Western music is characterized primarily by simple meters, but a number of other musical cultures, including Turkish, have both simple and complex meters. In Experiment 1, Turkish and American adults with and without musical training were asked to detect metrical changes in Turkish music with simple and complex meter. Musicians performed significantly better than nonmusicians, and performance was significantly better on simple meter than on complex meter, but Turkish listeners performed no differently than American listeners. In Experiment 2, members of (...) Turkish classical and folk music clubs who were tested on the same materials exhibited comparable sensitivity to simple and complex meters, unlike the American and Turkish listeners in Experiment 1. Together, the findings reveal important effects of musical training and culture on meter perception: trained musicians are generally more sensitive than nonmusicians, regardless of metrical complexity, but sensitivity to complex meter requires sufficient exposure to musical genres featuring such meters. (shrink)

A range of leading philosophers set the best resources of the philosophical tradition to the task of interpreting violence in its diverse expressions. >.

Beyond the major-minor tonality that characterizes classical and contemporary Western musical genres, Turkish classical and folk music offer experimental psychologists a rich modal system in which cognition, development, and enculturation can be studied. Here, we present a cross-cultural experiment concerning implicit knowledge of musical scales. Five groups of participants—American musicians and nonmusicians, Turkish musicians and nonmusicians, and Turkish classical and folk music listeners—were asked to listen to brief melodies composed using the member tones of either the major scale or the (...) rast makam, a microtonal mode found within Turkish classical and folk genres with no equivalent in Western music. Following each melody, participants were asked to identify whether a probe tone had been presented in the melody, providing confidence ratings on a six-point scale. In general, participants’ short-term memory was influenced by implicit knowledge of musical scales, with the major scale eclipsing the rast makam even in listeners experienced with Turkish genres. Prior work and future directions in cross-cultural music cognition research are discussed. (shrink)

Yates reviews Janicaud’s critique in its first iteration, then observes what the emphases of its later form indicate about the kind of phenomenology he propounds. The paper highlights the contours of Janicuad's rigorous “minimalism,” his qualified “atheism,” and the peculiar manner in which his self-described pursuit of phenomenological “possibilities” is propelled by his rejection of theological possibilities. The author questions the selective appropriation of Husserl in Janicaud’s adherence to phenomenality and neutrality by underlining ambiguities within Husserl’s early focus on intuition (...) and the now famous bracketing of “transcendence” and/or “God” set forth in. (shrink)

Bernard Freydberg’s recent work is a careful and compact study of David Hume’s signature texts: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), An Enquiry Concerning Principles of Morals (1751), and “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757). Contrary to traditional epistemological readings that comfortably situate Hume as an empiricist naturalist, Freydberg argues that he is better understood as a profound thinker of imagination and Socratic ignorance. Hume’s figurative and Platonic argumentation varies in each text, but Freydberg makes a convincing case that his (...) theoretical, moral, and aesthetic philosophies share a proto-phenomenological center in the artistry of human nature and perception. (shrink)

Christopher Yates explores how two of Walker Percy’s seminal texts call us to practice self-examination in a way that seeks to overcome deceptive clarities in our lives. It is misguided, he argues, to read the texts as ventures in surrealist exploration or pietistic moralizing. Instead, LG and LC are one project that centers on the predicament of human finitude by way of three phenomena: the dialogical unfolding of subjectivity and truth, the ethical summons of alterity, and the conversion of human (...) inauthenticity to reflective dwelling. Yates makes his case by reading Percy’s works through the lens of philosophers Mikhail Bakhtin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Heidegger. This approach fills a gap in Percy scholarship by explaining and securing the interrogative arc between Gentleman and Cosmos, and appreciating how Percy’s works enliven phenomenological accounts of human identity and knowledge. (shrink)

