Kirjahaku

What is a musical work? What are its identity-conditions and the standards (if any) that they set for a competent, intelligent, and musically perceptive act of performance or audition? Should the work-concept henceforth be dissolved as some New Musicologists would have it into the various, everchanging socio-cultural or ideological contexts that make up its reception-history to date? Can music be thought of as possessing certain attributes, structural features, or intrinsically valuable qualities that are response-transcendent, i.e., that might always elude or surpass the best state of (current or future) informed opinion? These are some of the questions that Christopher Norris addresses by way of a sustained critical engagement with the New Musicology and other debates in recent philosophy of music. His book puts the case for a qualified Platonist approach that would respect the relative autonomy of musical works as objects of more or less adequate understanding, appreciation, and evaluative judgement. At the same time this approach would leave room for listeners share the phenomenology of musical experience in so far as those works necessarily depend for their repeated realisation from one performance or audition to the next upon certain subjectively salient modalities of human perceptual and cognitive response. Norris argues for a more philosophically and musically informed treatment of these issues that combines the best insights of the analytic and the continental traditions. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Norris's book, true to this dual orientation, is its way of raising such issues through a constant appeal to the vivid actuality of music as a challenge to philosophic thought. This is a fascinating study of musical understanding from one of the worlds leading contemporary theorists.

This book brings together three main topics - deconstruction, philosophy of language, and literary theory - that have figured centrally in Christopher Norris' work over the past two decades. It offers a refreshingly clear and vigorous statement of his views as to how 'theory' might profit from a greater awareness of current philosophical debates while philosophy might likewise gain by adopting a more open-minded attitude toward developments in literary theory. Most significant here is Norris's continuing exploration of the various points of contact between Jacques Derrida's thought and the kinds of concern - especially with issues in philosophical semantics and speech-act theory - that have preoccupied thinkers in the 'other', mainstream-analytic line of descent. However, his focus is consistently on matters that should be of interest to philosophers and literary theorists alike. Thus, Norris devotes some penetrating commentary to topics such as modal or 'possible-worlds' logic as it bears upon issues in narrative theory; the 'two cultures' (science versus literature) controversy; the different ways in which literary theory has alternately embraced and rejected the appeal to 'scientific' modes of analysis; and some possible reasons for Wittgenstein's well-known aversion to Shakespeare. He also suggests a novel approach to the free-will/determinism issue by way of debates about the nature of language and the scope it affords for expressive creativity despite - or owing to - the limits imposed by various structural constraints. Altogether, this important new book provides a welcome overview of the author's current thinking and an equally welcome enlargement of horizons in contrast to the narrowly specialised character of much present-day academic discourse.

This book brings together three main topics - deconstruction, philosophy of language, and literary theory - that have figured centrally in Christopher Norris's work over the past two decades. It offers a refreshingly clear and vigorous statement of his views as to how 'theory' might profit from a greater awareness of current philosophical debates while philosophy might likewise gain by adopting a more open-minded attitude toward developments in literary theory. Most significant here is Norris's continuing exploration of the various points of contact between Jacques Derrida's thought and the kinds of concern - especially with issues in philosophical semantics and speech-act theory - that have preoccupied thinkers in the 'other', mainstream-analytic line of descent. However, his focus is consistently on matters that should be of interest to philosophers and literary theorists alike. Thus, Norris devotes some penetrating commentary to topics such as modal or 'possible-worlds' logic as it bears upon issues in narrative theory; the 'two cultures' (science versus literature) controversy; the different ways in which literary theory has alternately embraced and rejected the appeal to 'scientific' modes of analysis; and some possible reasons for Wittgenstein's well-known aversion to Shakespeare. He also suggests a novel approach to the free-will/determinism issue by way of debates about the nature of language and the scope it affords for expressive creativity despite - or owing to - the limits imposed by various structural constraints. Altogether, this important new book provides a welcome overview of the author's current thinking and an equally welcome enlargement of horizons in contrast to the narrowly specialised character of much present-day academic discourse.

