Music & Philosophy Blog 2

Ok, so I've been thinking about how to go about defining concepts that are a bit harder than simply dog or chair like art, music, etc. and here's what i've come up with, i touched briefly on how i feel about defining things in my extended Philosophy of Art paper which you can view at My papers/essays link on my main blog page. This blog may seem irrevevant at times or just a big tangent but bear with me.

To start with God: now in most cultures, God (or god or gods/goddesses) typically are simply summed up with three terms: omnipotent (all powerful), omniscent (all knowing), and omnipresent (everywhere simultaniously). Now, logically what this means is the God in most cases (esp in Judeo/Christan/Islamic terms) is infinite and limitless. Now there is a problem with defininf infinite concepts because language is finite and therefore no matter what, when you try to describe an infinite concept with finite language you are essentially limiting it and therefore the true message will not get across. for example refering to God as He, he, She, or she. Such is the problem with language: we don't always have the right words. This can also be said of absract concepts such as truth, beauty, freedom, justice, etc. The problem with refering to God comes into play with these terms because for the most part they are all subjective and have different meanings for different people and unless you are a Kantian and/or a Platonist/Neo-Plantonist,  there really is no objective concept of Truth, Beauty, Freedom, or Justice. and even if you do follow Kant or Plato, both of them still agree that as a single physical person, one will not truly know the full nature and objective meaning of these concepts. Therefore it can be difficult to define things like Music, Art, Dance, Literature, etc. You will end up limiting them and not taking into account all possibilites that exist or that may one day come along.

That being said, I also don't think it is a good idea to not have any base definition for these things either. I don't like the idea of opening floodgates so that anything can be anything. Definitons are important to an extent. I mean don't get me wrong, I'm not one of thsoe people who needs a label and classification for all things to feel safer and more comfortable with the world. This is something we all do to an extent as to not feel like we live in a world of chaos and uncertainties. However as I said, definitons are useful and helpful and they do weed out certain ridiculous or bad examples of a concept to be classified as such. For example. an iguana is not a cow. In the first place, an iguana isn't even a mammal so it fails even at the basic neccesities for being a cow.

Which bring me to my next point, once again, tangetn alert. I'm about to use zombies as a way to explain how to define music, Art, or art in general.:

Now at it's core a zombie follows certain things. Even before the days of George Romero who set the standard for the modern zombie, zombies were almost always previously dead things. I admit at times there were movies and books that had zombies as simply living people under hypnosis who did the bidding of the "zombie king" , the one who did the voodoo. But even if they were dead this figure was refered to as the zombie king. One, could look at these people in a trance as metaphorical zombies. the same way when parents say their kids are zombies in the morning. These parents do not actually mean their kids are zombies, undead, or being controlled by anyone. They know full well their kids are not among the walking dead.
So at our basis, zombies are dead that are somehow acting not dead. This is clear if we look at the synomyms for zombies: the living dead, the undead, the walking dead. See? Dead. Dead, dead, dead. Zombies are dead. More this, only the brain is typically functional. This means zombies don't need any of thewir other organs, which is why if you shoot or stab them in the chest or stomach they are not phased. it is the brain that still drives them and the only way to kill a zombie is to damage or remove the brain. now we all agree on this. But many many people have a tendency to label movies like 28 days later, evil dead, or i am legend as zombie movies. this is false. you can argue it anyway you want but in the end it comes down to whether they are dead or not. not only that but the writers of these movies usually clearly state their creatures are not zombies. out of those three films i listed, the only one that comes close to being zombies is the evil dead becuase in fact, the creatures are dead. but i nwill be going into a deeper argument about this in another post on debunking pseudozombie movies pretty much unrelated to this post but will recap and continue the specific discussion on the nature of zombies.

Anyway my point is if we don't somewhat close off definitons to at least not let in some things i feel we may be in trouble or else vampires could technically be zombies, cell phones could be works of art, computer system sounds of a laptop booting up could be music, etc.