Steven Lydon (Tenure-track Assistant Professor ) published his article entitled “Representing Nothing: Schopenhauer ‘decoding’ Chladni’s sound figures”in the edited volume The Schopehauerian Mind .
Abstract:
This article is about Arthur Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the “sound figures.” This acoustical phenomenon became well-known across Europe after its discovery in 1787 but did not truly become renowned until Napoleon Bonaparte commissioned a national prize for an explanation fifteen years later. In contrast to the two-dimensional wave patterns familiar at the time, the sound figures re-imagined sound as an arresting series of geometrical patterns. Among the public the sound figures were an amusing trinket and for physicists they were an intriguing puzzle. But for Schopenhauer, the sound figures elicited perhaps the most tantalizing question of all: whether nature possessed an internal structure and whether this structure was knowable. The sound figures indicated that nature existed independently of consciousness and that force acted beyond the narrow sliver of sensation apportioned to it. This could lead to various extrapolations: from the immanence of organized totality to the intimation of a capricious substratum known as the Will.