Editorial

When I first began studying philosophy, I was struck by the number of titles of philosophy books that consisted of a single noun or two nouns joined simply by “and”: The Republic, Pragmatism, Meaning, Caring, Process and Reality, Reason and Teaching, Experience and Education, Models and Metaphors, Feeling and Form, Responsibility and Judgment. Other texts I was reading at the same time from different disciplines seemed to have titles with so much more flair sending out tantalizing invitations to read them: Richard Katz’s Boiling Energy, Sidlow Baxter’s Explore the Book, Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return, Diane Ravitch’s The Troubled Crusade, Harvey Cox’s The Seduction of the Spirit, Walter Kaufmann’s God, the Problem, Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. They sported a few adjectives and verbs to spice up the nouns and sometimes even went into whole phrases. I admit I have made a careful selection of examples here to make the point because most of us would find philosophical sounding titles on the spines of books in our libraries that we would not call philosophical works, and some fairly dramatic titles on some of our philosophical books. Nelson Goodman’s Of Mind and Other Matters and Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought come to mind as examples of the latter. Yet, I suspect there is a tendency for philosophers to write books about a single concept or a single simple juxtaposition of concepts and capture that in the titles of their works. And I do not believe this is because philosophers as a whole are lacking in imagination. Rather, I suggest this tells us something significant about the work of philosophy.

Among its many tasks, a central job of philosophy is to clarify our thinking. It digs into concepts, some as familiar to us as “education,” “democracy,” “music,” “practice,” “theory,” “the good,” “pleasure,” and “meaning,” and untangles them from their glosses, idiosyncratic developments, and historical misconstruals so that we can really know what they mean in a particular context. This kind of analytic work has been undertaken by philosophers from at least as far back as Plato who tells of Socrates wandering the streets of Athens and asking his simply deceptive and sometimes annoyingly persistent questions about the meaning of such common conceptions as love and lovers, art and craft, the soul, good taste, manners, freedom, justice, and culture. The value of this lies in giving us a shared vocabulary around key concepts that can be enriched by this very analysis. And when philosophers juxtapose two or more of these concepts to analyze their interdependencies and relationships, such as the child and the curriculum (as did John Dewey), democracy and difference (as does Seyla Benhabib), or art and imagination (as does Roger Scruton), new perspectives open up around these ideas and new depths can be plumbed in them.

This tradition of clarifying concepts or analyzing the relationships that may occur among them is seen in the articles in this issue. Susan Laird, who presented her paper first as the keynote address at the Seventh International Symposium on Philosophy of Music Education, explores the relationship between hunger as a driving force in human experience along with its distortions, and music education. In this case, hunger and its network of associations and structural elements serve as a metaphor for exposing the potentialities of music education and of miseducation. Frede Nielsen addresses the relationship between research and practice: research in both aesthetics and pedagogy and the practice of teaching and learning music. Issues emerge around the quality and integrity of both research and music education in his discussion. He breaks down the research enterprise into a number of categories which help explain why we have not always been able to locate a direct link between research findings and what happens or even should happen in the classroom. Elizabeth Gould analyzes desire and desiring and through these lenses looks at the notion of musical literacy. Where the former may be individualistic and freeing, the latter may be hegemonic and limiting. Her work invites us to...