295
Journal of Music Theory 60:2, October 2016
DOI 10.1215/00222909-3651953 © 2016 by Yale University
Kendall Walton
In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence
Oxford University Press, 2014: 295 pp. ($29.95, paperback)
Bryan J. Parkhurst
This essay on Kendall Walton’s In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Exis-
tence is the first review of one of Walton’s books to appear in a music journal.
This contrasts with the situation of another prominent analytic aesthetician
of Walton’s generation, Peter Kivy, whose greater visibility in academic music
studies can be gauged in part by the many notices his books have received in
music periodicals. The determining factors here are output and focus. Wal-
ton has published three books, and of these only In Other Shoes has much to
do with music, whereas thirteen of Kivy’s twenty-one monographs are exclu-
sively occupied with questions arising within the philosophy of music. I flag
this contrast because it belies a fact that I want to use this review to under-
score: to a greater extent than any other analytic philosopher, and in spite of
the fact that it would be misleading to pigeonhole him as a “philosopher of
music,” Walton has confronted a set of philosophical problems that overlap
substantially with the defining concerns of contemporary music theory, con-
cerns that In Other Shoes does much to articulate and clarify.
Like Walton’s earlier collection Marvelous Images (2008), and unlike his
systematic treatise Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990), In Other Shoes is a potpourri
of loosely connected, previously published essays, most of them revised and
expanded for the volume.
1
For our purposes, these can be sorted into three
groups: (1) essays whose central argument is partly or wholly about music;
(2) essays that do not deal with music but arrive at conclusions that should
attract the attention of music scholars; and (3) chapters that are of strictly
philosophical interest.
The third group, which I’ll hereafter ignore, contains treatments of
philosophical puzzles related to the account of fictional representation set
out definitively in Mimesis as Make-Believe (“Fictionality and Imagination—
Mind the Gap,” “Restricted Quantification, Negative Existentials, and Fic-
tion,” “Fearing Fictions,” and “Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime: On Being
Moved by Fiction”) as well as extensions of Walton’s theory of fictionality into
nonaesthetic philosophical territories (“‘It’s Only a Game’: Sports as Fiction”
and “Existence as Metaphor?”).
1 Only the first chapter of the book, “Empathy, Imagina-
tion, and Phenomenal Concepts,” is new in the volume.
Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/journal-of-music-theory/article-pdf/60/2/295/437207/JMT602_07Parkhurst_fpp.pdf
by UNIV OF TX AUSTIN user
on 16 January 2020