Perceiving Nature(s): Epistemic, Artistic and Political Practices as Contested Fields

Lecture series – Date: 5 June 2025

The third event in the lecture series ‘Perceiving Nature(s): Epistemic, Artistic and Political Practices as Contested Fields’ took place on Thursday 5 June, featuring lectures by Professor Julian Johnson (University of London) and Jan von Brevern (University of Weimar). 

Julian Johnson is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. His publications include numerous works on music and musical aesthetics from the late 18th century to the present day, with a particular focus on the cultural and historical significance of modernist music. His work is consistently shaped by questions of musical meaning and value, which are reflected in his engagement with philosophy, conceptions of nature and landscape, and the relationship between music, literature and the visual arts. What if listening to the world with the same care and attention we devote to music were to reshape our understanding of ourselves? How does listening to music influence us, and what effect does it have on us (ourselves)? In his lecture, Johnson argued, drawing on examples from music and the visual arts, that aesthetics is increasingly being neglected in the fields of philosophy and musicology – with the notion of listening to music as a form of consumption taking centre stage instead. Aesthetic listening resists discursive certainties that seek to categorise knowledge and experience and to divide the language of both philosophy and empirical approaches. Instead, the focus should shift towards listening as a ‘way of being’ – a lived practice with far-reaching and urgent consequences for education, ethics and politics.