This book provides the first in-depth exploration of the importance of music for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s life and work. Wittgenstein’s remarks on music are essential for understanding his philosophy: they are on the nature of musical understanding, the relation of music to language, the concepts of representation and expression, on melody, irony and aspect-perception, and, on the great composers belonging to the Austrian-German tradition. Biography and philosophy, this work suggests that Wittgenstein was a composer of philosophy who used the musical form as a blueprint for his own writing and thought. For Wittgenstein music is not alone, but connects and resonates with our cultural forms of life. His relation to composers, especially to Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler, enables Wittgenstein to address the question of how to do philosophy and compose music in the breakdown of tradition. Unlike his conservative musical sensibility, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is open to musical experiments. Reflecting on his remarks on music makes it possible to compare the therapeutic aim of his philosophical activity with that of music, and thus notice affinities between Wittgenstein and John Cage. Béla Szabados has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Calgary and is professor of philosophy at the University of Regina. His publications include Wittgenstein Reads Weininger (2004), Wittgenstein at the Movies (2011) and Wittgenstein on Race, Gender, and Cultural Identity: Philosophy as a Personal Endeavour (2010).

Why does Stanley Cavell's philosophical thought matter for music? And how did Cavell's musical practice and appreciation of music give shape to his indelible philosophical claims about cinema, human speech, opera, the expression of skepticism, and ordinary language philosophy? Music with Stanley Cavell in Mind provides a first-of-its-kind intervention by leading philosophers and scholars of music into an intellectual landscape in need of such charting. As a performer who then trained as a philosopher, the arc of Cavell's wide-ranging investigation of music maps consistently with a proximate concern for the features of human experience that involve music and sound, including the sound of prose, authorial voice (its possession, its divestment, its arrogation), the presence/problem/potentiality of silence in communication, and related features of sonic phenomena central to life lived at the scale of the everyday. Despite widespread scholarly fascination with the intersection of “Cavell” and “music”--that music is famously a core theme for him--no book like this has yet appeared. Moreover, our efforts here are addressed to the serious student (at all levels) and the general reader alike arriving from many precincts of thought and practice: musical performance, literary theory, cultural studies, musicology, and philosophy.

This book, bringing together contributions by forty-five authors from fourteen countries, represents mostly new material from both emerging and seasoned scholars in the field of philosophy of education. Topics range widely both within and across the four parts of the book: Wittgenstein’s biography and style as an educator and philosopher, illustrating the pedagogical dimensions of his early and late philosophy; Wittgenstein’s thought and methods in relation to other philosophers such as Cavell, Dewey, Foucault, Hegel and the Buddha; contrasting investigations of training in relation to initiation into forms of life, emotions, mathematics and the arts (dance, poetry, film, and drama), including questions from theory of mind (nativism vs. initiation into social practices), neuroscience, primate studies, constructivism and relativity; and the role of Wittgenstein’s philosophy in religious studies and moral philosophy, as well as their profound impact on his own life. This collection explores Wittgenstein not so much as a philosopher who provides a method for teaching or analyzing educational concepts but rather as one who approaches philosophical questions from a pedagogical point of view. Wittgenstein’s philosophy is essentially pedagogical: he provides pictures, drawings, analogies, similes, jokes, equations, dialogues with himself, questions and wrong answers, experiments and so on, as a means of shifting our thinking, or of helping us escape the pictures that hold us captive.

In this Element, the author set out to answer a twofold question concerning the importance of music to Wittgenstein's philosophical progression and the otherness of this sort of philosophical importance vis-...-vis philosophy of music as practiced today in the analytic tradition. The author starts with the idea of making music together and with Wittgenstein's master simile of language-as-music. The author traces these themes as they play out in Wittgenstein early, middle, and later periods. The author argues that Wittgenstein's overarching reorientation of the concept of depth pertaining to music in the aftermath of his anthropological turn, and against the backdrop of the outlook of German Romanticism, culminates in his unique view of musical profundity as 'knowledge of people.' This sets Wittgenstein's view in sharp contrast with certain convictions and debates that typify current analytically inclined philosophy of music.

Wittgenstein's thought is reflected in his reading and reception of other authors. Wittgenstein Reading approaches the moment of literature as a vehicle of self-reflection for Wittgenstein. What sounds, on the surface, like criticism (e.g. of Shakespeare) can equally be understood as a simple registration of Wittgenstein's own reaction, hence a piece of self-diagnosis or self-analysis. The book brings a representative sample of authors, from Shakespeare, Goethe, or Dostoyevsky to some that have received far less attention in Wittgenstein scholarship like Kleist, Lessing, or Wilhelm Busch and Johann Nepomuk Nestroy. Furthermore, the volume offers means for the cultural contextualization of Wittgenstein's thoughts. Unique to this book is its internal design. The editors' introduction sets the scene with regards to both biography and theory, while each of the subsequent chapters takes a quotation from Wittgenstein on a particular author as its point of departure for developing a more specific theme relating to the writer in question. This format serves to avoid the well-trodden paths of discussions on the relationship between philosophy and literature, allowing for unconventional observations to be made. Furthermore, the volume offers means for the cultural contextualization of Wittgenstein's thoughts.

While the published works of Ludwig Wittgenstein reveal the final, coalesced thoughts of this philosophical giant, Wittgenstein’s diary reveals his process of doing philosophy. Only in his private writing does Wittgenstein's philosophical practice fully come to light. Wittgenstein’s diary entries from the 1930s reveal themselves as a first-person spiritual epic. Wittgenstein agonizes over his relationship with Marguerite Respinger and tries to come to terms with its failure. He relates and interprets several of his dreams. He comments on his philosophical colleagues Frank Ramsey and G.E. Moore; on musicians such as Beethoven, Bruckner and Brahms; and on authors such as Kraus, Mann, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard. He struggles to make confessions to friends and family. He relates in painful detail his spiritual crisis in Norway in the late winter of 1937. From a man who once recommended silence about spiritual matters, we find here an honest and searing articulation of his attempts to believe and live what he finds in the Bible. Here are the raw materials for what could have been one of the great spiritual autobiographies of the twentieth century. It is available here for the first time in an affordable edition, with updated and expanded editorial notes to help the reader understand Wittgenstein’s many allusions, and with a new Introduction by Ray Monk, which places the diary in the larger arc of Wittgenstein's life.

Demonstrates the profound impact of The Poems of Ossian on composers of the Romantic Era and later: Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Massenet, and many others. Beyond Fingal's Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination is the first study in English of musical compositions inspired by the poems published in the 1760s and attributed to a purported ancient Scottish bard named Ossian. From around 1780 onwards, the poems stimulated poets, artists, and composers in Europe as well as North America to break away from the formality of the Enlightenment. The admiration for Ossian's poems -shared by Napoleon, Goethe, and Thomas Jefferson - was an important stimulus in the development of Romanticism and the music that was a central part of it. More important still was the view of the German cultural philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who saw past the controversy over the poems' authenticity to the traditional elements in these heroic poems and their mood of lament. James Porter's long-awaited book traces the traditional sources used by James Macpherson for his epoch-making prose poems and examines crucial works by composers such as Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Massenet. Many other relatively unknown composers were also moved to write operas, cantatas, songs, and instrumental pieces, some of which have proven to be powerfully evocative and well worth performing and recording.