Philosophical Scholarship Research Articles

Performative Activism Redeemed

Abstract Over the last century, performance art has troubled the worlds of art and of philosophical aesthetics, unleashing modes of creativity and criticality that spill outside the customary boundaries of either. One of these modes is that of political activism. Performance art is genetically related to activism due to the shared historical contexts their respective waves have emerged from and responded to. In my article, I make the claim that the relationship between performance art and activism also has much to do with certain significant structural and methodological overlaps between the two. I explore these overlaps against the backdrop of extant philosophical scholarship on performativity, a selection of art historical examples, and a critique of the charge of “performative activism” that has become popular in the last decade. I see the tension between the figurative meaning of the phrase “performative activism” and its literal application to politically charged performance art as a space of philosophical opportunity. A better understanding of performance art and its political import can not only help clear up laypeople’s misconceptions of performativity, but it can also strengthen philosophy’s own position on the subject.

Taking Account

Taking Account

Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life

Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life

Metaphorical Engagements in Feminist Philosophy: Two Close Readings

Metaphors have been inserted by philosophers in philosophical discourses to simplify abstract and intricate concepts. The practice of using metaphor denotes its rhetorical, aesthetic, linguistic and cognitive function. In basic formulation, metaphor has also been used by philosophers as a device, strategy, method, stylist ornament and a medium of expression. In this background, the following paper intends to vindicate the intimate interaction between philosophy and metaphor, with marked emphasis on the domain of feminist philosophy. Categorically, by considering the context of feminist philosophical discourses, in this work, I explore the contributions of two influential feminist thinkers, namely, Young and Irigaray to elucidate the proposed metaphorical narrative. I suggest that these feminist philosophers ‘talk metaphorically’ beyond its ornamental or aesthetic value; beyond objectivism. To the contrary, I propose and argue that their employment of metaphor appeals to an epistemological thematic. Furthermore, I shall exhibit the close affinity between the metaphors they insert in their respective pursuits. Questions that shall be considered here are: Why metaphor matters in philosophical contexts? What does it mean to talk metaphorically in feminist philosophical scholarship? What and how do these feminist thinkers contribute to this endeavor? What is the implication of their respective contributions? Thus, I aim at uncovering and deepening the appearance, connotation and influence of metaphor in feminist scholarship.

DNP-PhD Collaboration in NINR-Funded Physical Activity Trials: A Series of Case Studies.

Collaboration between Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) scholars and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) scholars is crucial to efficiently advance and disseminate nursing science. Also, DNP-PhD collaboration can help achieve priorities outlined in the recent National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) Strategic Plan. The purpose of this series of case studies is to describe exemplars of ongoing DNP-PhD collaborations across three NINR-funded trials (1 completed, 2 ongoing) testing physical activity interventions for women at risk for cardiovascular disease. In our three physical activity intervention trials for women, we categorized examples of DNP-PhD collaboration by the four phases of the team-based research model (development, conceptualization, implementation, and translation). Across all three trials, DNP and PhD scholars contributed successfully to all phases of research in an iterative manner. Future work should focus on expanding DNP-PhD collaboration in behavioral trials, which can inform adapted, contemporary models of iterative DNP-PhD collaboration.

Best Approaches to Home-schooling Education: Balancing Children’s Rights in the Era of COVID-19 in South Africa

This article was motivated by the South African Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill (BELA) which, when in the draft stage, was open to public consultation until 10 January 2018 and re-opened again for comment on 15 May 2022, closing on 15 August 2022 after an extension was granted. This article examines the conflicting issues in the BELA clauses that are meant to regulate home-schooling. Using fundamental rights-based writings of notable legal philosophy scholars, and regional instruments such as the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, the article aims to demonstrate how different rights could be balanced in what could be a clash of interests, should the Bill be passed. It is submitted that the socio-economic issues prevalent in South Africa have not been considered carefully by the drafters the Bill, so as to avoid a class action by dissatisfied parents. The article also aims to investigate the efficacy of online learning implemented by the state, to curb the spread of COVID-19 and to further ascertain its impact compared to the growing increase of home-schooling in South Africa. Finally, case law precedent will be cited to demonstrate the balance that must be struck when weighing up the different interests related to home-schooling.

