A Phenomenological Study of Music's Formalism and Expression

I am interested in the possibility of resituating the ethical through aphenomenological study of performative aspects of music and philosophy.My task will be to show that beneath a certain tradition of philosophical texts lies a system of ethics essentially musical in its expression. The approach taken toward these texts will be phenomenological: that is to say, I will not be reading them strictly in terms of their propositional content; rather, I will be trying to understand the way that consciousness engages with and constructs meaning through the particular natureof their dynamic expressivity. A phenomenological account of time # thematized as rhythm # will be the conceptual framework that I will be using to navigate the texts that figure in the dissertation. I will examine rhythm as a constitutive structure of our orientation to the world. It is this orientation to the world that I hope then to flesh out as the foundation for a new ethics # a new ethics that would be understood specifically as the expression of musical attunement and rhythm.

Keywords:Phenomenology, Music

Disciplines:Philosophy, Theory and methodology of philosophy

Project type:PhD project