News
New Book on Music and Consciousness
A new book
entitled Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological and Cultural
Perspectives, edited by David Clarke (University of Newcastle) and Eric Clarke
has just been published by Oxford University Press. The book addresses
fundamental questions about music and consciousness from a variety of broadly
philosophical, psychological and cultural perspectives. What is consciousness?
Why and when do we have it? Where does it come from, and how does it relate to
the lump of squishy grey matter in our heads, or to our material and social
worlds? While neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, historians, and
cultural theorists offer widely different perspectives on these fundamental
questions concerning what it is like to be human, most agree that consciousness
represents a 'hard problem'.
The emergence of consciousness studies as a multidisciplinary discourse
addressing these issues has often been associated with rapid advances in
neuroscience – perhaps giving the impression that the arts and humanities have
arrived late at the debating table. The longer historical view suggests
otherwise, but it is probably true that music has been under-represented in
accounts of consciousness. Music and Consciousness aims to redress the balance:
its twenty essays offer a timely and multi-faceted contribution to
consciousness studies, critically examining some of the existing debates and
raising new questions.
The collection makes it clear that to understand consciousness we need to do
much more than just look at brains: studying music demonstrates that
consciousness is as much to do with minds, bodies, culture, and history.
Incorporating several chapters that move outside Western philosophical
traditions, Music and Consciousness corrects any perception that the study of
consciousness is a purely occidental preoccupation. And in addition to what it
says about consciousness the volume also presents a distinctive and
thought-provoking configuration of new writings about music.