Schoenberg, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle PDF Download

Author: James Kenneth Wright
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039112876
Category : Logical positivism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
In 2006, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle received a Lewis Lockwood Award (Finalist) from the American Musicological Society, for outstanding new books on musicological topics. This study examines relativistic aspects of Arnold Schoenberg's harmonic and aesthetic theories in the light of a framework of ideas presented in the early writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the logician, philosopher of language, and Schoenberg's contemporary and Austrian compatriot. The author has identified correspondences between the writings of Schoenberg, the early Wittgenstein (the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in particular), and the Vienna Circle of philosophers, on a wide range of topics and themes. Issues discussed include the nature and limits of language, musical universals, theoretical conventionalism, word-to-world correspondence in language, the need for a fact- and comparison-based approach to art criticism, and the nature of music-theoretical formalism and mathematical modeling. Schoenberg and Wittgenstein are shown to have shared a vision that is remarkable for its uniformity and balance, one that points toward the reconciliation of the positivist/relativist dualism that has dominated recent discourse in music theory. Contrary to earlier accounts of Schoenberg's harmonic and aesthetic relativism, this study identifies a solid epistemological core underlying his thought, a view that was very much in step with Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, and thereby with the most vigorous and pivotal developments in early twentieth century intellectual history.

Author: Allan Janik
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351326147
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Fin de siecle Vienna was once memorably described by Karl Kraus as a "proving ground for the destruction of the world." In the decades leading to the World War that brought down the Austro-Hungarian empire, the city was at once an operetta dream world masking social and political problems and tension, as well as a center for the far-reaching explorations and innovations in music, art, science, and philosophy that would help to define modernity. One of the most powerful critiques of the retreat into fantasy was that of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early career in Vienna has helped frame debates about ethical and aesthetic values in culture. In Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited Allan Janik expands upon his work Wittgenstein's Vienna (co-authored with Stephen Toulmin) to amplify a number of significant points concerning the genesis of Wittgenstein's thought, the nature of Viennese culture, and criticism of contemporary culture. Although Wittgenstein is the central figure in this volume, Janik places considerable emphasis on other influential figures, both Viennese and non-Viennese, in order to break down some of the persistent stereotypes about the philosopher and his surrounding culture, especially the myths of "carefree" Vienna and Wittgenstein the positivist. The persistence of these myths, in Janik's view, stems in part from the inability of many historians to differentiate past from present in the evaluation of intellectual currents. Janik reviews a number of figures overlooked in assessing Wittgenstein: Otto Weininger, Kraus, Schoenberg, Nietzsche, Wagner, Ibsen, Offenbach, and Georg Trakl. All of these, Janik demonstrates, are absolutely necessary to understand what was at stake in the debates on aestheticism and the critique of a modern culture. Wittgenstein's efforts to recognize the limits of thought and language and thus to be fair to science, religion, and art account for his place of honor among critical modernists. These essays elucidate Wittgenstein's perspective on our culture.

Author: Allan Janik
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
ISBN: 9781566631327
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This is a remarkable book about a man (perhaps the most important and original philosopher of our age), a society (the corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of dissolution), and a city (Vienna, with its fin-de si cle gaiety and corrosive melancholy). The central figure in this study of a crumbling society that gave birth to the modern world is Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker. With others, including Freud, Viktor Adler, and Arnold Schoenberg, he forged his ideas in a classical revolt against the stuffy, doomed, and moralistic lives of the old regime. As a portrait of Wittgenstein, the book is superbly realized; it is even better as a portrait of the age, with dazzling and unusual parallels to our own confused society. "Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have acted on a striking premise: an understanding of prewar Vienna, Wittgenstein's native city, will make it easier to comprehend both his work and our own problems....This is an independent work containing much that is challenging, new, and useful."--New York Times Book Review.

Author: Allan S. Janik
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9783211830772
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
"Wittgenstein in Vienna" documents Wittgenstein's life in the city: the places he, his family and those with whom he was in contact, lived, worked, entertained and socialized. The book will be a source of enrichment to the cultural tourist in Vienna. Its authors are authorities on Wittgenstein's philosophy especially in relation to Viennese culture and popular culture, in particular the world of the coffee house and cabaret.