Puer renidens (Mart. Cap. 2.144). Revisited Topos of ‘Two Loves’ and intertextuality

AbstractLove is one of the most frequent literary motifs, often differentiated in various forms. A plurality of words for love in ancient Greek corresponds to a plurality of their divine representations in particular works, and more generally in Ancient religious and philosophical images. The most famous concept is that of the two Loves which is represented in Plato's dialogue Symposium. In the paper, the author revises the standard interpretation of the ‘Two Loves Topos’, considered in Mart. 2. 144–148, literalized as the presence of Amor and absence of Cupid in Philology's suite during her journey to heaven, in terms of literary intertextuality. After a brief outline of the literary evidence of the ‘Two Loves Topos’, Martianus Capella's comprehensive picture is analysed, connecting the archaic opposition between Amor and Cupid and the Platonic division to support his compositional intention to create a ‘new’ comprehensive Love god person, who is in accordance with the unified and harmonious world of mythological, cosmological, and philosophical scholarship.

Health Information as a Human Right: From Justification to Practice

The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated how necessary clear and accurate health information is and yet how vulnerable people are to mis- and disinformation. The objective of this article is to put forth a sound argument, based on both policy and philosophical doctrine, on why people—regardless of citizenship—have a right to accurate, current health information. Evidence is provided to show that access to quality health information is a human right asserted by the United Nations, and academic writing from scholars of philosophy is explored to put forth a moral assertion that agrees. Finally, practical measures are offered for librarians and other information professionals to promote these rights in their institutions and communities—for example, by teaching health and information literacy skills while pushing back on disinformation flooding communities in times of crisis.

Lembranças Coloniais, Restos Coloniais: Fórum sobre a Atualidade da ‘Crítica da Violência’ de Benjamin em seu Centenário, Parte II

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In Part II of the Forum, Aggie Hirst, Tom Houseman, and Vinícius Armele draw on Benjamin to analyse what remains of European colonialism. Hirst and Houseman interrogate the extent to which Walter Benjamin’s notion of divine violence may be useful in the service of decolonial struggle. Insofar as it is antithetical to the colonial order – which is inaugurated and reproduced by the law making and law preserving functions of mythic violence – divine violence appears to open a space for conceptualising a far-reaching challenge to the violence encrypted in that order that is ‘lethal without spilling blood’. Because the exercise of such ‘power over all life’ is exercised ‘for the sake of living,’ Benjamin argues, its accompanying sacrifices are acceptable. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory, Hirst and Houseman offer a critique of the ‘God’s-eye view’ inherent to any claim to divine violence. Benjamin’s text can generate powerful insights into the nature and limits of decolonial struggles, but it ultimately fails in providing an alternative to the mythic violence it criticises, by reproducing – at the heart of the emancipatory concept of divine violence – a problematic impersonation of a divine authorial voice that is already a trope of coloniality. Armele’s reflection seeks to recover ancient tragedy’s role of reluctance toward the previously unquestionable power of the violence of mythical destiny. Resume Benjamin’s contributions on (1) melancholy and Romanticism, which represents the revolt of repressed, channelled and deformed subjectivity and affectivity, and (2) the criticism of the violence that is established in the manifestation of its ethical relations between law [Recht] and justice [Gerechtigkeit], Armele reveals the intertwining of the experience of historical time and the orientation of current political struggles. Inspired by Benjamin, he examines the action of the Black Lives Matters movement in Bristol, UK, which toppled a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, and threw it in the city’s harbour, reopening a historical wound of colonialism and national memory.

Benjamin ainda faz sentido: Fórum sobre a atualidade da “Crítica da Violência” de Benjamin em seu centenário, Introdução - Por que precisamos de Benjamin mais do que nunca

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In this opening to the Forum, the guest editors Gabriela Azevedo and Ludmila Franca-Lipke introduce the Forum as a whole. Then in the following piece, James Martel argues that Benjamin helps us to better understand our current moment than almost any other thinker. Benjamin explains the nature of authoritarianism, the link between liberalism (and neoliberalism) and fascism and how such forces can be resisted. In his essay, Martel updates the concept of mythic violence to take into account the resilience of the liberal/fascist connection (even as it appears to be a node of struggle and mutual incompatibility). He shows that ‘Critique of Violence’ doesn’t just diagnose our time but it also shows a way out of the abyss that we are in. Martel lists seven key points from Benjamin’s essay and adds one other point from José Carlos Mariátegui to think concretely about how to apply their lessons from 100 years ago to our own time.

