There's madness in your method: a philosophical exploration into the thought of Paul Feyerabend and its implications for music education

Drawing on the work of the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, this paper argues that the popular yet mistaken notion of scientific method has had a deleterious effect on music education by discouraging us from embracing conflict or pursuing counterinductive ways of thinking about music. Feyerabend argues that knowledge advances not according to principles traditionally associated with scientific method, but rather as a result of ad hoc hypotheses, counterinduction, and contradictions that are recognised between partly overlapping theories that are mutually inconsistent. Ignoring this truth results in the erasure of all but abstract forms of knowledge acquired through methodical investigation, which occurs when educators put all of their faith in method and ignore musical knowledge that escapes articulation or measurement. Yet tacit or informal musical knowledge can be seen as the artistic equivalent of the ad hoc propositions that are required, ultimately, to advance knowledge.

Harmony between Arkhē and Telos in Patristic Platonism and the Imagery of Astronomical Harmony Applied to Apokatastasis

This study investigates the idea of harmony as a protological and eschatological principle in three outstanding Patristic philosophers, well steeped in the Platonic tradition: Origen, Gregory Nyssen, and Evagrius. All of them attached an extraordinary importance to harmony, homonoia, and unity in the arkhē and, even more, in the telos. This ideal is opposed to the disagreement/dispersion of rational creatures’ acts of volition after their fall and before the eventual apokatastasis. These Christian Platonists are among the strongest supporters of the final universal restoration. Their reflection on the unity-multiplicity dialectic, which parallels that between harmony and disorder/discord/dissonance, is informed by the Platonic tradition. In Gregory, the idea of harmony assumes musical connotations, especially in relation to the telos. In this connection, I examine the relationship between their notion of harmony in the arkhē and telos and Plotinus’ concept of harmony. Plotinus was well known to Gregory, the author of a Christianized version of Plato’s Phaedo in which apokatastasis is prominent. Origen, whose readings included many Middle-Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean texts, in Alexandria attended the classes of the “proto-Neoplatonist” Ammonius, who was also Plotinus’ teacher. A wide-ranging methodical investigation of the relation between Origen’s and Plotinus’ philosophical thoughts is still a notable desideratum. Finally, I concentrate on the concept of harmony in astronomy as a metaphor for intellectual harmony and apokatastasis in Patristic Platonism, especially in Evagrius’ Kephalaia Gnōstika. The noun apokatastasis was used in an astronomical sense, and employed in Stoicism for the conclusion of a cosmic cycle. Evagrius, who loved astronomical metaphors, focussed a kephalaion on a wordplay—which escaped Guillaumont and all other scholars—concerning the astronomical meaning of apokatastasis, thus embedding his theory of the eventual restoration in an allegorical framework that rests on a notion of astronomical harmony. A strong case is made in this connection that Evagrius was elaborating on Plato’s pivotal link between cosmological (astronomical) and intellectual harmony, and was aware that the Stoic theory of cosmological apokatastasis drew on Plato.