Philosophy, Music and Emotion explores two contentious issues in contemporary philosophy: the nature of music´s power to express emotion, and the nature of emotion itself. It shows how closely the two are related and provides a radically new account of what it means to say that music "expresses emotion." Geoffrey Madell maintains that most current accounts of musical expressiveness are fundamentally misguided. He attributes this fact to the influence of a famous argument of the nineteenth-century critic Hanslick, and also (...) to the dominant "cognitivist" approach to the nature of emotion, which sees the essence of emotion to be the entertaining of evaluative judgments and beliefs. This book argues that the cognitivist account of the nature of emotion is false and should be replaced with a conception of emotions as states of feeling. Central to this bold analysis is a new account of two closely connected mental states, desire and pleasure, and their role in human motivation. (shrink)

It is a remarkable feature of most contemporary discussions of emotion that they have been conducted without any reference to what it could mean to talk of the expression of emotion in music. This is a crucial absence, I shall argue, since a proper understanding of music's expression of emotion must lead to a correct view of the nature of emotion itself. Such an understanding will yield the view that emotion is a state of consciousness which is both intentional and (...) affective, and at the same time totally undermine the view that emotions are, or necessarily involve, judgments or evaluations. (shrink)

In this volume, Geoffrey Madell develops a revised account of the self, making a compelling case for why the "simple" or "anti-criterial" view of personal identity warrants a robust defense. Madell critiques recent discussions of the self for focusing on features which are common to all selves, and which therefore fail to capture the uniqueness of each self. In establishing his own view of personal identity, Madell proposes that there is always a gap between ‘A is f (...) and g’ and ‘ I am f and g’ ; , that a complete description of the world offered without recourse to indexicals will fail to account for the contingent truth that I am one of the persons described; and , that an account of conscious perspectives on the world must take into account what it means for an apparently arbitrary one of these perspectives to be mine . Engaging with contemporary positions on the first person, embodiment, psychological continuity, and other ongoing arguments, Madell contends that there can be no such thing as a criterion of personal identity through time, that no bodily or psychological continuity approach to the issue can succeed, and that personal identity through time must be absolute, not a matter of degree. Madell’s view that the nature of the self is substantively different from that of objects in the world will generate significant discussion and debate among philosophers of mind. (shrink)

The idea of social justice belongs to a narrow group of philosophical concepts which have been frequently and eagerly discussed by moderns. Many different authors, not only philosophers, have recognized this idea as being crucial to any social approach - others have applied it with considerable enthusiasm to their own discourses on the social order. To mention Karl Marks and Frederic Engels is enough. Unfortunately, professional philosophical works dedicated to the idea of social justice have been scarce. It is so (...) not only because the main issue of humanistic production on social justice up to now belongs mostly to writers, columnists or even politicians rather than to systematic thinkers, but also because the question itself is wide, complicated and laden with problems of application. The idea of social justice seems even to be somehow ideologically biased. Prof. Stanisław Kowalczyk, a fertile scholar of the Catholic University in Lublin, Poland, presents in his recent book the past and the present of the idea of social justice, doing so with good methodology and without ideological prejudices. (shrink)

(1989). Physicalism and the content of thought∗. Inquiry: Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 107-121.

In ‘The Concept of a Person’ Ayer presents a theory of personal identity which has never, to my knowledge, attracted the close attention which it deserves. The theory puts forward bodily continuity as the central criterion of personal identity. In this, of course, Ayer does not differ from many other philosophers who have written on this subject. The real interest of Ayer's view is that it is quite explicit that the body is taken as the principle of unity underlying one's (...) experiences, as that in virtue of which a series of experiences are the experiences of one person. Without the body, ‘not only is it not clear how the individual experiences are to be identified, but there appears to be no principle according to which they can be grouped together; there is no answer to the question what makes two experiences which are separate in time the experiences of the same self’ . Some link between experiences there must be. Memory cannot serve as this link, since remembering an experience already implies thinking of it as one's own. The only acceptable candidate is the body. (shrink)