Author: Allan Janik
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
"Wittgenstein in Viennaa documents Wittgensteina (TM)s life in the city: the places where he, his family and those with whom he was in contact lived, worked, entertained and were socialized. The book will be a source of enrichment to the cultural tourist in Vienna. Its authors are authorities on Wittgensteina (TM)s philosophy especially in relation to Viennese culture and popular culture, in particular to the world of the coffee house and cabaret.

Author: Béla Szabados
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401210993
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
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).

Author: Enzo De Pellegrin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402099096
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The philosophical thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein continues to have a profound influence that transcends barriers between philosophical disciplines and reaches beyond philosophy itself. Less than one hundred years after their publication, his early masterpiece 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' and the posthumously published 'Philosophical Investigations' have emerged as two classic philosophical texts, each of which has elicited widely divergent readings and spawned contesting schools of interpretation. This collection of original essays by leading experts offers deep insights into the forces that shaped and influenced Wittgenstein's thought on a broad variety of topics. It also contains the text - in both the original German and an English translation by Juliet Floyd and Burton Dreben - of letters and cards sent to Wittgenstein by the philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege, which shed light on their interaction during the crucial period when Wittgenstein completed work on the 'Tractatus'. This important record of a philosophical friendship is complemented by a scholarly apparatus and an introduction. Other essays featured in this volume document and discuss Wittgenstein's thinking on music and religion as well as issues that take center stage in the 'Investigations' such as Wittgenstein's account of rule-following. The volume provides an invaluable research tool not only for students of the history of philosophy and for scholars of both Wittgenstein and Frege but also for anyone interested in the intellectual history of the first half of the twentieth century.

Author: Anat Matar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501302434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
In the last half-century Ludwig Wittgenstein's relevance beyond analytic philosophy, to continental philosophy, to cultural studies, and to the arts has been widely acknowledged. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was published in 1922 - the annus mirabilis of modernism - alongside Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's The Waste Land, Mansfield's The Garden Party and Woolf's Jacob's Room. Bertolt Brecht's first play to be produced, Drums in the Night, was first staged in 1922, as was Jean Cocteau's Antigone, with settings by Pablo Picasso and music by Arthur Honegger. In different ways, all these modernist landmarks dealt with the crisis of representation and the demise of eternal metaphysical and ethical truths. Wittgenstein's Tractatus can be read as defining, expressing and reacting to this crisis. In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein adopted a novel philosophical attitude, sensitive to the ordinary uses of language as well as to the unnoticed dogmas they may betray. If the gist of modernism is self-reflection and attention to the way form expresses content, then Wittgenstein's later ideas - in their fragmented form as well as their ?ear-opening? contents - deliver it most precisely. Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism shows Wittgenstein's work, both early and late, to be closely linked to the modernist Geist that prevailed during his lifetime. Yet it would be wrong to argue that Wittgenstein was a modernist tout court. For Wittgenstein, as well as for modernist art, understanding is not gained by such straightforward statements. It needs time, hesitation, a variety of articulations, the refusal of tempting solutions, and perhaps even a sense of defeat. It is such a vision of the linkage between Wittgenstein and modernism that guides the present volume.

Author: Matthew Arndt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135197579X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This book examines the origin, content, and development of the musical thought of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg. One of the premises is that Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s inner musical lives are inseparable from their inner spiritual lives. Curiously, Schenker and Schoenberg start out in much the same musical-spiritual place, yet musically they split while spiritually they grow closer. The reception of Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s work has sidestepped this paradox of commonality and conflict, instead choosing to universalize and amplify their conflict. Bringing to light a trove of unpublished material, Arndt argues that Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s conflict is a reflection of tensions within their musical and spiritual ideas. They share a particular conception of the tone as an ideal sound realized in the spiritual eye of the genius. The tensions inherent in this largely psychological and material notion of the tone and this largely metaphysical notion of the genius shape both their musical divergence on the logical (technical) level in theory and composition, including their advocacy of the Ursatz versus twelvetone composition, and their spiritual convergence, including their embrace of Judaism. These findings shed new light on the musical and philosophical worlds of Schenker and Schoenberg and on the profound artistic and spiritual questions with which they grapple.

Author: Nicole V. Gagné
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538122987
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on the most important composers, musicians, methods, styles, and media in modernist and postmodern classical music.