Badiou is with doubt the most influential philosopher working in Europe today - this book will provide the first detailed introduction to "Being and Event", a hugely important, but challenging book. Alain Badiou's "Being and Event" is the most original and significant work of French philosophy to have appeared in recent decades. It is the magnum opus of a thinker who is widely considered to have reshaped the character and set new terms for the future development of philosophy in France and elsewhere.This book has been written very much with a view to clarifying Badiou's complex and demanding work for non-specialist readers. It offers guidance on: philosophical and intellectual context; key themes; reading the text; reception and influence; and, further reading."Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

Badiou is with doubt the most influential philosopher working in Europe today - this book will provide the first detailed introduction to Being and Event, a hugely important, but challenging book. Alain Badiou's "Being and Event" is the most original and significant work of French philosophy to have appeared in recent decades. It is the magnum opus of a thinker who is widely considered to have reshaped the character and set new terms for the future development of philosophy in France and elsewhere.This book has been written very much with a view to clarifying Badiou's complex and demanding work for non-specialist readers. It offers guidance on: philosophical and intellectual context; key themes; reading the text; reception and influence; and, further reading."Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

We live in a world where questions of truth and of falsehood are left increasingly unattended. Such questions are often replaced by a relativism which allows any group the right to assert their values with impunity. Should, however, stories from an event such as the Holocaust be given equal truth status to neo-Nazi claims that it never happened? This book is a polemical warning against a too easy rejection of the standards of truth and value in the modern world, and is a further sortie in Christopher Norris's prolonged battle with the wilder side of postmodernism. Christopher Norris makes a timely reassessment of the cultural theorist Louis Althusser, and also makes a political case for Jacques Derrida whose "deconstruction" techniques are described as a useful tool when up against the rhetorical gestures of those theorists, such as Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, who are trapped in the postmodern playpen. The book should be of interest to any student of contemporary philosophy, critical theory and politics, and should be a contribution to the debate that is currently dominated by conservative thinkers. Christopher Norris is the author of "The Deconstructive Turn", Jacques Derrida", "What's Wrong with Postmodernism" and "Uncritical Theory: Intellectuals, Politics and the Gulf War".

Low back pain affects most of us at some time, and exercise is key to both its prevention and treatment. Critically appraising work from several approaches to produce an integrated, practical approach suitable for day-to-day clinicians and personal trainers, this essential guide looks at the science and practice of designing and teaching the best exercise programmes for this common condition. Learn: Vital client assessment skills Which exercises to use and why The most effective teaching methods How to structure and progress a full back pain management programmeAimed at student therapists and clinical exercise teachers, as well as trainers planning exercise programmes for subjects recovering from low back pain, Back Rehabilitation is essential reading for therapists and exercise academics and professionals of all types.

Low back pain affects most of us at some time, and exercise is key to both its prevention and treatment. Critically appraising work from several approaches to produce an integrated, practical approach suitable for day-to-day clinicians and personal trainers, this essential guide looks at the science and practice of designing and teaching the best exercise programmes for this common condition. Learn: Vital client assessment skills Which exercises to use and why The most effective teaching methods How to structure and progress a full back pain management programmeAimed at student therapists and clinical exercise teachers, as well as trainers planning exercise programmes for subjects recovering from low back pain, Back Rehabilitation is essential reading for therapists and exercise academics and professionals of all types.

The fifth edition of the retitled Sports and Soft Tissue Injuries sharpens its focus on the treatment of sports injuries, providing the most complete evidence-based guide for physiotherapists, sports therapists and medical practitioners working with athletes.Opening with chapters that examine the underlying science of tissue healing and principles of rehabilitation, the book employs a systematic approach, with chapters covering each area of the body, from facial through to ankle and foot injuries. Every chapter includes in-depth discussion and guidance on the treatment of common sports injuries through physiotherapeutic modalities, drawing on the author’s wealth of personal experience and the latest peer-reviewed research.A complete pedagogical resource, Sports and Soft Tissue Injuries is highly illustrated in full colour, and is an important text for students of sports therapy, physiotherapy, sport medicine and athletic training, interesting further reading for sport and exercise science or kinesiology students with an interest in sports injury, and a crucial reference for practicing physiotherapists and athletic trainers and the related disciplines.

The fifth edition of the retitled Sports and Soft Tissue Injuries sharpens its focus on the treatment of sports injuries, providing the most complete evidence-based guide for physiotherapists, sports therapists and medical practitioners working with athletes.Opening with chapters that examine the underlying science of tissue healing and principles of rehabilitation, the book employs a systematic approach, with chapters covering each area of the body, from facial through to ankle and foot injuries. Every chapter includes in-depth discussion and guidance on the treatment of common sports injuries through physiotherapeutic modalities, drawing on the author’s wealth of personal experience and the latest peer-reviewed research.A complete pedagogical resource, Sports and Soft Tissue Injuries is highly illustrated in full colour, and is an important text for students of sports therapy, physiotherapy, sport medicine and athletic training, interesting further reading for sport and exercise science or kinesiology students with an interest in sports injury, and a crucial reference for practicing physiotherapists and athletic trainers and the related disciplines.

