This book provides a new approach to the intersections between music and philosophy. It features articles that rethink the concepts of musical work and performance from ontological and epistemological perspectives and discuss issues of performing practices that involve the performer’s and listener’s perceptions. In philosophy, the notion of essence has enjoyed a renaissance. However, in the humanities in general, it is still viewed with suspicion. This collection examines the ideas of essence and context as they apply to music. A common concern when thinking of music in terms of essence is the plurality of music. There is also the worry that thinking in terms of essence might be an overly conservative way of imposing fixity on something that evolves. Some contend that we must take into account the varying historical and cultural contexts of music, and that the idea of an essence of music is therefore a fantasy. This book puts forward an innovative approach that effectively addresses these concerns. It shows that it is, in fact, possible to find commonalities among the many kinds of music. The coverage combines philosophical and musicological approaches with bioethics, biology, linguistics, communication theory, phenomenology, and cognitive science. The respective chapters, written by leading musicologists and philosophers, reconsider the fundamental essentialist and contextualist approaches to music creation and experience in light of twenty-first century paradigm shifts in music philosophy.

Substance and Essence in Aristotle is a close study of Aristotle's most profound—and perplexing—treatise: Books VII-IX of the Metaphysics. These central books, which focus on the nature of substance, have gained a deserved reputation for their difficulty, inconclusiveness, and internal inconsistency. Despite these problems, Witt extracts from Aristotle's text a coherent and provocative view about sensible substance by focusing on Aristotle's account of form or essence. After exploring the context in which Aristotle's discussion of sensible substance takes place, Witt turns to his analysis of essence. Arguing against the received interpretation, according to which essences are classificatory, Witt maintains that a substance's essence is what causes it to exist. In addition, Substance and Essence in Aristotle challenges the orthodox view that Aristotelian essences are species-essences, defending instead the controversial position that they are individual essences. Finally, Witt compares Aristotelian essentialism to contemporary essentialist theories, focusing in particular on Kripke's work. She concludes that fundamental differences between Aristotelian and contemporary essentialist theories highlight important features of Aristotle's theory and the philosophical problems and milieu that engendered it.

This collection of essays covers the classical heritage and Islamic culture, classical Arabic science and philosophy, and Muslim religious sciences, showing continuation of Greek and Persian thought as well as original Muslim contributions to the sciences, philosophy, religion, and culture of Islam.

The eleventh-century philosopher and physician Abu Ali ibn Sina (d. A.D. 1037) was known in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna. An analysis of the sources and evolution of Avicenna's metaphysics, this book focuses on the answers he and his predecessors gave to two fundamental pairs of questions: what is the soul and how does it cause the body; and what is God and how does He cause the world? To respond to these challenges, Avicenna invented new concepts and distinctions and reinterpreted old ones. The author concludes that Avicenna's innovations are a turning point in the history of metaphysics. Avicenna's metaphysics is the culmination of a period of synthesis during which philosophers fused together a Neoplatonic project (reconciling Plato with Aristotle) with a Peripatetic project (reconciling Aristotle with himself). Avicenna also stands at the beginning of a period during which philosophers sought to integrate the Arabic version of the earlier synthesis with Islamic doctrinal theology (kalam). Avicenna's metaphysics significantly influenced European scholastic thought, but it had an even more profound impact on Islamic intellectual history—the philosophical problems and opportunities associated with the Avicennian synthesis continued to be debated up to the end of the nineteenth century.

The study of chaotic systems has become a major scientific pursuit in recent years, shedding light on the apparently random behaviour observed in fields as diverse as climatology and mechanics. InThe Essence of Chaos Edward Lorenz, one of the founding fathers of Chaos and the originator of its seminal concept of the Butterfly Effect, presents his own landscape of our current understanding of the field. Lorenz presents everyday examples of chaotic behaviour, such as the toss of a coin, the pinball's path, the fall of a leaf, and explains in elementary mathematical strms how their essentially chaotic nature can be understood. His principal example involved the construction of a model of a board sliding down a ski slope. Through this model Lorenz illustrates chaotic phenomena and the related concepts of bifurcation and strange attractors. He also provides the context in which chaos can be related to the similarly emergent fields of nonlinearity, complexity and fractals. As an early pioneer of chaos, Lorenz also provides his own story of the human endeavour in developing this new field. He describes his initial encounters with chaos through his study of climate and introduces many of the personalities who contributed early breakthroughs. His seminal paper, "Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wing in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" is published for the first time.

