The Harvard Review of Philosophy

Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks on music, when brought together and then related to his similarly scattered remarks on culture, show a deep and abiding concern with music as a repository and conveyer of meaning in human life. Yet the conception of meaning at work in these remarks is not of a kind that is amenable to brief or concise articulation. This paper explores that conception, considering in turn (a) the relational networks within which musical meaning emerges, (b) what he calls a discernible “kinship” between composers and styles, (c) the embodied character of musical content, (d) the close and too-little-appreciated intricate connections between our capacity to make sense in music and in language (and the frequent dependence of the former on the latter) and the interaction of the musical theme with spoken language, and (e) music as a culturally-embedded phenomenon that is, as he said of language, possible only in what he evocatively, if too briefly, called “the stream of life.”

This paper discusses the philosophical view proposed by Gregory Mankiw in his recent article “Defending the One Percent” (JEP 27-3, 2013): the just deserts view in application to income distribution. Mankiw’s view suffers from three unsolved problems: the Criteria Problem, the Measurement Problem, and the Problem of the Missing Desert Function. The overall conclusion is that Mankiw’s normative “Defense of the One Percent” fails quite drastically.