Description: Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. A particularly rich field of investigation, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'.
Review Quotes: 'I recommend this book to a wide audience... absolutely engrossing and satisfying.' Early Music America 'Two significant questions posed by Semi's new book are, to what extent does speculation on music enter into this scientific discourse, and in what way does the art of music itself participate in and contribute to the overall project? These are important but underexplored issues, one reason being that, for the most part, historians of eighteenth-century British science and philosophy have not considered music as part of their intellectual remit. In my view, this book certainly shows that they should.' British Journal for the History of Science '... an interesting and welcome synthesis of British eighteenth century theories of music.' Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies