Zwicky, Wittgenstein, music

IN 1992, would it not truly have been "fresh air" if, instead of the praise of Ronald de Sousa, the U of T Press had broken with good form and marketing and placed a dissenting view of the book on the back cover of the paperbound edition of Kan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy? On a tasteless dust jacket for an oh, so expensive hardcover destined for the shelves of libraries and so, discarded?  And then from the stacks to storage?

Consider that not a single page is colour - in a book of so many reproductions.  Not even the addition of colour to the bass clef.  Or the alto clef of the Mozart.

The music extends only across Wittgenstein's taste.  The melody of Ben Jonson's 1616 "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" cannot find a place in the narrow band from Bach to Bruckner's 7.

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner. Where is that Haydn piano sonata? The Weber clarinet?

Among post-Wittgensteinians, a question of good form?  „Listen - can you hear it?“

Hopefully another edition would include links to fine interpretations of each selection included.

But is it assumed the reader can read music?  Yet we could not have the Kant with the original German?  This was Toronto Studies in Philosophy.  They had published Fackenheim.  Who are these readers of Wittgenstein who cannot read him in German?

It is as sad as those books of Haiku in translation with largely blank pages and not so much as a romanji version of the original.  No special typesetting required (beyond a few diacritics.)

What explains the absence of Suzanne Langer?  A failing of her editor?  A misplaced set of note cards?  A mis-labeled box of index cards?  A single set of large file cards used on a plane while travelling back from an APA conference - and then misplaced?

Should this post be re-worked with an eye to form, to ensure balance, to allow thought to etch the mean plate of experience?

Wittgenstein — said to have interrupted a performance of a Schubert quartet ... a question of style.  A shoebox of notes, perhaps not quite in order.

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note: the 2003 Gaspereau Press volume has the author's name in a subtle red on the title page.
v. Rorschach colour shock; red-inked seals, kanji, on Japanese prints, 朱印

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Dryer Kant

The characterization of science in the opening of D.P. Dyer's Kant's Solution for Verification in Metaphysics (U. Toronto) is a vexation.

Sixty years after the death of Boltzmann, the battle for atomism at the turn of the century should have given pause.

At the time Dryer was writing, were not the Petroleum Engineers of America battling against plate tectonics just as they now battle against global warming (geology, geography and meteorology strike me as very much sciences close to Kant's own lectures and interests) ?

Today a massive revision of the Linnaen tree of species is underway - arguably as significant a revision in biology as that stirred by Darwin, the structure of DNA/RNA and the electron microscope (and many others that come to mind only with regard to biology which were fresh at the time he was writing.)

And then there is the role of important "thought experiments" in physics which do not fit easily into his brief portrait of the "success" of science (to use Dryer's term.)

The ability of suggestions by Murray Gell-Mann to keep String Theory in constant revision without yet succumbing has troubled at least one Harvard philosopher.

For one glimpse of the current state of philosophy in relation to science and metaphysics, see the CMU work on causality associated with Clark Glymour.

For progress in philosophy in the last century, see the work of Hilary Putnam and John Searle among others.

That philosophy remains beset with sophistry may be evident in the life's work of Habermas when see in relation to Hegel, Marx, Weber and then Searle.

Economics is no doubt the most difficult to assess, with psychology and sociology following close behind (as one might expect.)

Perhaps a present day figure of Kant's stature would being with the problems besetting economics as a science in the sense of organic chemistry or genome-based botany.

For credit to Habermas, see the opposition to GM botany and GM fisheries versus GM mosquitoes.