the ideological and institutional dimensions of transphobia by Talia Bettcher and Viviane Namaste, alongside Sara Ahmed's writing on the cultural politics of disgust, I reverse engineer this specific instance of laughter into a meditation on the social meaning of transphobic laughter in public space. I then look at racialized (...) transphobic laughter directed against Tyra Hunter and Miriam Rivera to emphasize transmisogynist laughter as a denial of contact, intimacy, and care. Building on Kate Manne's work on misogyny, I conclude that a key aspect of transmisogyny is the use of transfeminine people as a source of dehumanized, disavowed, and disposable care and intimacy. Laughter and accompanying violence against trans women serves to reinforce this dynamic. (shrink)

Work in philosophy of mind often engages in descriptive phenomenology, i.e., in attempts to characterize the phenomenal character of our experience. Nagel’s famous discussion of what it’s like to be a bat demonstrates the difficulty of this enterprise (1974). But while Nagel located the difficulty in our absence of an objective vocabulary for describing experience, I argue that the problem runs deeper than that: we also lack an adequate subjective vocabulary for describing phenomenology. We struggle to describe our own phenomenal (...) states in terms we ourselves find adequately expressive. This paper aims to flesh out why our phenomenological vocabulary is so impoverished – what I call the impoverishment problem. As I suggest, this problem has both practical and philosophical import. After fleshing out the problem in more detail, I draw some suggestive morals from the discussion in an effort to point the way forward towards a solution. (shrink)

As Hume famously claimed, we are nowhere more free than in our imagination. While this feature of imagination suggests that imagination has a crucial role to play in modal epistemology, it also suggests that imagining cannot provide us with any non-modal knowledge about the world in which we live. This chapter rejects this latter suggestion. Instead it offers an account of “imagining under constraints,” providing a framework for showing when and how an imaginative project can play a justificatory role with (...) respect to our beliefs about the world. That we can be free in our imaginings does not show that they must proceed unfettered; as is argued, our ability to constrain our imaginings in light of facts about the world enables us to learn from them. The important upshot is that imagination has considerably more epistemic significance than previously thought. (shrink)

I offer a new interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety in Being and Time as an account of the relationship between individual agents and the public normative practices of their communities. According to a prominent recent interpretation, Heidegger’s discussions of anxiety, death and the “call of conscience” together explain how we can respond to the norms of our practices as reasons and subject them to critical reflection. I argue that this is only part of the story. Anxiety is an occasion (...) for Dasein to take responsibility for its ongoing activity of interpreting the possibilities for living and acting made available by the normative practices of its community, which is presupposed and overlooked from the perspective of everyday Dasein. Public normativity underdetermines Dasein’s conception of what it would mean to take up any of the possibilities available in its world as a way of living its own life. (shrink)

In The Matter of Consciousness, in the course of his extended discussion and defense of Frank Jackson’s famous knowledge argument, Torin Alter dismisses some objections on the grounds that they are cases of cheating. Though some opponents of the knowledge argument offer various scenarios in which Mary might come to know what seeing red is like while still in the room, Alter argues that the proposed scenarios are irrelevant. In his view, the Mary case is offered to defend the claim (...) that phenomenal facts cannot be a priori deduced from physical facts. Thus, a proposed scenario constitutes an objection to the knowledge argument only if it presents a case in which Mary’s learning inside the room comes about via a priori deduction from physical facts. Call this the deducibility standard. In what follows, I’ll explore a series of relevant cases in an effort to clarify this standard. Doing so enables us to better understand how cheating should be assessed in this context and thereby also to get clearer on the argumentative dialectic surrounding the Mary case. (shrink)

Though philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Sartre have dismissed imagination as epistemically irrelevant, this chapter argues that there are numerous cases in which imagining can help to justify our contingent beliefs about the world. The argument proceeds by the consideration of case studies involving two particularly gifted imaginers, Nikola Tesla and Temple Grandin. Importantly, the lessons that we learn from these case studies are applicable to cases involving less gifted imaginers as well. Though not all imaginings will have justificatory power, (...) the chapter shows how the sorts of cases in which imagining plays an epistemic role can be easily distinguished from the sorts of cases in which it does not. (shrink)

