Department of Philosophy: People: Core Faculty: Jerrold Levinson

Jerrold Levinson (PhD, Michigan) is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy. His main philosophical interest is aesthetics, with strong secondary interests in metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of mind. Among the arts he is particularly concerned with philosophical problems arising in connection with music, film, and literature. Levinson has written extensively on the definition of art, expression in music, emotional response to art, the nature of literary interpretation, and the ontology of artworks. Topics of recent interest include intrinsic value, humor theory, sexual morality, vocal jazz improvisation, and the varieties of visual beauty. Levinson held a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1980, was co-director of an NEH Summer Institute in 1991 and director of another such Institute in 2002, and has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism since 1993. Levinson has been visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, the University of London, the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), the Université de Rennes (France), the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), and the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland). Many of his papers have been repinted in recent anthologies of aesthetics, and several have been translated into other languages. Levinson is Past President of the American SOciety for Aesthetics, 2001-2003, and was general editor of the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford UP, 2003). Recent lecture tours of note include ones at the Unversidade de Lisboa in June 2006 and the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University in September 2007. During the academic year 2008-2009 Levinson is Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Kent in Canterbury.

Email: august@umd.edu

Representative Publications

Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990).

The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996).

Music in the Moment (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998).

Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).

L'art, la musique, et l'histoire (Paris: Editions de l'Eclat, 1998).

"Concatenationism, Architectonicism, and the Appreciation of Music," Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Fall 2006.

"Why There Are No Tropes," Philosophy, 81, 2006.

"Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression," in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics, M. Kieran, ed., (Blackwell, 2006).

"Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures," Philosophy and Literature, 29, 2005.

"What Are Aesthetic Properties?" Proc. Arist. Socy. Suppl., 79, 2005.

"Intrinsic Value and the Notion of a Life," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Fall 2004.

"Musical Thinking," Midwest Studies 27, 2003.

"Elster on Artistic Creativity," in The Creation of Art, B. Gaut & P. Livingston, eds. (Cambridge UP, 2003).

"Hume's 'Standard of Taste': The Real Problem" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Summer 2002.

"Who's Afraid of a Paraphrase?" Theoria, October 2000.