Le 1er juillet 2017
de 14h30 à 15h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 6
Séance - Philosophical Approaches
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Jessica Wiskus
At the turn of the 20th century, not music but philosophy as a discipline stood on the brink. The newest science – psychology – redefined questions of meaning by taking account of empirical evidence in the brain. Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen responded to this challenge by developing phenomenology as a Wissenschaftslehre – a science of science – concerned with the relation between the natural laws of empirical psychology and the formal laws of logic.
How remarkable, then, that after the turn of the 21st century, music analysis finds itself in a similar situation; the contemporary domain of music analysis seems to be ceded to a new science – neuroscience – that promises an empirical account of musical meaning. Yet, like the psychologism that Husserl refuted in 1900, the neuroscience of today risks reducing musical meaning to the natural acts of the subject.
My aim is to investigate the correlation between the formal idea and natural act within the field of music. I draw upon the third investigation of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen and apply this formal system to his analysis of time-consciousness in Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917). Both texts are suitable for application to musical concerns, growing as they do out of Husserl’s positive reception of the work of Carl Stumpf (particularly, his Tonpsychologie of 1890). They show that is not necessary to oppose the empiricism of neuroscience to the theory of music; thanks to phenomenological analysis, we have in our hands a clarification of their common epistemological ground.