The relationship between the phenomenology of imagination and the phenomenology of memory is an interestingly complicated one. On the one hand, there seem to be important similarities between the two, and there are even occasions in which we mistake an imagining for a memory or vice versa. On the other hand, there seem to be important differences between the two, and we can typically tell them apart. This paper explores various attempts to delineate a phenomenological marker differentiating imagination and memory, (...) with a special focus on two proposed markers that have generated considerable philosophical discussion: the feeling of pastness and the feeling of familiarity. As we will find, neither of them proves to be up to the task at hand. However, by way of a deeper exploration of the feeling of familiarity, we are able to tease out some important morals for efforts to differentiate imagination and memory on phenomenological grounds and, more generally, for efforts to engage in a descriptive phenomenological enterprise. (shrink)

Provides a brief account of trans philosophy organizing in the 2010s and argues for the importance of building spaces for trans philosophers.

Pruss (2016) argues that Christian philosophers should reject Open Futurism, where Open Futurism is the thesis that “there are no true undetermined contingent propositions about the future” (461). First, Pruss argues “on probabilistic grounds that there are some statements about infinite futures that Open Futurism cannot handle” (461). In other words, he argues that either the future is finite or that Open Futurism is false. Next, Pruss argues that since Christians are committed to a belief in everlasting life, they must (...) deny that the future is finite. From here, Pruss concludes that Christians must reject Open Futurism. In practice, Pruss’s argument extends to anyone who endorses everlasting life. In this essay, I respond to Pruss’s argument on behalf of Open Futurism: pace Pruss, the open futurist can consistently believe in everlasting life while also accepting the basic principles of probability theory. (shrink)

A vision of a living code of ethics is proposed to counter the emphasis on negative phenomena in the study of organizational ethics. The living code results from the harmonious interaction of authentic leadership, five key organizational processes (attraction–selection–attrition, socialization, reward systems, decision-making and organizational learning), and an ethical organizational culture (characterized by heightened levels of ethical awareness and a positive climate regarding ethics). The living code is the cognitive, affective, and behavioral manifestation of an ethical organizational identity. We draw (...) on business ethics literature, positive organizational scholarship, and management literature to outline the elements of positive ethical organizations as those exemplary organizations consistently practicing the highest levels of organizational ethics. In a positive ethical organization, the right thing to do is the only thing to do. (shrink)

Our ordinary conception of imagination takes it to be essentially a conscious phenomenon, and traditionally that’s how it had been treated in the philosophical literature. In fact, this claim had often been taken to be so obvious as not to need any argumentative support. But lately in the philosophical literature on imagination we see increasing support for the view that imagining need not occur consciously. In this paper, I examine the case for unconscious imagination. I’ll consider four different arguments that (...) we can find in the recent literature—three of which are based on cases and one that is based on considerations relating to action guidance. To my mind, none of these arguments is successful. I conclude that the case for postulating unconscious imagining has not yet been well motivated. (shrink)

Narrativists about well-being claim that our lives go better for us if they make good stories—if they exhibit cohesion, thematic consistency, and narrative arc. Yet narrativism leads to mistaken assessments of well-being: prioritizing narrative makes it harder to balance and change pursuits, pushes us toward one-dimensionality, and can’t make sense of the diversity of good lives. Some ways of softening key narrativist claims mean that the view can’t tell us very much about how to live a good life that we (...) can’t find in other theories of well-being; while there are smaller-scale ways we can incorporate narrativist insights into our views of well-being, narrativism should not be a universal organizing principle for our lives. (shrink)

