Rhythm is the fundamental pulse that animates poetry, music, and dance across all cultures. And yet the recent explosion of scholarly interest across disciplines in the aural dimensions of aesthetic experience--particularly in sociology, cultural and media theory, and literary studies--has yet to explore this fundamental category. This book furthers the discussion of rhythm beyond the discrete conceptual domains and technical vocabularies of musicology and prosody. With original essays by philosophers, psychologists, musicians, literary theorists, and ethno-musicologists, The Philosophy of Rhythm opens up wider-and plural-perspectives, examining formal affinities between the historically interconnected fields of music, dance, and poetry, while addressing key concepts such as embodiment, movement, pulse, and performance. Volume editors Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison bring together a range of key questions: What is the distinction between rhythm and pulse? What is the relationship between everyday embodied experience, and the specific experience of music, dance, and poetry? Can aesthetics offer an understanding of rhythm that helps inform our responses to visual and other arts, as well as music, dance, and poetry? And, what is the relation between psychological conceptions of entrainment, and the humane concept of rhythm and meter? Overall, The Philosophy of Rhythm appeals across disciplinary boundaries, providing a unique overview of a neglected aspect of aesthetic experience.

Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists’ masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty’s thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty’s most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.

Rhythm: A Theological Category argues that, as a pervasive dimension of human existence with theological implications, rhythm ought to be considered a category of theological significance. Philosophers and theologians have drawn on the category of rhythm—patterned movements of repetition and variation-to describe reality, however, the ways in which rhythm is used and understood differ based on a variety of metaphysical commitments with varying theological implications. Lexi Eikelboom brings those implications into the open through using resources from phenomenology, prosody, and the social sciences to analyse and evaluate uses of rhythm in metaphysical and theological accounts of reality. The analysis relies on a distinction from prosody between a synchronic approach to rhythm, which observes the whole at once and considers how various dimensions of a rhythm hold together harmoniously, and a diachronic approach, which focuses on the ways in which time unfolds as the subject experiences it. Based on an engagement with the twentieth-century Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara alongside thinkers as diverse as Augustine and the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, Eikelboom proposes an approach to rhythm that serves the concerns of theological conversation. It then demonstrates the difference that including rhythm in such theological conversation makes to how we think about questions such as "what is creation" and "what is the nature of the God-creature relationship?" from the perspective of rhythm. As a theoretical category, capable of expressing metaphysical commitments, yet shaped by the cultural rhythms in which those expressing such commitments are embedded, rhythm is particularly significant for theology as a phenomenon through which culture and embodied experience influence doctrine.

Edward A. Lippman?s writings on musical aesthetics comprise a wide variety of areas and employ both systematic and historical approaches, reflecting throughout his unrivaled knowledge of the philosophical literature on music and his deep understanding of the musical repertory. These essays span a broad range of subjects, from the ancients? sense of what music encompasses to the experience of rhythm in Anton Webern?s work. ø Lippman surveys the physical and physiological factors that condition musical perception, and he explores the effect of sung text in vocal music. In the more purely philosophical realm, he argues persuasively that music speaks in its own terms, not in any formalistic sense but through the symbolic meanings it conveys. ø The historically focused essays include investigations of the aesthetic thinking of Wagner and Schumann, an endeavor that leads Lippman to probe the sources and drives behind musical creativity. Elsewhere he explores the development of particular musical styles. The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Music draws upon both philosophy and musicology in demonstrating how the interpretation of music extends far beyond the scope of conventional theory and analysis.

Rhythm is the fundamental pulse that animates poetry, music, and dance across all cultures. And yet the recent explosion of scholarly interest across disciplines in the aural dimensions of aesthetic experience--particularly in sociology, cultural and media theory, and literary studies--has yet to explore this fundamental category. This book furthers the discussion of rhythm beyond the discrete conceptual domains and technical vocabularies of musicology and prosody. With original essays by philosophers, psychologists, musicians, literary theorists, and ethno-musicologists, The Philosophy of Rhythm opens up wider-and plural-perspectives, examining formal affinities between the historically interconnected fields of music, dance, and poetry, while addressing key concepts such as embodiment, movement, pulse, and performance. Volume editors Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison bring together a range of key questions: What is the distinction between rhythm and pulse? What is the relationship between everyday embodied experience, and the specific experience of music, dance, and poetry? Can aesthetics offer an understanding of rhythm that helps inform our responses to visual and other arts, as well as music, dance, and poetry? And, what is the relation between psychological conceptions of entrainment, and the humane concept of rhythm and meter? Overall, The Philosophy of Rhythm appeals across disciplinary boundaries, providing a unique overview of a neglected aspect of aesthetic experience.

Off Beat: Pluralizing Rhythm draws attention to rhythm as a tool for analyzing various cultural objects. In fields as diverse as music, culture, nature, and economy, rhythm can be seen as a phenomenon that both connects and divides. It suggests a certain measure with which people, practices, and cultures may comply. Yet, for this very reason rhythm can also function as a field of exclusion, contestation, and debate. In that respect, rhythm possesses an underestimated meaning-creating potential. Whereas its connecting force is often accentuated in the aesthetic, political, and commercial usage of the term, the divisive aspect of rhythm is at least as important. This volume wants to rid rhythm of its harmless, nearly esoteric, reputation as a cosmic unifier by understanding it in the light of the contemporary medial turn. In the present collection of essays, we have encouraged approaches that combine political, aesthetic, musical, and theoretical dimensions of rhythm. Jan Hein Hoogstad is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen is Associate Professor in the Section for Aesthetics and Culture, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University, Denmark.