Creative art, and perhaps especially great music, tend to go beyond immediate existential reference, while opening up our souls to grand and deep themes. (..) Philosophy should be up to the task of supplying theoretical access to the wealth of qualitative human perceptions, and the unforgetable worldviews expressed in the texts of the great musical composers. (..) It is necessary to adopt a macrohistorical perspective in philosophy - focus the history of philosophy. (..) Together with this perspective, it is necessary to pursue a full range of structural analyses to allow one to appreciate the variety of historically realized kinds of "philosophical" worldviews. (..) There are also continuities in kinds of thought. (..) A new kind of qualitative pluralism. (..) Three interpretive/reflective phases: the critical, comparative, and evaluative intentionalities of pedagogical work. (..) Critical/analytical: our point of new departure must be the great texts of world philosophy (not the works of immitation or deconstruction). (..) Comparative: establishing the intertextual profiles of various sets of great texts. (..) evaluative intentionality: making synoptic judgments on the theoretical merits of great texts when brought into relationship with one another. (..) Our possibilities of human happiness and wisdom depend on our taking their proper measure, and of recomposing them in our own texts. (..) The "world" is the material cause of all our "texts", "philosophical" texts are essentially referent to the world in general and fundamentally. (..) Not all philosophical texts are of equal value. (..) Locate the individual masterpieces of an historically recognized genius: the "career-text" or that author, artist, musician. (..) Career-texts shine forth in an expanding network of their interrelationships. (..) Exemplary world-texts contain the best paradigms and precedents of human criticism, comparison, and evaluation at our hermeneutical disposal. (..) Paradigmatic example: Aristotle: meanings are conveyed in assertive (propositional), active (morally and politically agential), and poetic (aesthetic, performative, productive) modes. (..) These vectors of expression - the assertive, active, and poetic - function simultaneously in complex combinations. (..) The great texts are semantically complex in this sense. (..) The great works of literature, art, music and so on, function no less than the great mythologies, religions, and canonical works of philosophy, as such "world texts" having exceptional philosophical significance. (..) Critical, or Analytical Expansion: in The Archic Matrix (Watson) 256 types of archic configurations as formal possibilities of philosophical (and religious, artistic, literary, and other kinds of) texts. (..) Comparative, Intertextual Expansion: the four generic archic variables are the point of contact, as well as the differential vectors, of the semantic transferences between any two texts. (..) Archically isomorphic texts illuminate one another. The archic variables and elements function as the bridge concepts of such intertextual associations. (..) Evaluative Expansion: reconstitute a large plurality of these intertextual profiles into a systematic set (..) a generically normative theory that locates the differences in kinds and in degrees of the "world-texts" through a synoptic account of their forms of generality. (..) guiding concepts of a systematic pluralism newly envisioned as a macrohistorical, civilizational metaphysics. |