This article examines the theme of imagination in Ricoeur’s Living Up to Death (2009[2007]). I argue that his meditations on death are centered on the question of the imagination, and that the exorcizing mode of detachment so crucial to Ricoeur’s position amounts to a ‘refiguration’ of what he terms the ‘make-believe’. Drawing on his work in Time and Narrative , I chart the instances of the make-believe attached to death and dying as disclosures of vulnerability attending the stages of Ricoeur’s (...) threefold mimesis. This means that Living Up to Death involves a struggle of the narrative or poetic imagination to refigure the misleading con-figurations of the natural imagination when faced with death. Ricoeur’s interest in ‘schematizing’ the eternal and Essential, as well, marks a specific connection between the labors of the productive imagination and the refigura-tion of death as a transfiguration of the living. (shrink)

This article proposes a philosophical reception of writer Cormac McCarthy’s work, a reception oriented specifically toward the subject of “place” as a primary ontological register in two of his novels. More than a mere appraisal of his descriptive prose or the moral weight of his themes, this reading examines the interrogative dimension of his border-country landscapes and the existential horizon distilled therein. Read with reference to the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that McCarthy’s storied concentration on (...) place seeks to retrieve the question of primordial givenness from beneath the determinations of epistemic and objectivist judgments. So doing, his orientation parallels and contributes to an important and unsettled tension in phenomenological ontology and its aftermath: the question as to whether poetic or visual modes of ontological “measure-taking” are more appropriate to the question of the meaning, truth, and history of being. Ultimately McCarthy shows us the necessary and productive interplay of both. (shrink)

Based primarily on his 1981-1982 course, The Hermeneutics of the Subject , I contend that Michel Foucault’s robust treatment of ancient models for self-salvation answers his systematic problem of a lost spiritual art of living primarily through a sustained dichotomy between the Hellenistic-Roman and Christian models of conversion. In this way his intended recovery of an aesthetic-ascetic spiritual “resistance” is accomplished through a methodology of resistance. He relies on an accelerating arrangement of polarities between the aim and practice of immanent (...) self-return and what he takes to be the coercive discourses of transcendent self-renunciation. Though such historiography may raise questions for some readers, my aim is simply to show how, for Foucault, the dichotomizing is necessary for grounding his own understanding of the art of ”conversion.”. (shrink)

The first comparative study of Heidegger and Schelling, recognizing Schelling's place in post-Kantian GermanIdealism and his contribution to Heidegger's later thought.

Skin pigment pattern formation is a paradigmatic example of pattern formation. In zebrafish, the adult body stripes are generated by coordinated rearrangement of three distinct pigment cell‐types, black melanocytes, shiny iridophores and yellow xanthophores. A stem cell origin of melanocytes and iridophores has been proposed although the potency of those stem cells has remained unclear. Xanthophores, however, seemed to originate predominantly from proliferation of embryonic xanthophores. Now, data from Singh et al. shows that all three cell‐types derive from shared stem (...) cells, and that these cells generate peripheral neural cell‐types too. Furthermore, clonal compositions are best explained by a progressive fate restriction model generating the individual cell‐types. The numbers of adult pigment stem cells associated with the dorsal root ganglia remain low, but progenitor numbers increase significantly during larval development up to metamorphosis, likely via production of partially restricted progenitors on the spinal nerves. (shrink)

Drew M. Dalton: Longing for the other: Levinas and metaphysical desire Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-8 DOI 10.1007/s11007-012-9216-y Authors Christopher Yates, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA Journal Continental Philosophy Review Online ISSN 1573-1103 Print ISSN 1387-2842.

A study of the strain and striving in the heart of human finitude, Brian Treanor’s case for melancholic joy uses the resources of hermeneutic philosophy and the arts to galvanize a hopeful counterweight to despair. Though evil and suffering are tragically ingrained in the tissue of lived experience, and entropy and loss buffet our projects and aspirations, there remains in the landscape of being a durable mystery of goodness, beauty, and grace. Treanor pits such mystery against our calcified pessimisms and (...) arid theodicies by drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s vision for a “second naiveté” of faith, gratitude, and moral responsibility that is worthy of living in – and up to – an order of things which is dark yet shining. Melancholic joy is neither resignation nor optimism, but an attuning praxis that can be realized through responsive modes of vitality, love, attention, and tragic wisdom. (shrink)