Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Imagination, Music, and the Emotions: A Philosophical Study

Imagination, Music, and the Emotions: A Philosophical Study

Trivedi, Saam

Paperback

PhilosophyCognitionMusic Instruction: General

ISBN10: 1438467168
ISBN13: 9781438467160
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: Jul 2 2018
Pages: 205
Weight: 0.66
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

Articulates an imaginationist solution to the question of how purely instrumental music can be perceived by a listener as having emotional content.

Both musicians and laypersons can perceive purely instrumental music without words or an associated story or program as expressing emotions such as happiness and sadness. But how? In this book, Saam Trivedi discusses and critiques the leading philosophical approaches to this question, including formalism, metaphorism, expression theories, arousalism, resemblance theories, and persona theories. Finding these to be inadequate, he advocates an imaginationist solution, by which absolute music is not really or literally sad but is only imagined to be so in a variety of ways. In particular, he argues that we as listeners animate the music ourselves, imaginatively projecting life and mental states onto it. Bolstering his argument with empirical data from studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science, Trivedi also addresses and explores larger philosophical questions such as the nature of emotions, metaphors, and imagination.

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