This essay develops a concept of curiotization, through which people are reduced to a curio for the fascination of others. I argue that trans people as they have appeared in media, philosophy, and narratives of history are curiotized as forever fascinating, new, titillating, and controversial. In contrast to the narrative of momentous trans progress in the mid-2010s, I point out that frameworks such as the "Transgender Tipping Point" worked to position its "trans moment" as unprecedented and always on the threshold (...) of arrival. To work through a specific example, I point to decades of renewed fascination over trans women being capable of breastfeeding and the long history of trans fascination in popular music. I conclude by emphasizing the obscured world-historical presence of transsexuality as it coincides with the history of pharmaceuticals, hormone technologies, and birth control. In contrast to a "goldfish memory optics" through which trans people become eternally new, fascinating, and debatable, I stress the importance of restoring the complexity of "trans" and its histories back into an understanding of the present. (shrink)

This essay provides a critical overview of the debate about corporate moral responsibility. Parties to the debate address whether corporations are the kinds of entities that can be blamed when they cause unjustified harm. Proponents of CMR argue that corporations satisfy the conditions for moral agency and so they are fit for blame. Their opponents respond that corporations lack one or more of the capacities necessary for moral agency. I review the arguments on both sides and conclude ultimately that what (...) divides the two is not so much competing conceptions of the corporation as it is disagreement about what moral agency requires. Homing in on the real site of contention will, it is hoped, allow future participants in the debate to focus their efforts more productively. (shrink)

In this short essay I connect Perry Zurn’s work on curiosity with trans history, activism, and art to bridge trans curiosity with eco curiosity in the form of transecological curiosity. I discuss examples from trans art, literature, music, and ecopoetics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imagination in Inquiry by A. Pablo IannoneAmy KindIANNONE, A. Pablo. Imagination in Inquiry. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2022. xxvi + 254 pp. Cloth, $110.00; eBook $45.00Though imagination is often associated with the fanciful and the fictional, over the course of the last decade philosophers have begun to devote considerable attention to more practical uses of imagination. Philosophers of imagination have increasingly focused on ways in which imagination can (...) play an important epistemic role in activities such as decision-making, planning, and scientific discovery; more generally, there has been attention to a variety of ways in which imagination can teach us about the world in which we live. Iannone’s discussion in Imagination in Inquiry can be seen as part of this general trend—even if his discussion is not itself situated directly within contemporary philosophy of imagination but, rather, in a broader interdisciplinary approach.Iannone works with an expansive conception of what imagination is. In his view, we should not limit our understanding of imagination simply to the ability to generate images. Rather, imagination is a diverse set of different abilities that aim “at figuring out cognitively, emotively, or practically, alternatives for dealing with actual, probable, plausible, foreseeable, or merely possible challenges or problems, abstract or concrete, theoretical or practical being faced, or notions being considered, and determining or deciding which is (are) preferable in the circumstances, and acting accordingly.” Moreover, this set of abilities should not be seen as operating in isolation; rather, imagination functions as part of an ecology of human abilities. Iannone refers to his view of imagination as the “homeostatic model,” so called because he sees imaginative processes as maintaining stability by way of a system of self-correcting feedback and methods for incorporating and adjusting to any new information received.Iannone also operates with an expansive conception of what counts as practical use of imagination. In his view, imagination is put to practical use in a wide range of circumstances, for example, when a dancer imagines the next steps of a dance in the process of spontaneous improvising, when a combatant imagines how to block an expected blow from an opponent, and when an environmental activist imagines a new set of corrective policies to address pollution. All these uses fall under the activity of what Iannone calls “inquiry,” that is, the activity of finding a solution to a problem or challenge. The problems and challenges that might prompt the use of imagination can be both personal and interpersonal, and the imaginative processes used will involve strategies such as discovery, creation, and anticipation.In the first part of the book, Iannone develops his basic conceptual apparatus. In the next part of the book, he puts this apparatus to work in the context of philosophy, that is, he shows how imagination plays a role in philosophical inquiry. In the third part of the book, he looks at the role of imagination in other disciplines such as sociology and psychology. Here, the interdisciplinary nature of his discussion is especially on display. In the fourth part of the book, he applies his model of imagination to a number of different contexts; in particular, he discusses the role of [End Page 354] imagination in language, in humor, in vision (both at the personal and the societal level), and in morality. Finally, the last part of the book offers a variety of case studies involving dance, technology, and artificial intelligence. Of the four chapters in this part of the book, three are written by other authors: two by Alejandra Iannone, a scholar and practitioner of dance and theater (and the author’s daughter), and one by Rocci Luppicini, an expert in technology studies. In light of the explosive pace with which new AI technologies are being developed, the book’s discussion of whether and how such technologies present challenges for our capacity for imagination is especially timely and important.In addition to affirming the practical importance of imagination, Iannone also affirms the practical importance of nurturing imagination—something he repeats at several points throughout the book. But how do we do this? One natural way that imagination is nurtured is simply by its regular use... (shrink)