This book showcases a range of views on topics at the forefront of current controversies in the field of metaphysics. It will give readers a varied and alive introduction to the field, and cover such key issues as: modality, fundamentality, composition, the object/property distinction, and indeterminacy. The contributors include some of the most important philosophers currently writing on these issues. The questions and philosophers are: Are there any individuals at the fundamental level? / (1) Shamik Dasgupta (2) Jason Turner Is there an objective difference between essential and accidental properties? / (1) Meghan Sullivan (2) Kris McDaniel and Steve Steward Are there any worldly states of affairs? / (1) Daniel Nolan (2) Joseph Melia Are there any intermediate states of affairs? / (1) Jessica Wilson (2) Elizabeth Barnes and Ross Cameron Do ordinary objects exist? / (1) Trenton Merricks (2) Helen Beebee Editor Elizabeth Barnes guides readers through these controversies (all published here for the first time), with a synthetic introduction and succinct abstracts of each debate.

The thesis of this work is that the modern scientific world view, emerging in the 20th Century, makes a new metaphysics in System Science. That metaphysics illuminates the most difficult subjects in Psychology, like mind, consciousness and the self. It proposes that the phenomena of life and mind-and even of "soul" and "spirit"-are the natural emergents of the basic forms of Nature itself, and that these forms have been discovered and described in the science of the last hundred years. The main resources for this conclusion are in those developments, as amplified in the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Gregory Bateson. The book is intended as a reading in History and Systems of Psychology and for an interested public. The title of the book means "messenger of mind." It is a tribute to Galileo Galilei, whose book, Siderius Nuncius ("messenger of the stars") appeared in 1610 and founded both telescope Astronomy and the modern scientific era. Cheaper b&w and e-book editions are available.

Content and Content Management are core topics in the IT and broadcast industry. However these terms have not been clearly defined for those learning the field. The topic is complex and users from different industries have different backgrounds and a varied understanding of content issues. Multimedia Content Management helps to clarify the subject area, define problematic issues and establish a universal understanding of content and its management. * Provides clarity in the subject area * Defines potential problems and establishes a universal understanding * Builds an architectural framework upon this account and different aspects of the industry and solutions are reviewed * Comprehensively describes the different users working and accessing content, the applications and workflows Essential reading for students, engineers and technical managers, in the area of data, storage management and multimedia, requiring an overview of this complex topic. The topics discussed will also prove highly insightful for executive managers and media professionals with a technical understanding and broadcast executives in the field.

Do you ever ask yourself why the first celebration of Holy Communion that we have says nothing about the forgiveness of sins, why the Apostle Paul is very careful about the way he describes the cup as a new covenant, or why doesnt he demand that the leader of the congregation in Corinth straighten these folk out? What happened that caused Holy Communion today to become all about the forgiveness of sin? Would those Corinthians have any conception of a charge that they had caused Jesus to die for them? Paul doesnt accuse them. The True Meaning of the Last Supper: Welcoming Others seeks answers for these and other questions. Developments in church life in the first century described in the pages of the New Testamentbut also gleaned from the history of that first century and succeeding yearsmay change your understanding of Communion today.

Phenomenology in a Pluralistic Context contains papers selected from three years of meetings of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). The essays are representative of the most current thinking among North American philosophers who have been influenced by the phenomenological movement. A majority of the selections reveals a considerable mutual influence between phenomenology and other philosophical currents. Special emphasis is given to issues in social and political theory; the philosophy of medicine, of art, of language, and of religion; phenomenology's relationship to Kantianism and to Marxism; and the figures of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Heidegger.