Reflexões sobre a Violência Divina: Fórum sobre a Atualidade da ‘Crítica da Violência’ de Benjamin em seu Centenário, Parte III

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. Melany Cruz, Kaveh Ghoreishi and Sara Minelli engage Benjamin on ‘divine violence.’ As Cruz notes, lynching in contemporary Mexico has become a recurrent phenomenon in nota roja outlets. Due to its brutality, perceptions of lynching have been reduced to a form of uncivilised and irrational crime. In opposition to this perspective, Cruz theorises the political dimension of the violence of lynching by drawing from Benjamin and argues that such violence symbolically and affectively dramatises the suspension of ‘mere life’ in which the communities enacting the lynchings are immersed in the current conditions of neoliberal Mexico. In this way, it is possible to claim that lynching, in Benjamin’s terms, constitutes a form of divine violence that has the capacity to reveal and communicate the need to end the fear- and anger-provoking condition of ‘mere life.’ In the second section, Ghoreishi and Minelli propose a reading of ‘divine’ as opposed to ‘mythical violence’ that brings out the radical elements of some contemporary struggles by interpreting some examples of strike which took place in Iranian Kurdistan (Rojhilat) in the last forty years. They understand the revolutionary ‘general strike’ considered by Benjamin as what Jesi has called a ‘suspension of time,’ bringing ‘normal’ economic and social relations to a halt. In this sense, the general strikes in Kurdistan can be said to bring the mythological temporality of oppression to an end. These struggles, in which new forms of collectivity have emerged and been experimented, should, therefore, be seen as anticipations of the ‘divine violence’ that puts an end to ‘mythical violence.’

Violência/poder/força e luta contra o tempo no Brasil contemporâneo: Fórum sobre a atualidade da “Crítica da Violência” de Benjamin em seu centenário, Parte V

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In Part V of the Forum, Rafael Barros Vieira argues that Benjamin’s essay ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ (Critique of Violence/Power/Force) is deeply penetrated by the historical problems of the revolution and counterrevolution in Germany. In a certain sense, it is a conjunctural text, although it goes beyond its own context by seeking to apprehend historical phenomena of longue durée. Unfortunately, Vieira argues, this contextual aspect tends to disappear in readings that emphasize only a kind of philosophical ‘purity’ of this essay. Vieira hypothesizes that the essay, in addition to facing conjunctural problems, can be used to understand other conjunctures by highlighting the relations between law, history and social classes (in a wide conception of social classes that will be present in Benjamin’s work and will be made explicit in his late writings). The purpose of turning to this essay is to critically understand the exercise of violence/power/force in liberal states, particularly that of Brazil, highlighting the movement through which the authoritarian and fascist forces rise around liberal state structures. As Benjamin points out in one of the variants of the essay on the work of art, fascism is the conservation of relations of production and property through violence. However, violence is not a product only of this type of regime, although it certainly radicalizes it. Vieira proposes to understand how this is expressed in this recent period of Brazil, marked by the combination of the rise of a president with fascist traits, the reorganization of certain liberal institutions and the implementation of typically neoliberal reforms.

Biopoder: Fórum sobre a atualidade da “Crítica da Violência” de Benjamin em seu centenário, Parte IV

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In their separate contributions, sasha skaidra and R. Guy Emerson each elaborate on how Benjamin’s classic illuminates contemporary understandings of the politics of life and (violent) death globally. skaidra takes the Sanctuary City movement in Europe and North America as a focus. Arguing that Sanctuary politics is limited in its capacity to challenge borders in-of-themselves because the movement is caught in a false antinomy between natural and positive law that Benjamin critiques, skaidra’s contribution proposes a critique of borders that emulates Benjamin’s method which isolates violence from the mystification of legal theory. Whereas migrant justice movements threaten the state order by challenging Westphalian notions of time, Sanctuary operates like a purgatory wherein a potential messianic migrant figure could herald the end of state borders. skaidra proposes the idea of utopic purgatory as a means to isolate how Sanctuary Cities contribute to and limit a critique of borders. In the second sole-authored contribution to this section of the forum, Emerson rereads Benjamin in relation to Foucault by thinking biopower through criteria irreducible to official qualifications on life or the efficient management of populations. As a pure means without ends, violence for Benjamin cannot confirm anything external to it, be it the protection of life that comes after its elimination elsewhere or the regulation of life that follows the suppression of alterity. Instead, for Emerson, violent biopower, as pure, manifests a deadly order that immediately strikes life in a manner too abrupt to confirm rule or regulate populations. The result is a criterion for understanding both violence and life in biopower that maintains its distance from official intentions.

