On Music and Metaphysics

Kalkavage "discusses the metaphysics of music: music’s role in the liberal arts, the paradox in the union of rational and irrational, order and feeling in its composition, and music’s connection and reflection of the deeper order of the natural world, of being."

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Peter Kalkavage, PhD

Please join Peter Kalkavage as he discusses the metaphysics of music: music’s role in the liberal arts, the paradox in the union of rational and irrational, order and feeling in its composition, and music’s connection and reflection of the deeper order of the natural world, of being.

Introduction: In this podcast, we hear from Peter Kalkavage, a tutor at St John’s College and author of The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Dr. Kalkavage discusses his writing about philosophy and music. Reading Dr. Kalkavage’s writing, you can tell that one of his aims isn’t just to think about music as a fine art, but to think about music as itself a way of thinking. His approach allows him to write about and think through music in some surprising or perhaps just unfamiliar ways: He asks how music contributes to the formation of one’s opinions, one’s beliefs about the world. But then he also writes about music in ways that are familiar, but that require a great deal of imagination and precision. Dr. Kalkavage asks why music—particularly classical music and sacred music but also some rock n roll thrown in—makes us feel certain ways, gives form to our emotions. In a sense, why does music helps us feel our own emotions?

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The featured image is “The Three Musicians” (circa 1618), by Diego Velázquez, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.