Is _Invisible Man_ a sexist novel? Some critics have said so. I argue that reading _Invisible Man_ solely with a focus on gender representation misses an ethically significant dynamic between Ralph Ellison's narrator and white women. Reading _Invisible Man_ alongside Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy reveals a shared emphasis on cultivating attention to the realities of individuals by resisting fantasy. In viewing white women, the invisible man undergoes a Murdochian moral pilgrimage from fantasy to reality with courage, humility, and generosity. By (...) situating this triumph within the American white supremacist patriarchy, Ellison corrects some of Murdoch's disengagement from politics. (shrink)

This chapter examines the views of seventeenth-century British philosophers on passions and affections. It explains that about 8,000 books published during this period mentioned passion and that it started with Thomas Wright's Passions of the Mind in General. The chapter also explores the intellectual basis of the writers who wrote about passion – which includes Augustinianism, Aristotelianism, stoicism, Epicureanism, and medicine – and furthermore, analyzes the relevant works of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, and Lord Shaftesbury.

ABSTRACT This article engages with a key interpretive puzzle in Hobbes’s political thought – his seemingly contradictory view of liberty of conscience – and argues that Hobbes theorizes civic education as a powerful tool to confront and refashion prevailing views of conscience in early modernity. While influential accounts have recovered more ‘tolerant’ arguments in Hobbes’s political thought, recent revisionist accounts have argued that Hobbes does not merely advocate for the compulsion of outward conformity but also subjects’ inward persuasion. Yet this (...) nuanced attention to the sovereign’s role in cultivating obedient, peaceful subjects does not attend fully to his shaping of the consciences of his subjects. Situating Hobbes in the early modern discourse on casuistry, as well as political debates on educational reform, reveals that the sovereign can and should try to shape the consciences of subjects, specifically returning to a view of conscience as a kind of ‘knowing with’ others. Reframing Hobbes’s project of civic education as a strategy to ‘gently instill’ the consciences of subjects does not merely shed light on the interpretive puzzle of Hobbes’s ambivalence towards toleration but also draws attention to one of the most powerful and arguably underappreciated ways to overcome the threat of conscience to sovereignty. (shrink)

In this book, Richlin argues that the attitude of sexual aggressiveness exhibited by the garden statues of the god Priapus served as a model for Roman satire from Lucilius to Juvenal.

If, as Axel Honneth has recently argued, critical theory needs psychoanalysis for meta-normative and explanatory reasons, this does not settle the question of which version of psychoanalysis critical theorists should embrace. In this paper, I argue against Honneth's favoured version – an intersubjectivist interpretation of Winnicott's object-relations theory – and in favour of an alternative based on the drive-theoretical work of Melanie Klein. Klein's work, I argue, provides critical theorists with a more realistic conception of the person and a richer (...) explanatory account of human aggression and destructiveness than does Honneth's intersubjectivist view. As such, it better serves the ends for which Honneth claims that critical theory should turn to psychoanalysis in the first place. (shrink)

Human languages vary in many ways but also show striking cross-linguistic universals. Why do these universals exist? Recent theoretical results demonstrate that Bayesian learners transmitting language to each other through iterated learning will converge on a distribution of languages that depends only on their prior biases about language and the quantity of data transmitted at each point; the structure of the world being communicated about plays no role (Griffiths & Kalish, , ). We revisit these findings and show that when (...) certain assumptions about the relationship between language and the world are abandoned, learners will converge to languages that depend on the structure of the world as well as their prior biases. These theoretical results are supported with a series of experiments showing that when human learners acquire language through iterated learning, the ultimate structure of those languages is shaped by the structure of the meanings to be communicated. (shrink)

