Cinemusical meanings in motion pictures: commerce,art, and Brando loyalty … or … De Niro,My God,To Thee

• The theme of art‐versus‐commerce has surfaced in many motion pictures but serves here to juxtapose three otherwise disparate films that draw upon the power of jazz as a force toward the dramatic development of character, plot, central themes, and other cinemusical meanings. Specifically, via the significance of its ambi‐diegetic music, New York, New York (1977) shows the elevation of artistic integrity (Robert De Niro as Jimmy Doyle) over commercialism (Liza Minnelli as Francine Evans). In Heart Beat (1980), the raw honesty of a committed‐but‐doomed creative genius (Art Pepper) provides nondiegetic music that signifies the self‐destructive degradation of a key protagonist (Nick Nolte as Neal Cassady). Finally, in The Score (2001), the appealing nature of diegetic jazz in a cinemusically‐enriched nightclub environment helps to explain why a soon‐to‐be‐ reformed criminal (Robert De Niro, again, as Nick Wells) would risk everything in collaboration with two bizarre partners (Marlon Brando as Max Baron and Ed Norton as Jack Teller) in hopes of a payoff big enough to allow him to retire from a lucrative career in crime in order to run his legitimate jazz venue and to settle down with his true love (Angela Bassett as Diane Boesman).

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“God … has sent me to Germany”: Salomon Maimon,Friedrich Jacobi,and the Spinoza Quarrel

Salomon Maimon's Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie [Essay in Transcendental Philosophy] (1790) challenges and reworks Kant's arguments in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason] (1785, 2nd ed. 1787) about the foundations of natural science and of Newtonian physics in particular. Kant himself was impressed both with Maimon's grasp of his critical project and also with the force of his challenge to it. While Maimon's significance on the later development of German Idealism is now widely acknowledged, another aspect of Maimon's Versuch has not been fully appreciated, namely, its engagement with the central questions of the Spinozastreit [Spinoza Quarrel] that erupted in 1785 with the publication of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn [Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn]. The Spinoza Quarrel centered on whether and to what extent philosophy's rational understanding of God needs to be grounded in an unmediated and suprarational revelatory experience. This paper is the first extended effort at placing Maimon's Versuch into the context of the Spinoza Quarrel. I argue that the Spinoza Quarrel and Maimon's self‐proclaimed philosophical mission in response to it—the replacement of revealed faith by reason—deeply inform the goals he pursues in his Versuch. I show how Maimon's Versuch can be read as not only a response to Kant, but also to Jacobi's defense of the revelatory nature of sense experience in David Hume über den Glauben (1787), the book in which Jacobi offers his own skeptical challenge to Kant's Kritik. Situating Maimon's Versuch as a response to Friedrich Jacobi's David Hume allows us to understand how one of Maimon's objectives in his Versuch is to keep Jacobian Glaube [faith] at bay by demonstrating, using a revised Kantian framework, the conditions of the impossibility of experiencing miracles.     

Can > Will: Predictions of What Can Happen are Extreme,but Believed to be Probable

Predictions of uncertain events are often described in terms of what can or what will happen. How are such statements used by speakers, and what are they perceived to mean? Participants in four experiments were presented with distributions of variable product characteristics and were asked to generate natural, meaningful sentences containing either will or can. Will was typically associated with either low or intermediate numeric values, whereas can consistently suggested high (maximum) values. For instance, laptop batteries lasting from 1.5 to 3.5 hours will last for 1.5 hours or for 2.5 hours, but they can last for 3.5 hours. The same response patterns were found for positive and negative events. In will‐statements, the most frequent scalar modifiers were at least and about, whereas in can‐statements, the most frequent modifier included up to. A fifth experiment showed that will indicates an outcome that may be certain but more often simply probable. Can means possible, but even can‐statements are perceived to imply probable outcomes. This could create a communication paradox because most speakers use can to describe outcomes that because of their extremity are at the same time quite unlikely. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.