Since the veritable renaissance of aesthetics and philosophy of art in the 1960s, there has been a clear tendency to deal with the individual arts as presenting philosophical problems peculiar to themselves. This is not to say that philosophy of art in general has not also been pursued. Ambitious theories of art, attempting to encompass all of the fine arts in synoptic definitions, have occupied some of the best philosophical minds of the period, and brought much needed clarity and rigor to the discipline. But alongside of this more traditional, Socratic project there has flourished a busy community of philosophers exercising their analytic skills on the individual problems of arts such as literature, painting, dance, photography, cinema, drama, architecture, and, of course, music, the topic here.

Music and the Emotions

The oldest and most persistently scrutinized philosophical question with regard to music is the...