This path-breaking book explores different ways in which writing about poetry can deepen and extend our critical engagement by deploying creatively the manifold resources of poetic language and form. Through a series of verse-essays, reflective monologues, and inventive variations on topics in literary theory The Winnowing Fan makes a strong case for revising received ideas about the scope and limits of criticism.Norris’s poems traverse the full range of European poetic history from Homer’s Odyssey, through the work of French symbolists such as Mallarmé, to modern writers such as Yeats, Benjamin, Heaney, Larkin, and Barthes. There are also verse-essays and shorter pieces on philosophers from Hume and Leibniz to Heidegger, Althusser, Derrida, de Man, Rorty, Deleuze, Badiou, and Agamben. In each case Norris seeks to free criticism from conventional academic forms and return it to an active mutual engagement with the practice of literature itself.

Re-Thinking the Cogito seeks to combine a strongly naturalistic with a distinctively rationalist perspective on some nowadays much-discussed issues in philosophy of mind. Against the common view that they involve downright incompatible conceptions of mind, knowledge and ethics it seeks to unite a naturalism that draws on recent advances in neurophysiology and cognitive science with an outlook that gives full weight to those normative values at the heart of rationalist thought. True to the book's constructive spirit, Norris offers various detailed proposals for bringing the two approaches into a mutually enhancing - though also mutually provocative - relationship. He finds that claim strikingly prefigured in Spinoza's working-out of a non-reductive yet metaphysically uncompromising mind/body monism. Moreover he suggests how a thoroughly naturalised approach might yet become a locus of productive engagement with the work of an ultra-rationalist thinker such as Alain Badiou. Thus Norris puts the case that physically embodied human thought has cognitive, intellectual and creative powers that cannot and need not be accounted for in terms of conscious (let alone self-conscious) reflection.

In this path-breaking study Christopher Norris proposes a transformed understanding of the much-exaggerated differences between analytic and continental philosophy. While keeping the analytic tradition squarely in view his book focuses on the work of Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou, two of the most original and significant figures in the recent history of ideas. Norris argues that these thinkers have decisively reconfigured the terrain of contemporary philosophy and, between them, pointed a way beyond some of those seemingly intractable issues that have polarised debate on both sides of the notional rift between the analytic and continental traditions. In particular his book sets out to show - against the received analytic wisdom - that continental philosophy has its own analytic resources and is capable of bringing some much-needed fresh insight to bear on problems in philosophy of language, logic and mathematics. Norris provides not only a unique comparative account of Derrida's and Badiou's work but also a remarkably wide-ranging assessment of their joint contribution to philosophy's current - if widely resisted - potential for self-transformation.

Christopher Norris argues for and constructs a new approach to philosophy of mind that combines naturalistic and rationalist perspectives usually thought to be at odds. "Re-Thinking the Cogito" seeks to combine a strongly naturalistic with a distinctively rationalist perspective on some nowadays much-discussed issues in philosophy of mind. Against the common view that they involve downright incompatible conceptions of mind, knowledge and ethics it seeks to unite a naturalism that draws on recent advances in neurophysiology and cognitive science with an outlook that gives full weight to those normative values at the heart of rationalist thought. True to the book's constructive spirit, Norris offers various detailed proposals for bringing the two approaches into a mutually enhancing - though also mutually provocative - relationship. He finds that claim strikingly prefigured in Spinoza's working-out of a non-reductive yet metaphysically uncompromising mind/body monism. Moreover he suggests how a thoroughly naturalised approach might yet become a locus of productive engagement with the work of an ultra-rationalist thinker such as Alain Badiou. Thus Norris puts the case that physically embodied human thought has cognitive, intellectual and creative powers that cannot and need not be accounted for in terms of conscious (let alone self-conscious) reflection. "Continuum Studies in Philosophy" presents cutting-edge scholarship in all the major areas of research and study. The wholly original arguments, perspectives and research findings in titles in this series make it an important and stimulating resource for students and academics from a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.