Benjamin e o Brasil, uma interpretação final: Fórum sobre a atualidade da “Crítica da Violência” de Benjamin em seu centenário, Parte VI

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In Part VI of the Forum, Bethânia Assy, Rafael Felgueiras Rolo, and Jeanne Marie Gagnebin close the series with reflections on Benjamin and Brazil. In their essay, Assy and Rolo discuss Benjamin’s work to assert which conception of history could render justice to actual needs in the struggle against contemporary forms of fascism, especially considering the reality of the urban movements such as MUST and MTST. For Rolo and Assy, the concept of divine violence needs to be reconsidered and dislocated from traditional understandings in contemporary literature on Benjamin, and the authors do so by developing an immanent notion of divine violence. They develop an analysis of Benjamin’s eighth thesis to make sense of the so-called ‘state of exception’ regarding a real state of exception, which is the duty of critical thinking to instate. Assy and Rolo shed light on the social phenomenon of these urban occupations, so that a better positioning in the struggle against contemporary fascism is (if at all) possible in the light of Benjamin’s texts. In the final reflection, Gagnebin draws on her vast expertise in contemporary philosophy to weave together conceptual and philological insights on Benjamin’s Marxism in relation to his political and theological thought, on law and justice, and on myth and the mythical.

Martin Buber and Daoism on Interhuman Philosophy

For Martin Buber, a person participates in two kinds of relationship: the I-Thou and the I-It. In the case of the former, the wholeness of being is employed resulting in genuine dialogue, while the latter objectifies things and is thus devoid of anything genuine. Among the influences on Buber’s thought, that of Daoism has not gone unnoticed by scholars of comparative philosophy. This paper will contribute to said discourse by examining Buber’s concept of the interhuman and its employment of the following themes: oneness and the genuine person, non-deliberate action (wuwei) and the in-between, and genuine dialogue as a turning towards being. What our analysis will show is that Buber’s interhuman philosophy bears witness to the transcendence of words by bringing to life the silence from which they arise and recede, attuning participants in genuine dialogue to the spiritual resonance between themselves and the primal Thou, while elevating their faith in human life in the process. The interhuman was seen by Buber as a viable solution for the societal ills of his time and it remains so half a century after his passing.

Parting Ways: With Werner Hamacher

Parting Ways:With Werner Hamacher Kevin Newmark (bio) GIVE THE WORD: RESPONSES TO WERNER HAMACHER'S 95 THESES ON PHILOLOGY EDITED BY ANN SMOCK AND GERARD RICHTER University of Nebraska Press, 2019 Wer spricht, wer sich ausmacht, wer seinen Namen, seinen Ort, sein Wort vermisst, der entmisst sich, verliert seinen Ort an der Verortung, sein Wort an die Entwortung und (ist) entwo —Werner Hamacher, "Amphora" The prominent place accorded to philology by Werner Hamacher is remarkable for a number of reasons. Among the most eye-catching would doubtless concern the way that, for him, philology can be assigned no place; it is only by virtue of philology taking place that the world becomes a place in the first place. "Philology is not a part of this world," Hamacher writes in the eighty-ninth of his 95 Theses on Philology, "it is the movement of the world itself: it is the coming into the world of the world" (Smock and Richter, liii).1 Such an affirmation would not be the most predictable one to derive from the canonical concept and practice of philology. If philology today seems mostly antiquated, that is because we have lost touch with what, through a return to philology, the same name might have been—and still be—able to point toward. Philology as we know it has succeeded in becoming rigorous enough as a historical and hermeneutical discipline to have made us forget what a philology of the term philology might otherwise be able to disclose. And it would be toward allowing such an other [End Page 172] philology to emerge from the crusty layers of philology that Hamacher devotes his 95 Theses. For, if philology names a certain attentiveness to language, and if language consists first of all in those acts that open a "place" in which names can begin to function as names, then a particular kind of attentiveness—call it philia—to language (call it "philialogy") could by the same token bring about an attentiveness to the way the world will have become whatever we think is meant by that term, the world, only through the philological fact of its having been so named. One of the innumerable merits of Hamacher's Theses is to have been able to generate from this situation sufficient attentiveness among scholars of philology, literature, and philosophy for another publication to have resulted from it: Give the Word: Responses to Werner Hamacher's 95 Theses on Philology. In many respects, Give the Word is a peculiar volume. It is composed of a third reprinting of Hamacher's 95 Theses on Philology, this time in both English translation and German, followed by a short introduction by coeditors Ann Smock and Gerhard Richter, which leads to the Responses to the Theses written by eleven scholars, most (but not all) of whom are affiliated with U.S. universities. Following these eleven Responses—anywhere between six and nearly forty pages in length—there is another text by Werner Hamacher, "What Remains to Be Said," which responds at surprising length to the preceding essays on his Theses. As the editors point out in their introduction, extracts from the Theses first appeared in English translation as part of a 2010 special issue of PMLA, "Literary Criticism for the Twenty-First Century" (Hamacher 2010b, 4).2 "As the beginning of a response" to that publication, the editors specify, they organized two panels at the 2013 MLA Convention in Boston and then followed up on that first initiative by compiling the volume of texts that now appear in Give the Word. It is worth noting, however, that Hamacher died in July of 2017, two years before publication of the volume. Something of a disjunction, if not a dissonance, is produced as soon as one notices that Hamacher's Response to all the other Responses now has, or has been given, "the last word" in a way that could not have been registered at the time he wrote the essay "What Remains to Be Said" in 2016. In the interval between Hamacher's writing "What Remains to Be Said" and its publication in Give the Word, lies an event—Hamacher's death—that from now on cannot...

