This spring the German Studies Committee is hosting two thematically linked small conferences or colloquia. These colloquia both deal with modern and contemporary German and American cultural concerns, philosophical interactions (and transactions) as well as musical and musicological ones. The common theme of these colloquia is the limits between nature and artifice.

"Affect and Structure in Music"

The first colloquium is based on a collaboration between the German Studies Committee and the Oregon Bach Festival. For each of the past four years we have held springtime colloquia on the cultural history of German music, in conjunction with the Oregon Bach Festival (OBF), as an augmentation of the intellectual offerings surrounding their annual spring Baroque-centered music festival, which spreads over several weeks of the late spring-early summer. This year, our OBF German Studies symposium, which follows upon and extends the philosophy conference at the end of May, is entitled “Beyond Affect and Structure: Contemporary Reflection on Meaning in Music.” We will examine German music theory and philosophy of music in and around Adorno (in the tradition of the Viennese School in music—Schönberg et al--that emerged at the same time as Viennese positivism in philosophy), on the one hand, and music theory in the analytical tradition (Kivy et al), on the other hand. As the tension between the continental and the analytic traditions, respectively, is often understood as a tension between a focus on intuition (aesthetics, feeling, impressions, and so on), and a focus on conceptual logic (syllogistic structures, referential reliability, and objectivity), where the former affirms artificiality and the latter denies it, so the tension between the major positions in the philosophy of musical meaning (since Hanslick in the mid-nineteenth century) comprises the dissonant relation between the attempt to situate this meaning in musical aesthesis, the affective (and hence intuitive) dimension, and the attempt to situate it in musical structure, in the conceptual logic of music (which indeed tends to naturalize itself). In addition, as feelings are often thought to be natural, while structural analysis is frequently characterized as artificial, one can readily see how this debate engages the questions of nature versus artifice in predictable but also at times bewildering ways. Hence, the OBF symposium extends and elaborates the concerns of the general conference on the German-Anglo connection in the continental-analytic divide within the narrower sphere of the philosophy of music, once again exploring a German-Anglo-American conversation.

"Between Nature and Culture: Edging Past the Continental-Analytic Divide."

The second colloquium will reconsider the question of nature and culture in connection with the debate (or polemically motivated indifference) that reigns between continental and analytic philosophy in this country and largely also abroad. The colloquium is called “Between Nature and Culture: Edging Beyond the Continental-Analytic Divide.” We will examine the largely untraversed, quasi-taboo, and generally unthought borderline between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions. In order to test our working hypothesis that these two traditions are divided largely by the fact that they take different approaches to the borderline between nature and culture, and specifically to the question of the natural or artificial character of language, we are inviting thinkers from these two traditions to address the nature/culture divide. Since the entire creation of an analytic philosophical tradition occurs in conjunction with a transfer of Viennese philosophy (Carnap, Frege, Wittgenstein) into the English context—a Germanization or Austrianization of English philosophy or an Anglicization of German-Austrian philosophy—the question of the relation between the analytic and continental traditions is something like that of the relation beween the German-Austrian and English traditions. If, as is commonly argued, the analytic tradition arises out of a rejection of idealism (and this is German Idealism beginning with Kant's "transcendental idealism"), then its origin is tied to the rejection of a specific concept of nature as well, namely the Idealist concept of nature. And of course, Idealism is nothing if not a specific kind of definition of nature, an ontology spelled out in terms of the relative independence of spirit from nature, and so on. . . In light of this brief philosophico-historical reminiscence, we can see how the difference between the continental and analytic traditions is tied to a difference over the concept of nature, and specifically a concept intimately bound up with the German philosophical tradition from the late eighteenth century until the twentieth. This is what the colloquium will explore, focusing partly on figures in German and English philosophy (especially Kant and Wittgenstein), partly on strictly conceptual issues