Music And Philosophy (Marquette Studies in Philosophy)
by Gabriel Marcel
Marquette Studies in Philosophy
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Music played a central role in the thought of existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973). One of the most tantalizing claims he made was in a set of conversations with Paul Ricoeur. Employing a geographic metaphor, he claimed that philosophy was the continent of his work while his plays formed the off-shore islands; but what was deepest was music as the water that conjoins the two. One who wishes to understand how he thought of music will find that his philosophical writings show more contain only a few, quasi-aphoristic, though significantly penetrating things about the nature of music and its relation to his thought. Disappointingly, neither his short An Essay in Autobiography of 1947 nor his larger autobiography of 1971, Awakenings, adds much to that beyond a few remarks. But the latter work makes reference to an article, La musique dans mon vie et mon oeuvre, a lecture he delivered in Vienna in 1959, that turned out to be a significantly richer source. And if one turns to his bibliography, one discovers that, as a music critic, Marcel published over 100 items on music--including Musique dans mon vie None of them are available in English. Those of greater length and philosophical interest were gathered together, along with several shorter representative pieces, in the work entitled L'esthetique musicale de Gabriel Marcel that appeared in the Presence de Gabriel Marcel series. In order to enrich and deepen the appreciation of Marcel's thought in the English-speaking world by following up his understanding of the central role of music in his thought, but also to underscore the central role of music in his thought, but also to underscore the central importance of the aesthetic inhuman experience, we have selected the main articles that appeared in that work for translation here. Marcel complained that (as of 1959) commentators had not paid significant attention to the close connection between music and philosophy. The present text should remedy that. show lessTags
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Gabriel Marcel has been described as a theistic or Christian existentialist. Born in Paris of Protestant parents, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1924. Prior to his conversion, he had immersed himself in idealism, as his first book, a study of Royce's metaphysics, reveals. Before Jaspers and Heidegger were known to French intellectuals, show more Marcel had written about themes central to existentialism, but with a religious twist. He had acknowledged concern for the vitality and pervasiveness of religious experience, and, like Martin Buber, he had pointed to the sociality of human experience, which bears witness to the presence of the Divine. For Marcel, Being involves participation. No one can be separated from the whole of Being to which he or she is related. Nor can a person be reduced to merely a facet of Being; for he or she is a concrete individual, with experience that is immediate, spontaneous, unpredictable. Though entranced by the mystery of existence, a person may illuminate it by means of philosophical reflection. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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