Today recorded music probably accounts for the single largest category of music listening. This essay seeks to re-frame the usual understanding of the role of that type of music. Here the history and phenomenology of instrumentally mediated musics examines pre-historic instruments and their relationship to skilled, embodied performance, to innovations in technologies which produce multistable trajectories which result in different musics. The ancient relationship between the technologies of archery and that of stringed instruments is both historically and phenomenologically examined. This narrative is then paralleled by a similar examination of the history and variations upon recorded and then electronically produced music. The interrelation of music-technologies and embodiment underlies this interpretation of musical production.

This essay traverses a heterogeneous terrain, finding important links in the ideas of Jacques Derrida and John Cage, and relating these to diverse cultural topics such as film soundtrack design, audio art, Saussurian linguistics, the sound and light shows at the Egyptian pyramids, the analogic nature of digital information, and cybernetics. Furthermore, the essay attempts to create some bridges- through the concept of "perceptual differance"- between the divergent world pictures (to use Heidegger's term) of cognitive psychology (with its quantitative frame of analysis) and the more slippery domain of hermeneutics.

America has become a spiritual wasteland. Three aspects of the human condition are crucial for human beings to recognize if they are to develop a proper identity and agency within the world: these aspects are finitude, contingency, and the spiritual (which follows from the other two). The notion of the spiritual can be filled out with an understanding of faith. American culture is antithetical to faith, as is demonstrated through a discussion of the basic human practice of conversation. In America, conversation works against faith because conversation has become brutal. Contemporary debate literally works against faith because conversation has become brutal Contemporary debate literally works to annihilate the reality of others. These reflections support the conclusion that brutality is the antithesis of faithfulness.

Heidegger understands technology as an act of revealing rather than merely a human achievement. Within the modem era, technology represents the manner in which humans stand within and make manifest the open interplay and inter-relatedness that is world. The danger of this era is the extent to which everything has become available, accessible, and disposable to human manipulation, practically without limit. However, the very totalizing extent to which this is happening and the forgetfuUness that takes it all for panted, can also make us suddenly aware that everything, including world itself, is at risk; that we ourselves are at risk; that we are the danger He calls for an attitude of releasement that handles world with a sense of receiving and not just taking a sense of thankfulness. Such a change could directly impact how we see ourselves and our responsibilities as we go about developing and using technologies.

Alphonso Lingis is the author of many hooks and renowned for his translations of Levinas, Merleau-Pontyy and Klossowski. By combining a rich philosophical training with an extensive travel itinerary, Lingis has developed a distinctive brand of phenomenobgy that is only now beginning to gain critical attention. Lingis inhabits a ready-made language and conceptuality, but cultivates a style of thinking which disrupts and transforms the work of his predecessors, setting him apart from the rest of his field. This essay sketches Lingis phenomenobgy of sensation in order to give expression to some dimensions of Lingisian travel. As we see, Lingis deploys a theory of the subject which features the plasticity of the body, the materiality of affect, and the alimentary nature of sensation.

Sylvia Plath wrote in the midst of growing racial tensions in 1950s and 1960s America. Her work demonstrates ambivalence towards her role as a middle-class white woman. In this paper, I examine the racial implications in Plath's color terms. I disagree with Renee Curry's reading in White Women Writing White that Plath only considers her whiteness insofar as it affects herself. Through a phenomenological study of how whiteness shifts meaning in this poem, I hope to show that Curry's negative estimation is only partly right. I suggest that embodiment is a problem for Plath in general, and this contributes to her inability to fully examine other bodies.

Auto-description does not typically start with people introducing themselves saying "l am vertical". From our human condition as bipeds we associate the upright position as the typical conscious human body situation. The sheer fact that someone mentions this detail about their personas, makes their individual experience of themselves no less than remarkable. With its title, Sylvia Plath's poem "I Am Vertical" invites the reader to investigate on the persona speaking behind its words. In order to study how the mention of body position contributes here to the readers mental construction of this persona, I shall start from Cámara's definition of "lyrical subject" and move on to construe an integration mental space corresponding to the persona behind the poem. With this purpose I shall use Lakoff and Johnsons study on image-schemas, Sweetser and Ibarretxe's account of the way sensory experience influences conceptualisation, and Fauconniers proposal of mental spaces.

This paper examines the possibility of friendship across differences in Richard Wright's Native Son by examining the protagonist's relationship to three pivotal white characters in the text. Through the application to Native Son of a theory of friendship I cull from Heidegger's discussion of care in Being and Time, I offer a model for relationships whereby radically different individuals may approach each other across across spite of differences. In putting Heidegger and Wright into dialogue I both shed light on the intricacies of inter-subjective relations depicted by Wright as well as give depth to an obscure passage regarding inter-subjective relations in Heidegger's Being and Time.