1. Introduction: 1.1 Difficulties of Approach; 1.2 Philosophical Background. 2. The Context of Early Modern Theories of the Passions: 2.1 Changing Vocabulary; 2.2 Taxonomies; 2.3 Philosophical Issues in Theories of the Emotions. SUPPLEMENTARY DOCUMENTS: Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Theories of the Emotions; Descartes; Hobbes; Malebranche; Spinoza; Shaftsbury; Hutcheson; Hume.

This article explores some of the philosophical implications of the Bayesian modeling paradigm. In particular, it focuses on the ramifications of the fact that Bayesian models pre‐specify an inbuilt hypothesis space. To what extent does this pre‐specification correspond to simply ‘‘building the solution in''? I argue that any learner must have a built‐in hypothesis space in precisely the same sense that Bayesian models have one. This has implications for the nature of learning, Fodor's puzzle of concept acquisition, and the role (...) of modeling in cognitive science. (shrink)

Some of the world’s best-loved films can be used as springboards for examining enduring philosophical questions. Philosophy Through Film provides guidance on how to watch films with an eye for their philosophical content, helping students become familiar with key topics in all of the major areas in Western philosophy, and helping them to master the techniques of philosophical argumentation. -/- The perfect size and scope for a first course in philosophy, Philosophy Through Film assumes no prior knowledge of philosophy. It (...) is an excellent teaching resource and learning tool, introducing students to key topics and figures in philosophy through thematic chapters, each of which is linked to one or more “focus films” that illustrate a philosophical problem or topic. -/- This new edition features a new chapter on the mind-body problem. In addition, one new primary reading and nine new focus films have been added. Films examined in depth include: Arrival The Matrix Inception Memento Moon Live, Die, Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow Her Ex Machina Minority Report Beautiful Boy Crimes and Misdemeanors Gone Baby Gone Equilibrium Divergent A Serious Man Silence Ad Astra . (shrink)

The two cases presented here may at first seem very different: one patient was an adult, making autonomous decisions for herself and her fetus; the other was a child too young to meaningfully participate in the most significant decisions regarding his health. In both cases, healthcare professionals had to determine the extent to which the parents of a dying fetus or child should be permitted to make agonizing choices about how long to maintain hope and what that death will look (...) like; and in both, health professionals’ prognostications influenced their judgments about the patients’ best interests and whether they were candidates for certain interventions. While members of both healthcare teams questioned the patients’ and families’ ability to objectively consider the risks and benefits, the families were focused on the need to be able to live with the decisions made, regardless of outcome. Clinicians expressed unwillingness to perform physical actions they felt were more likely to promote harm and suffering than benefit, and experienced attendant moral distress in the face of conflicting values. In this regard, these cases are mirror images: only in the first case did the clinician, an obstetrician, have sufficient professional authority to refuse to perform the desired intervention. In the second case, the clinicians who expressed the most distress regarding the patient’s trajectory were the nurses, who largely lacked similar autonomy. Viewed together, these cases share a core question: What does paternalism look like in the contemporary era? (shrink)

In target articles for this special issue, Fox et al. report that ethics consultation (EC) practices have not improved significantly since 2000, and question whether the status quo affords patients...

The authors offer a framework based on the stakeholder, organizational identity, and strategic response literatures to specify how organizational identity influences an organization’s responses to negative evaluation in the public domain by external stakeholders. The framework proposes how the number of organizational identities possessed by an organization and the level of perceived organizational identity threat affect which type of response an organization will adopt. Directions for future research are developed and implications for practicing managers are proposed.

