Erwin Ott

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Happy anniversary to Bob Moog's US patent number 3,475,623, the voltage-controlled low pass filter! October 29th, 1969.

Beat and Flux: The Club as a Laboratory of Ontological Experience I.

The beat is a philosophical event - an illusion that reveals, a stability that dissolves, a unity that disappears. It is not just sound; it is ontology in motion. #PhilSky
open.substack.com/pub/erwinott...

10/10 "Beat and Flux" isn’t just about music - it’s a call to rethink philosophy itself. What if truth isn’t in concepts, but in the vibration of bodies in a room? The club might be the future of thought. #PhilSky #SoundAsPhilosophy

9/10 Philosophy must join the dance. To understand flux, we can’t just theorize—we must resonate, let the beat move us, and accept that truth here is fleeting, embodied, and collective. #PhilosophyInAction

8/10 The beat is both illusion (order) and revelation (flux). It’s a paradoxical medium: stable enough to dance to, unstable enough to remind us that all order is temporary. #Dialectics #Temporality

7/10 Philosophy of sound can’t stop at theory. The public’s experience - the way bodies move, sync, and dissolve in rhythm - is where flux becomes real. The club is a lived epistemology. #AestheticExperience #SocialOntology

6/10 Here’s the twist: the beat’s unity is apophatic - it reveals by concealing. Like negative theology, it points to the flux through absence. The moment of fusion is also its disappearance. #ApophaticAesthetics #Ontology

5/10 Collective trance isn’t about losing the self - it’s about suspending difference. The beat dissolves boundaries: between bodies, between subject/object, between “me” and “we.” But this unity is fleeting, tied to the rhythm’s duration. #CollectiveEffervescence

4/10 Key move: the beat isn’t just sound—it’s a physical inscription. Subwoofers don’t just play music; they press air into bodies, syncing breath, pulse, and movement. The club becomes a site where ontology is lived. #EmbodiedCognition #Phenomenology

3/10 The beat is a mask: it imposes order on chaos, turning infinite flux into countable rhythm. But this “illusion” of stability is what makes the flux experienceable - through vibration, resonance, and collective trance. #Deleuze #Whitehead

2/10 The essay starts with a paradox: the club’s beat, mathematically precise, creates unity among dancers. Yet, as Christoph Cox argues, sound is "flux" - endless, ungraspable process. How does the beat reconcile these opposites? #ProcessPhilosophy #Aesthetics

1/10 What if the club isn’t just a space for music, but a philosophical lab? "Beat and Flux" explores how the machine-driven beat masks and reveals the infinite sonic flux of sound. #PhilSky #SoundStudies #PhilosophyOfMusic
(das.ubernerden.com/ott-beat-flu...)

First day of my large lecture class was me explaining that the poem they were looking at was more than the sum of its technics.

From the Philosophy of Sound to Philosophy in Sound: Christoph Cox’s "Sonic Flux" and the Via Negativa The Problem of the Ephemeral

To philosophize in sound is to embrace withdrawal, to think not about the unsayable but from within it. #PhilSky
open.substack.com/pub/erwinott...

Von der Philosophie des Klangs zur Philosophie im Klang Christoph Cox’ <em>Sonic Flux</em> und die via negativa

10/10
Apophatic sound aesthetics isn’t a deficit but a productive provocation. It reminds us philosophy doesn’t just *speak* of sound—it *happens* in it.
das.ubernerden.com/ott-cox.html #PhilSky #SoundThinking #FutureOfPhilosophy

9/10
Methodological ambiguity: Is this still aesthetics - or ontology? Theology? Ott’s essay oscillates between disciplines, showing how sound transcends their boundaries.
#Interdisciplinarity #Philosophy #SoundStudies

8/10
Critique: Does this mystify sound? The essay warns against elevating sound to the “sacred” and advocates a materialist rigor that thinks withdrawal *this-side* of transcendence.
#Critique #Materialism #Aesthetics

7/10
Silence, stillness, reverberation: The essay frames them as sound’s “negative forms.” Not absence, but productive void—like mystic silence, which speaks louder than words.
#Silence #Stillness #SoundPhilosophy

6/10
The ear as “apophatic organ”: It hears what withdraws. The easy links Derrida’s *différance* to an aesthetics of listening that abandons signification - hearing as letting go.
#Derrida #Listening #AestheticTheory

5/10
Noise as acoustic “nothing”: Not silence, but excess. The essay analyzes how noise (Cage, Merzbow) shatters signification - akin to Eckhart’s divine “nothing.”
#Noise #Mysticism #SoundTheory

4/10
The *via negativa* (Pseudo-Dionysius) negates all positive predicates—just as sound defies definition. Ott reads Cox’s *Sonic Flux* as a secular apophatic: truth in the echo of withdrawal.
#NegativeTheology #SoundArt #Deconstruction

3/10
Sound as “resonant presence”: It exists only in vanishing. The essay asks how a philosophy of sound can embrace withdrawal itself as its subject.
#Aesthetics #Phenomenology #Unsayable

2/10
Sound is not an object but *flux* - a processual event eluding classical ontology. Cox’s materialism meets negative theology (Dionysius, Eckhart, Derrida).
#SonicFlux #Ontology #Materialism

Von der Philosophie des Klangs zur Philosophie im Klang Christoph Cox’ <em>Sonic Flux</em> und die via negativa

1/10
How to think sound when it resists fixation? The essay “From the Philosophy of Sound to Philosophy in Sound” merges Christoph Cox’s *Sonic Flux* with the *via negativa* - a radical aesthetics of withdrawal.
das.ubernerden.com/ott-cox.html #PhilSky #SoundPhilosophy #Apophatics

Emergence explains nothing and is bad science | John Heil

"That the parts behave very differently in these arrangements than in isolation or in pairs does not license the idea that the arrangement exerts a downward 'configurational force' on the parts or that the wholes and their characteristics are emergent."

#philsky #metaphysics

iai.tv/articles/eme...

🚀AVOBMAT beta is out: a user-friendly platform for scalable, #multilingual #textmining and #metadata analysis for teaching and research—hosted by the #GWDG infrastructure. Unlock new possibilities! Start here 👉 avobmat.hu
#DigitalHumanities #Libraries #NLP #ResearchTools #DARIAH #ADHO

Uncovering Hidden Influences: The Reception Reader as a Tool for Intellectual Historians Published in Global Intellectual History (Ahead of Print, 2025)

Full article: Uncovering Hidden Influences: The Reception Reader as a Tool for Intellectual Historians www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
#dh #digitalhumanities

Den Artikel hat doch hoffentlich die KI geschrieben - so einfältig sollte kein lebender Mensch sein. Von der Fixierung aufs spätere Gehalt bis zum „Hilfswissenschaftler“.

Real ist der große Vorteil einer Diss, dass man einmal im Leben etwas von vorne bis hinten durchdenkt

Against Self-Assurance: Raymond Geuss as an Anti-Heroic Philosopher in the Post-Metaphysical Age Thinking in an Age of Disillusionment

Geuss' texts refuse the consolation that comes from the idea that one has now found the "right" system. Instead, they invite us to understand thinking as a continued diagnostic practice - a practice that needs no heroes. #PhilSky
open.substack.com/pub/erwinott...