The Swerve and Ancient Materialism

Author(s): Thomas Nail and Katerina Kolozova Title (English): The Swerve and Ancient Materialism Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 19, No. 1-2 (2022). Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 58-71 Page Count: 13 Citation (English): Thomas Nail and Katerina Kolozova, “The Swerve and Ancient Materialism,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 19, No. 1-2 (2022): 58-71. Author(s) Biography Thomas Nail, University of Denver Thomas Nail is a Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of numerous books, including The Figure of the Migrant, Theory of the Border, Marx in Motion, Theory of the Image, Theory of the Object, Theory of the Earth, Lucretius I, II, III, Returning to Revolution, and Being and Motion. His research focuses on the philosophy of movement. Katerina Kolozova, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje Dr. Katerina Kolozova is Executive Director, senior researcher and full professor at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, and a professor of political philosophy at FMK-Belgrade. She has published many influential articles in a number of international journals, as well as several books. These include: Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy (Bloomsbury Academic), as well as Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (Columbia University Press).

Gerhard Oberhammer’s Works on Sāṃkhya and Yoga in Light of Recent Research

Gerhard Oberhammer is a prominent Austrian scholar of Indian philosophy and religions. This paper presents an analysis of Oberhammer’s works on spiritual practices of sāṃkhya and yoga. Based on the works that belong to the traditions of sāṃkhya, Patañjali’s yoga and the Pāśupata’s śaivism, Oberhammer reconstructed the phenomenology of each spiritual path and developed a general typology of yogic practices. Particularly, in the Yoga-sūtras, he identified four distinct practices of different origin, which implies that initially this work was a compilation. Oberhammer revealed an affinity between one of these practices and a later teaching of the theistic Mṛgendratantra. Based on the material of the Yuktidīpikā he described the phenomenology of the spiritual path of sāṃkhya, a tradition that is often believed to be of purely theoretical character. Oberhammer’s works on sāṃkhya and yoga attracted interest of scholars of Indian religions. However, with the course of time they were almost forgotten, not least because of the general positivist bias of modern indology. It seems promising to compare Oberhammer’s typology of yogic practices, as well as his philosophical teaching of transcendental hermeneutics, with the works by Mircea Eliade and Evgeniy Torchinov, which provide broad descriptions of religious practices with a general focus on the phenomenology of spiritual experience.

Trash Talk or Smack Talk: The Language of Competitive Sport

This paper challenges the Eurocentric interpretation of the intentionality of the use of trash talk in competitive sport. The power bloc established within sport enables the formation of a moral community amongst athletes within competitive sport. An anthropological exploration of the Black vernacular tradition of trash talk, from the Middle Passage to modern American sport, supports the use of trash talk as a mechanism used to ethically vet and form relationships within moral communities of competitive sport. The proposed conceptual framework advances philosophical scholarship on the sociology and ethics of sport by creating a line of literature that explores moral communities in sport from the perspective of the athlete. Framing trash talk as smack talk reveals the intentionality of the aggressive interactions as an ethical construct established by the athletes within the capitalistic environment of competitive sport. An understanding of athlete discourse will empower diversity, equity, and inclusion officers, administrators, and coaches in producing and regulating ethical environments for athletes in American sport.

Perspectives on music and evolution

Many scholars of philosophy, aesthetics, religion, history or social science have ventured to offer a comprehensive explanation of music, one of the most intangible and elusive phenomena in the world. A palaeoanthropological approach, which places music into an evolutionary paradigm, can add important perspectives to our understanding of this phenomenon. To begin with, the question whether music is an adaptation that has survival value in the classical Darwinian sense is contemplated. Views on the origin of music in conjunction with the emergence of language and as a domain for the expression of emotion, linked to music’s benefits for social coherence, are discussed. More recent views on the emergence of consciousness, on semiosis and on music as a manifestation of biocultural co-evolution, especially in conjunction with ritual, are then presented. Finally, the merit of exploiting the concept of play to help account for the systematicity of music’s semiosis is examined.Contribution: In line with the intent of this special collection of articles, the above considerations are placed into the context of materialist versus nonmaterialist perspectives on the emergence of the human mind. The overarching argument is that music contributes crucially to what it means to be human.