1. Introduction: Finite Provinces of Meaning, Resilience, Responsiveness, The Plan of this Book -- Chapter 2: Imposed Relevances and Resilience -- Chapter 3. The Province of Play: Creativity, Responsiveness, and Ethics -- Chapter 4. The Implications of Play: Resilience, Everyday Life, and Ethics -- Chapter 5: The Experience of Music: Embodied, Holistic, and Intersubjective -- Chapter 6: Finite Provinces of Meaning and Responsiveness, Responsibility, and Jazz -- Chapter 7: Religious/Spiritual Ritual and Intersubjective Responsiveness -- Chapter 8: African-American Folkloric Humor: Resilience, Province of Meaning, Responsiveness -- 9. Conclusion: Phenomenological Intentionality and Looking-Glass Sociality.

This book extends Alfred Schutz’s “On Multiple Realities” by describing the provinces of meaning of play, music, religious ritual, and African-American folkloric humor. Throughout these provinces, the author traces two themes: resilience and responsiveness. In resilience, individuals or communities run up against obstacles, imposed relevances, which they come to terms with, or give meaning to (in phenomenological parlance), by modifying, evading, overcoming, or accepting them. Responsiveness emerges from Schutz’s idea of making music together, which the author takes further by analyzing the mimetic encounter with the other and the asymmetries in listening to music, and, especially, by showing how the features of the cognitive style of music as a province of meaning affect sociality, disposing us to be more vulnerable and attentive to each other’s non-conceptual, musical meanings. This text appeals to upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students as well as to faculty in philosophy.