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St. Matthew Passion is Hans Blumenberg's sustained and devastating meditation on Jesus's anguished cry on the cross, \"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?\" Why did this abandonment happen, what does it mean within the logic of the Gospels, how have believers and nonbelievers understood it, and how does it live on in art? With rare philological acuity and vast historical learning, Blumenberg unfolds context upon context in which this cry has reverberated, from early Christian apologetics and heretics to twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Blumenberg's guide through this unending story of divine abandonment is Johann Sebastian Bach's monumental Matthäuspassion, the parabolic mirror that bundled eighteen hundred years of reflection on the fate of the crucified and the only available medium that allows us post-Christian listeners to feel the anguish of those who witnessed the events of the Passion. With interspersed references to writers such as Goethe, Rilke, Kafka, Freud, and Benjamin, Blumenberg gathers evidence to raise the singular question that, in his view, Christian theology has not been able to answer: How can an omnipotent God be so offended by his creatures that he must sacrifice and abandon his own Son?

Every lover of music finds themselves, at privileged moments, in ecstasy - certain that what they are hearing has captured, somehow, an incontrovertible truth. Bach's Architecture of Gratitude explores this profound aesthetic experience in a case study of J.S. Bach's Mass in B Minor and its capacity to inspire gratitude.

St. Matthew Passion is Hans Blumenberg's sustained and devastating meditation on Jesus's anguished cry on the cross, \"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?\" Why did this abandonment happen, what does it mean within the logic of the Gospels, how have believers and nonbelievers understood it, and how does it live on in art? With rare philological acuity and vast historical learning, Blumenberg unfolds context upon context in which this cry has reverberated, from early Christian apologetics and heretics to twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Blumenberg's guide through this unending story of divine abandonment is Johann Sebastian Bach's monumental Matthäuspassion , the parabolic mirror that bundled eighteen hundred years of reflection on the fate of the crucified and the only available medium that allows us post-Christian listeners to feel the anguish of those who witnessed the events of the Passion. With interspersed references to writers such as Goethe, Rilke, Kafka, Freud, and Benjamin, Blumenberg gathers evidence to raise the singular question that, in his view, Christian theology has not been able to answer: How can an omnipotent God be so offended by his creatures that he must sacrifice and abandon his own Son?

This paper compares Kent Bach's peculiar version of semantic minimalism with the most radical form of contextualism in philosophy of language: Charles Travis's occasion-sensitivity. Bach posits a distinction between a contextually insensitive semantic notion of what is said in an utterance and the pragmatically enriched content a speaker can communicate with it, whereas Travis refuses to isolate the content of what is said in an utterance from the act of uttering it. I will argue that Bach's content dualism fails precisely as a result of its willingness to ascribe \"pure semantic content\" to an entity that is structurally pragmatic.

This paper concerns the phenomenon of pragmatic enrichment, and has a proposal for predicting the occurrence of such enrichments. The idea is that an enrichment of an expressed content c occurs as a means of strengthening the coherence between c and a salient given content c' of the context, whether c' is given in discourse, as sentence parts, or through perception. After enrichment, a stronger coherence relation is instantiated than before enrichment. An idea of a strength scale of types of coherence relations is proposed and applied.

This new investigation of the Brandenburg Concertos explores musical, social, and religious implications of Bach's treatment of eighteenth-century musical hierarchies. By reference to contemporary music theory, to alternate notions of the meaning of \"concerto,\" and to various eighteenth-century conventions of form and instrumentation, the book argues that the Brandenburg Concertos are better understood not as an arbitrary collection of unrelated examples of \"pure\" instrumental music, but rather as a carefully compiled and meaningfully organized set. It shows how Bach's concertos challenge (as opposed to reflect) existing musical and social hierarchies. Careful consideration of Lutheran theology and Bach's documented understanding of it reveals, however, that his music should not be understood to call for progressive political action. One important message of Lutheranism, and, in this interpretation, of Bach's concertos, is that in the next world, the heavenly one, the hierarchies of the present world will no longer be necessary. Bach's music more likely instructs its listeners how to think about and spiritually cope with contemporary hierarchies than how to act upon them. In this sense, contrary to currently accepted views, Bach's concertos share with his extensive output of vocal music for the Lutheran liturgy an essentially religious character.

Technological innovations and scientific discoveries do not occur in a vacuum but instead leave us needing to reimagine what we thought we knew about the human condition.

Through a case study of recordings of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, I argue that enlisting Deleuzian concepts when analyzing multiple performances of the same piece is useful for the exploration of individual differences and practices of performance. Such analysis reveals a continuously shifting-transforming performance style and provides a rich tapestry of diversity within and across nominally agreed upon stylistic trends and characteristics such as Romantic-modernist, Classical-modernist, or historically informed.

El último libro de Dennett está lleno de ideas infecciosas que luchan por captar la atención del lector, saltando casi de la página, e intentando anidar en su indefenso cerebro. ¿O esto no es así? En este artículo discuto la utilidad del punto de vista del ojo del meme para entender la cultura. Después de rechazar la visión del mundo denominada “panmemética\", intento resolver una ambigüedad que aparece en los escritos sobre evolución cultural planteando la cuestión ¿cui malo?: ¿quién o qué está siendo dañado cuando decimos que algún meme actúa como un “parásito\"? A continuación, abordo un desafío del tipo del de Millikan para reforzar la explicación que Dennett da de los memes. Finalmente, discuto brevemente por qué ciertos sistemas de creencias irracionales (p. ej., las creencias sobre la brujería en la Europa de los primeros tiempos de la edad moderna) son ejemplos prominentes de parasitismo cultural. Dennett's latest book is full of infectious ideas that are jostling for the reader's attention, almost leaping from the page, intent on nestling in his or her hapless brain. Or is it? In this paper, I discuss the usefulness of the meme's eye view to understand culture. After rejecting the worldview called “panmemetics\", I try to resolve an ambiguity in the literature on cultural evolution by asking the cui malo? question: who or what is being harmed when we say that some meme is “parasitical\"? I then address a Millikan' challenge, in order to strengthen Dennett's account of memes. Finally, I briefly discuss why certain irrational belief systems (e.g. witchcraft beliefs in early modern Europe) are prime examples of cultural parasitism.

Un rasgo sorprendente de la última versión del 'gran cuadro' proporcionado por Dennett de la evolución de la vida y de la mente es la frecuente referencia a los 'posibilitadores' (affordances). Un posibilitador es, hablando de forma aproximada, una posibilidad de acción para una criatura en un entorno. Dada la existencia de más de una posibilidad de acción, una buena pregunta es: ¿qué hará efectivamente la creatura? Argumento que los posibilitadores plantean un problema de selección y que una buena solución a este problema del diseño de la mente es implementar un sistema de preferencias. A striking feature of the latest version of Dennett's 'big picture' of the evolution of life and mind is frequent reference to 'affordances'. An affordance is, roughly, a possibility for action for a creature in an environment. Given more than one possibility for action, a good question is: what will the creature actually do? I argue that affordances pose a problem of selection, and that a good general solution to this problem of mind-design is to implement a system of preferences.