Four Poems

Individual poem titles: Whales Are Small, The Sale, If Nine, Opinion

Aristotle And The Paradox Of Tragedy

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. The paradox tragedy in simple terms may be stated thus: human misery is repulsive to us in real life, yet it somehow pleases us in tragedy. Indeed, tragedy is considered by many to be man\u27s highest art form, and to classify a play as a tragedy is to predicate value of it. Why do we get pleasure from reading or watching drama in which our fellow human beings are portrayed as suffering? If anyone would object that we do not take pleasure in tragedy as in a sizzling steak, let him substitute some other word. Why do we receive satisfaction from tragedy, or why do we want to see tragedy

Explanation and Quasi-Miracles in Narrative Understanding: The Case of Poetic Justice

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Craig Bourne, and Emily Caddick Bourne, ‘Explanation and Quasi‐miracles in Narrative Understanding: The Case of Poetic Justice’, Dialectica, Vol. 71 (4): 563-579, January 2018, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/1746-8361.12201. Under embargo until 29 January 2020. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.David Lewis introduced the idea of a quasi-miracle to overcome a problem in his initial account of counterfactuals. Here we put the notion of a quasi-miracle to a different and new use, showing that it offers a novel account of the phenomenon of poetic justice, where characters in a narrative get their due by happy accident (for example, when the murderer of King Mitys happens to be crushed by a falling statue of Mitys). The key to understanding poetic justice is to see what makes poetically just events remarkable coincidences. We argue that remarkable coincidence is to be understood in terms of a distinctive type of experience quasi-miracles offer. Cases of poetic justice offer a dual awareness of the accidental nature of the events and of a non-accidental process, involving intention, which it appears would explain them. We also extend this account to incorporate how we might experience magic tricks. An account of poetic justice as quasi-miraculous allows us to account for the experience of encounters with poetic justice, as involving the incongruity of seeing design in accident.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Musical Borrowing in Sonification

Sonification presents some challenges in communicating information, particularly because of the large difference between possible data to sound mappings and cognitively valid mappings. It is an information transmission process which can be described through the Shannon-Weaver Theory of Mathematical Communication. Musical borrowing is proposed as a method in sonification which can aid the information transmission process as the composer’s and listener’s shared musical knowledge is used. This article describes the compositional process of Wasgiischwashäsch (2017) which uses Rossini’s William Tell Overture (1829) to sonify datasets relating to climate change in Switzerland. It concludes that the familiarity of audiences with the original piece, and the humorous effect produced by the distortion of a well-known piece, contribute to a more effective transmission process

Does Death Render Life Absurd?

In this paper, I assess the claim that death renders life absurd. First, I characterize absurdity as something we perceive in situations involving extreme disharmonies which strike us as unexpected or unacceptable. Next, I outline several potential disharmonies which death might introduce into our existence (such as the disharmony between our dignity and capacities, and the undignified annihilation which death promises), but suggest that these examples need not be seen as necessarily absurd; there are perspectives available to us from which these facts can appear to be acceptable aspects of life. Finally, I consider a more problematic case of absurdity—that human beings allegedly fail to grasp the truth of their mortality—but suggest that the underlying disharmony here can be eliminated provided we develop an authentic attitude toward death (and that this is possible, despite some objections). In short, I argue that none of the most obvious potential absurdities which might arise from our mortality are strong enough to entail the claim that death inevitably renders life absurd, at least on one plausible and interesting interpretation of that claim