Following the publication of Seven Types of Ambiguity in 1930 William Empson was quickly recognised as a critic of great originality and unique creative gifts and he has inspired a whole new method and style of approach in literary criticism. But this is the first full-length study of his work and it is an important part of Dr Norris’s purpose to account for the gulf that has emerged between Empson’s viewpoint and the development of his ideas by others, especially the American New Critics, and for the consequent failure of Empson’s later books to generate the informed discussion they demand and deserve. Here particular attention is given to his critical summa, The Structure of Complex Words. To understand Empson’s work as a consistent whole, Dr Norris argues, one must relate it to his philosophy of humanistic rationalism. This is to give a new perspective not only to his practical criticism but also to his differences with Eliot and Leavis and to his anti-Christian polemic.

In this path-breaking study Christopher Norris proposes a transformed understanding of the much-exaggerated differences between analytic and continental philosophy. While keeping the analytic tradition squarely in view his book focuses on the work of Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou, two of the most original and significant figures in the recent history of ideas.Norris argues that these thinkers have decisively reconfigured the terrain of contemporary philosophy and, between them, pointed a way beyond some of those seemingly intractable issues that have polarised debate on both sides of the notional rift between the analytic and continental traditions. In particular his book sets out to show - against the received analytic wisdom - that continental philosophy has its own analytic resources and is capable of bringing some much-needed fresh insight to bear on problems in philosophy of language, logic and mathematics. Norris provides not only a unique comparative account of Derrida's and Badiou's work but also a remarkably wide-ranging assessment of their joint contribution to philosophy's current - if widely resisted - potential for self-transformation.

This path-breaking book explores different ways in which writing about poetry can deepen and extend our critical engagement by deploying creatively the manifold resources of poetic language and form. Through a series of verse-essays, reflective monologues, and inventive variations on topics in literary theory The Winnowing Fan makes a strong case for revising received ideas about the scope and limits of criticism.Norris’s poems traverse the full range of European poetic history from Homer’s Odyssey, through the work of French symbolists such as Mallarmé, to modern writers such as Yeats, Benjamin, Heaney, Larkin, and Barthes. There are also verse-essays and shorter pieces on philosophers from Hume and Leibniz to Heidegger, Althusser, Derrida, de Man, Rorty, Deleuze, Badiou, and Agamben. In each case Norris seeks to free criticism from conventional academic forms and return it to an active mutual engagement with the practice of literature itself.

These poems by a well-known philosopher and literary theorist take a lead from Plato's intriguing account of how Socrates turned to composing verse during his last few days despite having famously denounced its corrupting moral, social and political effects. Writing as a convinced formalist, Christopher Norris deploys a range of meters, stanza-forms and rhyme-schemes by way of exploring how the discipline of verse might relate to that of philosophical enquiry as practiced across the ages. Some of his poems have to do with individual thinkers, such as Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Adorno, and Derrida. Others are concerned with wider debates like those around the nature of time, the status of mathematical truths, the enduring puzzles of quantum mechanics, Kurt G del's Undecidability Theorem, the mind/body problem, the ontology of art, the nature of rules, and the role of luck in matters of moral judgment. Others again are philosophical in the non-specialist sense of confronting often-asked questions about love, memory, identity, character, social roles, choice, evolution, and animal sentience.What People Are Saying"I not only want to read it again. I want to emulate it. It's a liberating model of how, after a career in critical and philosophical prose, a writer can distill and animate the thoughts and thinkers with which and whom he has been long engaged." --DON BIALOSTOSKY"The poems in Socrates at Verse are not the mythic romantic odes of the nineteenth century, nor the very difficult lyrical sequences of the twentieth. Rather, these poems are more akin to eighteenth century British verse--a "poetry of ideas" that is wonderfully witty and fun. The poems are easy to grasp and understand--more deeply if one has a knowledge of or penchant for the particular philosophers, issues, or ideas treated in each. Reminiscent of the poetic genre dubbed "occasional verse" (constrained as it is by subject or situation), these poems skirt the dangers of stilted language, forced rhymes. They are freshly humorous (if not sarcastic), entertaining (and not at all self-absorbed)." --STEVE KATZAbout the AuthorCHRISTOPHER NORRIS is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff. He has published more than thirty books on topics in philosophy, literary theory, the history of ideas, cultural politics, and musical criticism. Norris's books on deconstruction were among the first to introduce Derrida's thought to an Anglophone readership and to establish its jointly philosophical and literary bearings. More recently he has turned to writing poetry and verse-essays that often draw on those earlier interests to generate a new kind of creative writing focused on the various complex intersections of imaginative, fictive, scholarly, philosophical, and speculative thought.