SALMON A, BROWNE AJ, and PEDERSON A. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 336–345 ‘Now we call it research’: participatory health research involving marginalized women who use drugsIn this paper, we discuss and analyse the strategies employed and challenges encountered when conducting a recent feminist participatory action research study with highly marginalized women who were illicit drug users in an inner city area of Vancouver, Canada. Through an analysis of the political economy of participatory praxis within current neoliberal contexts, we focus on (...) three main areas: (i) reconceptualizing the pragmatics of participation; (ii) the microeconomic implications of participatory research, including ethical issues in payment for research participation; and (iii) the value and limits of using research as a tool for activism and empowerment. We conclude with a brief discussion of what we see to be some of the most salient social justice implications arising from feminist and participatory approaches to health research within neoliberal political spaces. (shrink)

This paper argues that Descartes conceives of theoretical reason in terms derived from practical reason, particularly in the role he gives to the passions. That the passions serve — under normal circumstances — to preserve the union of mind and body is a well-known feature of Descartes's defense of our native make-up. But they are equally important in our more purely theoretical endeavors. Some passions, most notably wonder, provide a crucial source of motivation in the search after truth, and also (...) serve to reinforce memory. Our cognitive successes and failure scan also be tracked by passions and trains of passions. (shrink)

Taxonomy and terminology might seem like dull topics. But the diverse ways that eighteenth-century philosophers identified and classified the emotions crucially shaped the approaches they took. This chapter traces the sources available to eighteenth-century British philosophers for naming and ordering the passions, lays out the main vocabulary and concepts used for description and analysis, including the notions of “reflection” and “sympathy,” and outlines the principles that organized explanation, such as the division of the passions into the pleasurable or painful, and (...) the selfish or social, as well as the role of “master passions.”. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the material and rhetorical connection between “parental involvement” and motherhood has the effect of making two important features of parental involvement disappear. Both of these features need to be taken into account to think through the positive and negative effects of parental involvement in public schooling. First, parental involvement is labor. In the following section of this paper, I discuss the work of feminist scholars who have brought this to light. Second, parental involvement remains (...) one of the most significant ways in which citizens participate in the public sphere. While education reform projects centered on parental involvement do show some recognition that what parents/mothers do is in fact work, even as they ignore the gendered dimensions of this work and sunnily demand that parents do ever more of it, these projects resist the recognition that parents’/mothers’ involvement is also political. (shrink)

Traditionally, imagination has been considered to be a primitive mental state type (or group of types), irreducible to other mental state types. In particular, it has been thought to be distinct from other mental states such as belief, perception, and memory, among others. Recently, however, the category of imagination has come under attack, with challenges emerging from a multitude of different directions. Some philosophers have argued that we should not recognize belief and imagination as distinct states but rather on a (...) continuum, whereas other philosophers have argued something similar with respect to belief and memory. And some philosophers have suggested that we can reduce imagination to other mental states, whether mental imagery, belief, supposition, or some combination. In this paper, I address some of these challenges in an attempt to show we need to maintain imagination as a distinct – and indeed, robust – category in our taxonomy of mind. (shrink)

From Stage to Studio: Performances versus Recordings in Classical Music presents a cultural study of classical music-making through the analysis of live and studio performances of orchestral and operatic repertoire conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. The close listening analysis is based on detailed research into Mackerras's private collection of over 600 reel-to-reel and cassette tapes containing recordings of over 1,000 live performances which he conducted between the 1950s and the late 1990s. This is contextualized with evidence collected during ethnographic fieldwork (...) observations, presenting the opinions of Sir Charles, orchestral musicians from major London orchestras and opera houses with whom he was working (Philharmonia, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Royal Opera House, English National Opera), and production team members working for recording industry leaders (such as Decca, EMI, and Chandos). This ethnography of classical music-making gives a voice to performers and music professionals, brings to light some important and heretofore hidden issues and explores a fascinating time of intense change in the recording industry. Including consideration of ways forward for performance, education, and recording, this book will be relevant to specialist practitioners, as well as music enthusiasts interested in concert life and recording studio habits, professional performers, recordists, music students, educators, and scholars interested in classical music. (shrink)