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), the Unversidade de Lisboa (Portugal) and the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland). Many of his papers have been reprinted 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). In September 2007 Levinson was an invited fellow of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where he gave a series of lectures and a concert. During the academic year 2008-2009 Levinson was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Kent in Canterbury.

Email: august@umd.edu

Representative Publications

Contemplating Music (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006)

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

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

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

Aesthetics and Ethics, ed. (Cambridge UP, 1998).

Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. (Oxford UP, 2003)