This collection drops a boulder into the still waters of British poetry. It is wide-ranging, hard-hitting, and above all ambitious, both in vision and variety of poetic forms. Norris moves rhythmically through politics, philosophy, and science always with an eye for the particular, always in pursuit of the bigger picture. He has an extraordinary ability to blow the dust off our habitual perceptions, charge up our minds and make the language sing. He finds live connections between an anchorite and our own boxed existence, he quarrels with T. S. Eliot and jokes about endorphins. Each poem stands for what we are in danger of losing; our intelligence, our learning, our feeling, our connection with history, and with each other. The volume is one of those points of light that Auden said the just exchange with one another; so read and pass the word: here are poems to sustain in the dark times and give us hope for the future. -GARY DAY, author of Literary Criticism: A New HistoryThese poems eschew the confessional laxity and structural imprecision that typify so much contemporary verse. Christopher Norris takes seriously Ezra Pound's dictum that poetry should be at least as well written as good prose while exceeding that basic requirement through a range of expressive and formal-prosodic resources. His poems are unfailingly dynamic, the sense hard-won from rigorous forms which at times serve an almost dialogical function, nuancing assertions and scotching simple conclusions. These are the values that Norris here exemplifies in verse that is at once an eloquent present-day defense of poetry and, by implication, a searching critique of various turns in its development over the past half-century. -NIALL GILDEA, author of Jacques Derrida's Cambridge AffairCHRISTOPHER NORRIS is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cardiff in Wales. He has published more than thirty books on topics in philosophy, literary theory, the history of ideas, cultural politics, and musical criticism. Socrates at Verse and Other Philosophical Poems was published by Parlor Press in 2021.

These poems continue Christopher Norris's spirited exploration of the paths by which contemporary poetry might find its way out of the self-enclosed sphere of lyric subjectivity into the larger air of philosophical, ethical, political, scientific, and environmental debate. They do so through a range of formal resources, among them rhyme and meter, which Norris regards as portals of creative-intellectual discovery and not, as free-verse practitioners would have it, artificially cramping constraints. Norris also deploys a great range of stanza forms and verse structures to demonstrate the variety of ways in which technique and prosody can serve not only to emphasize, deepen or qualify a point but to express thoughts and feelings beyond the communicative reach of prose discourse. These aspects of his work are subject to commentary in a concluding essay where Norris talks about his passage from literary theory to philosophy and thence to poetry, although-as the reader will soon discover-without having left those earlier interests behind. Indeed, it is a main concern of this collection to make the case-against dominant post-Romantic or Modernist conceptions-that a poem can justifiably put forward certain ideas, propositions, or hypotheses that ask to be assessed in rational-critical as well as aesthetic or literary-critical terms. Norris is very clear that his kind of formalism is strictly a matter of verse-technique or structure and no part of any larger, doctrinally driven autonomist program, like that of the 'old' New Criticism, that treats poems as purely verbal artifacts self-sealed against any such alien intrusions as history, biography, or the meddlesome prose intellect. These poems are intended as mind-openers whose formal elements are always in the service of a deeper, more lucid, and creative engagement with their diverse topics and concerns.What People Are SayingExploring the relationship between poetry, literary criticism, theory, and philosophy, Norris has the earned authority of an expert in all four fields. Yet there's a disarming playfulness in his engagement with the reader, and he makes complex argument memorably musical by mining the resources of meter and rhyme. Deploying a dazzling array of poetic forms - from villanelle, terza rima and sonnet to ballad and acrostic-this collection is a tour de force of wit, intellect, political verve and musicality: in short, a major achievement. -Lucy Newlyn, author of Reading, Writing, and RomanticismEminent philosophers, or literary theorists, do not usually turn, all of sudden, into fully-formed, metrically-perfect and highly-formalized poets; but that is the trick or magic of Christopher Norris. And in this his latest volume of poetry the magic is all the more magical for often silently becoming the very subject of his poems. Witness talk of William Empson's "late-style change of hats," or James Joyce's Daedalus slipping "the scholar's leash." Here then, juggling his hats as he goes, Scholar Norris is well-and-truly on the run. And, as the Runaway himself writes, "just North of here the games begin."- John Schad, author of Paris Bride: A Modernist LifeAbout the AuthorChristopher Norris is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University in Wales, where he taught for four decades. He is the author and editor of more than forty books on topics in philosophy, literary theory, politics, music, and the history of ideas. More recently, he has published ten volumes of poetry ranging from lyrics and reflective verse to philosophical verse-essays and political satires. Academically he is best known for his extensive writing on the poet and literary critic William Empson and for his many books and essays on Jacques Derrida and deconstruction.