[LUTE] Re: The Online Lute Player

[Stephen Arndt]

On music not only evoking feelings but also forming the character of the 
listener, see also (prior to Quintilian) Plato, "Republic," 376d-403c, 
particularly 398c-403c. Music, however, at least in the Latin tradition, was 
part of the "quadrivium" and thus one of the seven liberal arts, understood 
as pursuits worthy of a free man as opposed to the mechanical arts of a 
slave (cf. Augustine's treatise "De musica" or Isidore's "Etymologiae.") 
(The "quadrivium" is also treated more or less explicitly in the Republic, 
though the "trivium" is present there only more generally as dialectic.) 
Despite its mathematical basis, as discovered already by the Pythagoreans, 
music was not considered a science in the Aristotelian sense of "episteme."

Just a few recollections from my former life as a philosophy professor (I 
hope that my early onset of senile amnesia hasn't caused me to misremember 
anything).

Stephen Arndt