I wrote: I don't really know what makes for that "authentic" quality of performance. ...but I do know it is a real phenomena in musical performance -- and its existence gives the lie to many relativist claims in aesthetics. It's there and it's the best and the rest are lesser.
Donal replied: Now this reflects my experience as to it being a "real phenomena"; no one who likes the Beatles wants to buy copied versions (that's not strictly true) -my point is that here the copy versions of original material either add or detract (or both) but, whichever, this is all real phenomena. Real as the table as phenomena. This shows to me that while relativist theories might have much to tell us, the right theory of art will have to be "objectivist". "It's there"; what is there may be debatable, but that "It" is real and not subjectivist or relativist illusion.
_____Recently read Jonah Lehrer's _How We Decide_, a popular survey of the recent cognitive science research on decision-making. One of the big shocks in the book is the empirical refutation of so-called "rational decisions." Apparently people who lose their emotional capacities through trauma are unable to make decisions -- or only make them slowly through torturous Gantt chart-like analysis -- and many of our best decisions are made on the (emotional) level of neurotransmitters. Dopamine says yes and so do we. Of course, a healthy mind is able to overcome the cognitive prejudice toward emotion, knowing when not to trust the hunch, but it seems that our emotional lives are so thoroughly welded to our reasoning that parsing them on an abstract level seems less and less tenable.
Then I found: Philosophy’s great experiment David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton 1st March 2009 — Issue 156Philosophers used to combine conceptual reflections with practical experiment. The trendiest new branch of the discipline, known as x-phi, wants to return to those days. Some philosophers don't like it
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/03/philosophysgreatexperiment/ What are the Kantians to do? Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
