Philosophy, Music and Emotion

This text explores two issues which have been intensively debated in contemporary philosophy: the nature of music's power to express emotion, and the nature of emotion itself. It shows how closely the two topics are related and provides a radical account of what it means to say that music "expresses emotion" Geoffrey Madell maintains that most current accounts of musical expressiveness are fundamentally misguided. He attributes this fact to the influence of a famous argument of the 19th-century critic Hanslick, and also to the dominant "cognitivist" approach to the nature of emotion, which sees the essence of emotion to be the entertaining of evaluative judgements and beliefs of a certain sort, an account very much in accord with Hanslick's position. Such an approach results either in the unpersuasive view that musical expressiveness is somehow akin to human expressive gesture, or in the view that music arouses feelings which have no specific object and, unavoidably, no necessary connection with the music The book argues that the "cognitivist" account of the nature of emotion is quite false and that it needs to be replaced with a conception of emotions as states of feeling toward

Geoffrey Madell is Honorary Faculty Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Identity of the Self (Edinburgh University Press, 1981) and Mind and Materialism (Edinburgh University Press, 1988) as well as articles in the philosophy of mind, ethics and aesthetics in leading philosophical journals.