The debate over the central issue confronted in The Closing of the American Mind—the role of the university and the liberal arts in the United States—has become increasingly urgent and contentious. The goal of this collection of essays is to see what we can learn about the dilemmas confronting American culture through consideration of both The Closing of the American Mind and the debate it aroused.

We often say that music is ineffable, that it does not refer to anything outside of itself. But if music, in all its sensuous flux, does not mean anything in particular, might it still have a special kind of philosophical significance?
 
In Deep Refrains, Michael Gallope draws together the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari in order to revisit the age-old question of music’s ineffability from a modern perspective. For these nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophers, music’s ineffability is a complex phenomenon that engenders an intellectually productive sense of perplexity. Through careful examination of their historical contexts and philosophical orientations, close attention to their use of language, and new interpretations of musical compositions that proved influential for their work, Deep Refrains forges the first panoptic view of their writings on music. Gallope concludes that music’s ineffability is neither a conservative phenomenon nor a pious call to silence. Instead, these philosophers ask us to think through the ways in which music’s stunning force might address, in an ethical fashion, intricate philosophical questions specific to the modern world.
 
 

Rodolphe Gasché’s commentary on Deleuze and Guattari’s last book, What Is Philosophy?, homes in on what the two thinkers define as philosophy in distinction from the sciences and the arts and what it is that they understand themselves to have done while doing philosophy. Gasché is concerned with the authors’ claim not only that philosophy is a Greek invention but also that it is, for fundamental reasons, geophilosophical in nature.

Gasché also intimates that, rather than a marginal issue of their conception of philosophy, geocentrism is a central dimension of their thinking. Indeed, Gasché argues, if all the principal traits that constitute philosophy according to What is Philosophy?—autochthony, philia, and doxa—imply in an essential manner a concern with Earth, it follows that what Deleuze and Guattari have been doing while engaging in philosophy has been marked by this concern from the start.