On May 13, from 5 to 6 p.m. in Room 209, visiting professor Martin Gustafsson from Åbo Akademi University will give a public lecture, "Showing in Music: Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Appreciation and Beauty".
This paper discusses Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing in a musical context. Focusing on passages taken from The Brown Book and from the “Lectures on Aesthetics” from 1938, Wittgenstein’s conception of aesthetic appreciation is clarified. This gives rise to a puzzlement about what is involved in the perception of musical sense. In The Brown Book, Wittgenstein offers a diagnosis of this puzzlement, and the paper argues that this diagnosis provides the material for a clarification of the saying/showing distinction. The distinction is further and more tentatively explored by relating it to what Wittgenstein has to say about beauty, musical sense-making and happiness.