No abstract

No abstract

Can a musical work be created? Some say 'no'. But, we argue, there is no handbook of universally accepted metaphysical truths that they can use to justify their answer. Others say 'yes'. They have to find abstract objects that can plausibly be identified with musical works, show that abstract objects of this sort can be created, and show that such abstract objects can persist. But, we argue, none of the standard views about what a musical work is allows musical works both to be created and to persist. I. INTRODUCTION IN 'WHAT a Musical Work Is', Jerrold Levinson lays down three criteria that, he argues, any adequate account of what a musical work is must meet. 1 The first of these is what he calls the creatability requirement, namely: (Cre) Musical works must be such that they do not exist prior to the composer's compositional activity, but are brought into existence by that activity. 2 Levinson famously uses the three criteria to argue that a musical work is not a sound structure, but rather a sound-structure-as-indicated-by-composer-X-at

Presentism, according to which reality is limited to the present, is a natural view, but it is incompatible with the claims that reality invariably has a say in which propositions are true and that not all truths about the past are made true by the present. We survey some responses to this incompatibility.

By any reasonable reckoning, Gottlob Frege's ‘On Sense and Reference’ is one of the more important philosophical papers of all time. Although Frege briefly discusses the sense-reference distinction in an earlier work (‘Function and Concept,’ in 1891), it is through ‘Sense and Reference’ that most philosophers have become familiar with it. And the distinction so thoroughly permeates contemporary philosophy of language and mind that it is almost impossible to imagine these subjects without it.The distinction between the sense and the referent of a name is introduced in the second paragraph of ‘Sense and Reference.’