“Dynamic Dualism”: Kurth and Riemann on Music Theory and the Mind

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Daphne Tan
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Hugo Riemann ◽  
The Mind

Abstract This article examines Ernst Kurth’s critical engagement with the ideas of Hugo Riemann and his eventual reformulation of harmonic dualism in dynamic terms. The principle of “dynamic dualism” appears most cogently in Musikpsychologie ([1931] 1947). After discussing the broader psychological movement within which this book emerged, I outline the aims and audience of Musikpsychologie and provide a detailed discussion of the dynamic dualism Kurth articulates therein. I then return to the origin of Kurth’s fascination with dualism, namely to Riemann, tracing points of intersection between the two figures across several decades. I suggest that Kurth’s displeasure with Riemann’s theories is symptomatic of a broader philosophical disagreement over the explanatory power of music theory and its relation to psychology at the time.

scholarly journals Demons of the mind: The ‘psy’ sciences and film in the long 1960s

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110285
Author(s):  
Tim Snelson ◽  
William R. Macauley
Keyword(s):  
Child Development ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Other ◽  
Research Centre ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Mind

This introduction provides context for a collection of articles that came out of a research symposium held at the Science Museum's Dana Research Centre in 2018 for the ‘ Demons of Mind: the Interactions of the ‘Psy’ Sciences and Cinema in the Sixties' project. Across a range of events and research outputs, Demons of the Mind sought to map the multifarious interventions and influences of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis) on film culture in the long 1960s. The articles that follow discuss, in order: critical engagement with theories of child development in 1960s British science fiction; the ‘horrors’ of contemporary psychiatry and neuroscience portrayed in the Hollywood blockbuster The Exorcist (1973); British social realist filmmakers' alliances with proponents of ‘anti-psychiatry’; experimental filmmaker Jane Arden's coalescence of radical psychiatry and radical feminist techniques in her ‘psychodrama’ The Other Side of the Underneath (1973); and the deployment of film technologies by ‘psy’ professionals during the post-war period to capture and interpret mother-infant interaction.

On thinking: Open letter to Hannah Arendt

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 159 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Agnes Heller ◽  
David Roberts ◽  
Peter Beilharz
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Open Letter ◽  
New School ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

Thesis Eleven is honoured to be able to publish this text by our late friend and mentor Agnes Heller. It was secured in the period before her recent death, and is published now posthumously in her memory. Echoing her earlier text written as an Imaginary Preface to Arendt’s Totalitarianism, it responds to themes in the later text, The Life of the Mind. These were among the most eminent of the minds referred to later as Women in Dark Times. Their connection was not only institutional, via the New School, but represented a deep and ongoing affinity and critical engagement in political and philosophical terms. The imaginary letter arcs around issues and questions indicated by Cicero, Kant, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, including matters of republicanism, rhetoric and the question of thinking. Best of all, it shows Agnes Heller at work, at her best: it shows her thinking. Like Arendt, she offers inspiration, provocation, through thinking.

Why Thomas Reid Matters to the Epistemology of the Social Sciences

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (279) ◽  
pp. 282-301
Author(s):  
Laurent Jaffro ◽  
Vinícius França Freitas
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Action ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Reasoning ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Mind

Abstract Little attention has been paid to the fact that Thomas Reid's epistemology applies to ‘political reasoning’ as well as to various operations of the mind. Reid was interested in identifying the ‘first principles’ of political science as he did with other domains of human knowledge. This raises the question of the extent to which the study of human action falls within the competence of ‘common sense’. Our aim is to reconstruct and assess Reid's epistemology of the sciences of social action and to determine how it connects with the fundamental tenets of his general epistemology. In the first part, we portray Reid as a methodological individualist and focus on the status of the first principles of political reasoning. The second part examines Reid's views on the explanatory power of the principles of human action. Finally, we draw a parallel between Reid's epistemology and the methodology of Weberian sociology.

Descartes' Mistake: How Afterlife Beliefs Challenge the Assumption that Humans are Intuitive Cartesian Substance Dualists

2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 387-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Mitch Hodge
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Sole Source ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Substance Dualism ◽  
Parsimonious Explanation ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Funerary Rites ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Afterlife Beliefs

AbstractThis article presents arguments and evidence that run counter to the widespread assumption among scholars that humans are intuitive Cartesian substance dualists. With regard to afterlife beliefs, the hypothesis of Cartesian substance dualism as the intuitive folk position fails to have the explanatory power with which its proponents endow it. It is argued that the embedded corollary assumptions of the intuitive Cartesian substance dualist position (that the mind and body are different substances, that the mind and soul are intensionally identical, and that the mind is the sole source of identity) are not compatible with cultural representations such as mythologies, funerary rites, iconography and doctrine as well as empirical evidence concerning intuitive folk reasoning about the mind and body concerning the afterlife. Finally, the article suggests an alternative and more parsimonious explanation for understanding intuitive folk representations of the afterlife.

scholarly journals The epistemic and pragmatic value of non-action: a predictive coding perspective on meditation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoine Lutz ◽  
Jérémie Mattout ◽  
Giuseppe Pagnoni
Keyword(s):  
Mindfulness Meditation ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Predictive Coding ◽  
The Body ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Voluntary Attention ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Psychological Models ◽  
Spontaneous Thought ◽  
The Mind

