In this paper I develop a version of musical formalism inspired by Schopenhauer. First, I present a Schopenhauerian account of music with a background of his metaphysical framework. Then, I define meaningfulness as an analog to a Kantian notion of purposiveness and argue that, in light of Schopenhauer, music is meaningful as a direct manifestation of the universal will. Given the ineffable nature of what music points to, its form lacks any representation of meaning. Music is therefore the mere form of meaningfulness, and it is precisely this mere form that gives rise to the infinite possibilities to ascribe it with a variety of musical meaning.

This paper raises some skepticism about the centrality of musical works in ontological debates in the philosophy of music. It argues that such a focus imposes conceptual and methodological limitations in investigating the nature of music. As an alternative to the work-oriented methodology, the paper proposes a shift toward an ontological framework centered on musical elements and the various structures they compose. This alternative approach allows us to pursue our philosophical interests about music without running into the familiar puzzles about work ontology.

This paper purports to define generativity by developing a formal account of generative operations. Formulated within the framework of higher-order logic with plural types and a Finean notion of essence, the theory articulates precisely what makes an operation genuinely generative in terms of the identity dependency of the output object on the inputs and the generative process. The proposal aims to account for a range of cases, from the paradigmatic examples favored by the generativist (such as set-building and structural abstraction) to more 'esoteric' objects (propositions, artworks, social objects, etc.) and to unify them under the same generative principles.

This paper defends musical formalism by proposing a novel account of musical form, according to which a form is a relational structure that not only describes music’s formal qualities but generates meaning as well. By elucidating an essential connection between the formal and the affective aspects of music, this approach may realize the formalist dream: it reconciles a traditionally held opposition between structural analysis and subjective interpretation while explaining music's significance—in a formalist way.

This paper explains how one can be a platonist about music, that is, how music can be construed as abstract entities that exist independently from us. It argues that the fact that musical objects (intervals, chords, motifs, melodies, etc.) are multiply manifestable, diversely identifiable, and compositional provides strong support for a platonist view about such things. A principle of ontological inheritance is then introduced and motivated to extend platonism from basic musical elements to more complex structures, resulting in a view on which all musical objects (including works and improvisations) are platonic. It concludes by making an attempt to adjudicate between different versions of musical platonism, showing the theoretical fruitfulness of adopting a generativist framework.

This paper revisits a well-known impossibility result concerning the logical representation of unawareness within classical epistemic frameworks, originally formulated in response to attempts to model agents’ awareness levels. It offers an alternative approach that treats unawareness as a failure of content-recognition rather than of truth evaluation, and does so by drawing on insights from weak Kleene logic. The proposed framework preserves classical reasoning where possible, while accommodating a finer-grained distinction between knowledge, ignorance, and unawareness.