The experience of music is an aesthetic experience that is usually considered to be expressive. If music is expressive then the question is what are the meanings which can be conveyed by it and make it expressive. There are different answers to this question. We could say that musical experience is expressive because it arouses specific emotions, or that it is so since it appeals to imagination or, finally, that it is an irreducibly metaphorical experience. This course will focus on the problem of the meanings of music and its value. We will analyze this problem within the current debate in analytic aesthetics. A number of contemporary hypotheses will be discussed. Moreover, a short presentation of Plato’s, Rousseau’s, Schopenhauer’s, and Nietzsche’s views on the value and expressivity of music will be given.

 Readings will be taken primarily from contemporary essays in analytic philosophy. Students will be required to submit a final paper. The course will be taught in English.