The surge of interest about mindfulness meditation is associated with a growing empirical evidence about its impact on the mind and body. Yet, despite promising phenomenological or psychological models of mindfulness, a general mechanistic understanding of meditation steeped in neuroscience is still lacking. In parallel, predictive processing approaches to the mind are rapidly developing in the cognitivesciences with an impressive explanatory power: processes apparently as diverse as perception, action, attention and learning, can be seen as unfolding and being coherently orchestrated according to the single general mandate of free-energy minimization. Here we briefly explore the possibility to supplement previous phenomenological models of focused attention meditation by formulating them in terms of active inference. We first argue that this perspective can account for how paying voluntary attention to the body in meditation helps settling the mind by downweighting habitual and automatic trajectories of (pre)motor and autonomic reactions, as well as the pull of distracting spontaneous thought at the same time. Secondly, we discuss a possible relationship between phenomenological notions such as opacity and de-reification, and the deployment of precision-weighting via the voluntary allocation of attention. We propose the adoption of this theoretical framework as a promising strategy for contemplative research. Explicit computational simulations and comparisons with experimental and phenomenological data will be critical to fully develop this approach.

Evolving Enactivism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel D. Hutto ◽  
Erik Myin
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Theoretical Support ◽  
Powerful Means ◽  
Processing Information ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Interactive Dynamic ◽  
Basic Cognition

Evolving Enactivism argues that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Building on their earlier book Radicalizing Enactivism, which proposes that there can be forms of cognition without content, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin demonstrate the unique explanatory advantages of recognizing that only some forms of cognition have content while others—the most elementary ones—do not. They offer an account of the mind in duplex terms, proposing a complex vision of mentality in which these basic contentless forms of cognition interact with content-involving ones. Hutto and Myin argue that the most basic forms of cognition do not, contrary to a currently popular account of cognition, involve picking up and processing information that is then used, reused, stored, and represented in the brain. Rather, basic cognition is contentless—fundamentally interactive, dynamic, and relational. In advancing the case for a radically enactive account of cognition, Hutto and Myin propose crucial adjustments to our concept of cognition and offer theoretical support for their revolutionary rethinking, emphasizing its capacity to explain basic minds in naturalistic terms. They demonstrate the explanatory power of the duplex vision of cognition, showing how it offers powerful means for understanding quintessential cognitive phenomena without introducing scientifically intractable mysteries into the mix.

Topic neutrality and the mind–body problem

2000 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-207
Author(s):  
CLIFFORD WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Body Problem ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Mind

In a previous paper I argued that there is conceptual parity between Christian materialism and Christian dualism because nonmatter is neutral with respect to thinking and feeling – it might do these but it also might not. This undermines the explanatory power of immaterial souls. J. P. Moreland responded by saying that dualists reject this neutral conception of souls: souls are not generic immaterial substances, but consist of a special kind of nonmatter, namely, nonmatter whose essence it is to think and feel. I reply that conceptual parity can still be maintained: Christian materialists can claim that brains are not neutral either, but consist of a special kind of matter, namely, thinking and feeling matter. So there is parity whether one adopts a topic-neutral approach or an essentialist approach.

scholarly journals Harmonic Closure: Music Theory and Perception

1992 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burton S. Rosner ◽  
Eugene Narmour
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Correlational Analysis ◽  
Root Position ◽  
Controversial Topic ◽  
Scale Step

Music theorists have often disagreed about the material variables that determine the perception of harmonic closure. To investigate this controversial topic, we presented subjects with pairs of selected two-chord progressions. The subjects judged which member of each pair seemed more closed. Preferences varied across pairs of cadences and generally obeyed transitivity. Quantitative reformulation of theoretical harmonic variables permitted correlational analysis of the results. Three or four variables, including one or two that reflect learned stylistic structures, best explained our findings. Conventional harmonic factors of scale step, soprano position, and root position demonstrated surprisingly little explanatory power.

scholarly journals THE IMPROVEMENT AND UTILIZATION OF TUSSOCK GRASSLANDS: A SCIENTIST'S VIEWPOINT

1966 ◽  
pp. 59-78
Author(s):  
K.F. O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Power ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Rigorous Testing ◽  
Tussock Grassland ◽  
Nobel Prizewinner ◽  
Traditional Assumption ◽  
The Mind

THERE has been a large increase in the volume of facts about tussock grassland improvement in the last few years. Although facts are important to the scientist, he is not merely a facts-gatherer. He also makes general statements. In the tradition of Anglo-Saxon logic formulated by John Stuart Mill, the scientist derives these general statements from the facts by the process called induction. Nobel Prizewinner for Medicine, Dr P. B. Medawar, questions this traditional assumption. He claims that "truth takes shape in the mind of the observer: it is his imaginative grasp of what might be true that provides the incentive for finding out, so far as he can what is true." If this imaginative idea of truth still fits the facts after rigorous testing, then it is a good idea and the facts themselves can be conveniently forgotten. Paradoxically, therefore, the factual burden of a science grows less as a science matures. As a science advances, "particular facts are comprehended within and therefore in a sense annihilated by general statements of steadily increasing explanatory power and compass".

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