Democracy was never praised in unanimity. Nor was it praised by everybody. Its greatest supporters were usually its greatest critics. Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of famous Democracy in America, used to call political parties an „evil inherent in free governments". Being so impressed by the enthusiasm of Americans for joining associations, probably he would never expect that some generations later Jonathan Rauch will call the same genuine American spirit „demosclerotical" and „hyperpluralistic". Stanislaw Kowalczyk writes about democracy from a far (...) different prospective. He completely ignores all factual data and tries to convince the reader that democracy is predominantly a philosophical quest. And Kowalczyk is right. He is right at least to the extent that he discusses several political ideas and popular Ideologies always underlying all the controversies of our modern society. Since he does it very carefully and accurately, Kowalczyk reveals them very effectively. (shrink)

Here are some sentences from Fred Dretske's book Naturalising the Mind:For a materialist there are no facts that are accessible to only one person … If the subjective life of another being, what it is like to be that creature, seems inaccessible, this must be because we fail to understand what we are talking about when we talk about its subjective states. If S feels some way, and its feeling some way is a material state, how can it be impossible (...) for us to know how S feels? Though each of us has direct information about our own experiences, there is no privileged access. If you know where to look, you can get the same information I have about the character of my experiences. This is a result of thinking about the mind in naturalistic terms. Subjectivity becomes part of the objective order. For materialists, this is as it should be. (shrink)

The common materialist view that a functional account of intentionality will eventually be produced is rejected, as is the notion that intentional states are multiply realisable. It is argued also that, contrary to what many materialists have held, the causation of behaviour by intentional states rules out the possibility of a complete explanation of human behaviour in physical terms, and that this points to substance dualism. Kant's criticism of the Cartesian self as a substance, endorsed by P. F. Strawson, rests (...) on a misinterpretation of Descartes. The so-called , which Kim sees to be the crucial objection to substance dualism, is examined, and Kim's arguments are rejected. (shrink)

Geoffrey Madell introduces the puzzle of personal identity.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, stringent lockdowns and sudden adjustments were enacted, both of which had a devastating effect on the economy of the Philippines and the method of education that was in place at the time. This resulted in shifts and serious challenges for everyone, particularly pupils from marginalized homes. Hence, this study employed a correlational design to determine if there is a significant relationship between academic burnout and academic procrastination among 150 grade 12 senior high school (...) students. The researchers used two instruments: Academic Procrastination Scale (APS) and Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) to measure the variables. Moreover, the statistical analysis reveals that the r coefficient of 0.80 indicates a high positive correlation between the variables. The p-value of 0.00, which is less than 0.05, leads to the decision to reject the null hypothesis. Hence, a significant relationship exists between procrastination and academic burnout among grade 12 senior high school students. (shrink)

The central fact about the problem of personal identity is that it is a problem posed by an apparent dichotomy: the dichotomy between the objective, third-person viewpoint on the one hand and the subjective perspective provided by the first-person viewpoint on the other. Everyone understands that the mind/body problem is precisely the problem of what to do about another apparent dichotomy, the duality comprising states of consciousness on the one hand and physical states of the body on the other. By (...) contrast, contemporary discussions of the problem of personal identity generally display little or no recognition of the divide which to my mind is at the heart of the problem. As a consequence, there has been a relentlessly third-personal approach to the issue, and the consequent proposal of solutions which stand no chance at all of working. I think the idea that the problem is to be clarified by an appeal to the idea of a human being is the latest manifestation of this mistaken approach. I am thinking in particular of the claim that what ought to govern our thinking on this issue is the fact that human beings constitute a natural kind, and that standard members of this kind can be said to have some sort of essence. Related to this is the idea that ‘person’, while not itself a natural kind term, is not a notion which can be framed in entire independence of this natural kind. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead is a prominent contemporary philosopher and scientist. He was an active participant of the scientific revolution in the two very first decades of this century. In a concise book dedicated to his philosophy the Author considers the concept of beauty elaborated by Whitehead, especially in his two principal works: Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas.

The encyclical Fides et ratio: On the Relationship Between Faith and Reason, written by Pope John Paul II in the summer of 1998 and published in the Vatican City 14th September of the same year, received considerable amount of commentaries in Poland. Several different volumes have already appeared: there are proceedings of some scientific meetings, some collected works, and a special, philosophical edition of the monthly review „Znak".