Jerrold Levinson

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Jerrold Levinson
Born (1948-07-11) July 11, 1948 (age 76)
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS)
University of Michigan (PhD)
AwardsInternational Prize of the Società Italiana d'Estetica
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
Institutions University of Maryland, College Park
Thesis Properties, Qualities, and Categoriality (1974)
Doctoral advisor Kendall Walton and Jaegwon Kim
Main interests
 Philosophy of Art

Jerrold Levinson (born 11 July 1948 [1] in Brooklyn) is distinguished university professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. [2] He is particularly noted for his work on defining art, the aesthetics of music, ontology of art, philosophy of film, interpretation, aesthetics experience, and humour.

Contents

Education and career

Levinson started his studies in 1965 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he gained a BS Degree in Philosophy and Chemistry in 1969. [3] He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Michigan in 1974, under the supervision of Jaegwon Kim and Kendall Walton. [4]

During 1974–1975, he was visiting assistant professor at SUNY Albany. In 1976 he became assistant professor at the University of Maryland, was promoted to associate professor in 1982 and full professor in 1991. In 2004 he was accorded the title of Distinguished University Professor. He became Professor Emeritus in 2018. [5] He has also been visiting professor at other US institutes, [6] including the Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University. He has also held visiting appointments in other countries, such as England (University of London and University of Kent), New Zealand (University of Canterbury), France (Université de Rennes), Belgium (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Portugal (Universidade de Lisboa) and Switzerland (Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana). During 2010-2011 he held an International Francqui Chair [7] at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), and in 2011 received the Premio Internazionale of the Società Italiana d'Estetica.

In 2003, Levinson co-directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, Art, Mind, and Cognitive Science, and during 2001-2003 was President of the American Society for Aesthetics. [8]

Philosophical work

Levinson advocates the position that music has the same relation to thought as does language; i.e., if language is an expression of thought, so is music. This is particularly revealed in his analysis of Wittgenstein's ideas on the meaning in music:

"What Wittgenstein is underscoring here about the appreciation of music is this. Music is not understood in a vacuum, as a pure structure of sounds fallen from the stars, one which we receive via some pure faculty of musical perception. Music is rather inextricably embedded in our form of life, a form of life that is, as it happens, essentially linguistic. Thus music is necessarily apprehended, at least in part, in terms of the language and linguistic practices that define us and our world." [9]

This raises interesting points in the debate on absolute music.

Bibliography

Books: [10]

Articles/papers: [10] [11]

Related Research Articles

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of taste and, in a broad sense, incorporates the philosophy of art. Aesthetics examines the philosophy of aesthetic value, which is determined by critical judgments of artistic taste; thus, the function of aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature".

Absolute music is music that is not explicitly "about" anything; in contrast to program music, it is non-representational. The idea of absolute music developed at the end of the 18th century in the writings of authors of early German Romanticism, such as Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann but the term was not coined until 1846 where it was first used by Richard Wagner in a programme to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sublime (philosophy)</span> Quality of greatness

In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aesthetics of music</span> Branch of philosophy

Aesthetics of music is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of art, beauty and taste in music, and with the creation or appreciation of beauty in music. In the pre-modern tradition, the aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics explored the mathematical and cosmological dimensions of rhythmic and harmonic organization. In the eighteenth century, focus shifted to the experience of hearing music, and thus to questions about its beauty and human enjoyment of music. The origin of this philosophic shift is sometimes attributed to Baumgarten in the 18th century, followed by Kant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gregory Currie</span>

Gregory Paul Currie FAHA is a British philosopher and academic, known for his work on philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. Currie is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and Executive Editor of Mind & Language.

This is an alphabetical index of articles about aesthetics.

Christopher Janaway is a philosopher and author. He earned degrees from the University of Oxford. Before moving to Southampton in 2005, Janaway taught at the University of Sydney and Birkbeck, University of London. His recent research has been on Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and aesthetics. His 2007 book Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy focuses on a critical examination of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Janaway currently lectures at the University of Southampton, which in the past has included a module focusing on Nietzsche's Genealogy. That module is now convened by Janaway's colleague, Aaron Ridley.

(Robert) Paul Ziff was an American artist and philosopher specializing in semantics and aesthetics.

Richard Shusterman is an American pragmatist philosopher. Known for his contributions to philosophical aesthetics and the emerging field of somaesthetics, currently he is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University.

Philosophy of music is the study of "fundamental questions about the nature and value of music and our experience of it". The philosophical study of music has many connections with philosophical questions in metaphysics and aesthetics. The expression was born in the 19th century and has been used especially as the name of a discipline since the 1980s.

Kendall Lewis Walton is an American philosopher, the Emeritus Charles Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. His work mainly deals with theoretical questions about the arts and issues of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. His book Mimesis as Make Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts develops a theory of make-believe and uses it to understand the nature and varieties of representation in the arts. He has also developed an account of photography as transparent, defending the idea that we see through photographs, much as we see through telescopes or mirrors, and written extensively on pictorial representation, fiction and the emotions, the ontological status of fictional entities, the aesthetics of music, metaphor, and aesthetic value.

Frank Noel Sibley was a British philosopher who worked mainly in the field of aesthetics. He held the first Chair of Philosophy at Lancaster University. Sibley is best known for his 1959 paper "Aesthetic Concepts", and for "Seeking, Scrutinizing and Seeing". Both papers have been anthologized, "Aesthetic Concepts" multiple times.

Yuriko Saito is a retired Japanese-American philosopher specializing in aesthetics, including wabi-sabi, the Japanese philosophy of appreciating transience and imperfection. She is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Stephen John Davies is a Distinguished Professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He mainly writes on aesthetics, particularly the philosophy of music but also works on political philosophy. He is a past president of the American Society for Aesthetics (2007–2008), and the New Zealand division of the Australasian Association of Philosophy (2001).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Lamarque</span> Philosopher

Peter Vaudreuil Lamarque is a British aesthethician and philosopher of art, working in the analytic tradition. Since 2000, he has been a professor of philosophy at the University of York. He is known primarily for his work in philosophy of literature and on the role of emotions in fiction.

<i>The Aesthetic Mind</i> 2011 book by Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens

The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology is a 2011 book edited by Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie. The contributors try to provide a new understanding of aesthetics and the experience of art based on philosophical reflections and evidence from empirical sciences.

Nick Zangwill is a British philosopher and honorary research professor at University College London and Lincoln University. He is known for his expertise on moral philosophy, and aesthetics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Malcolm Budd</span> British philosopher

Malcolm Budd is a British philosopher.

Jenefer Mary Robinson is an American philosopher, author and emerita professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. She writes on aesthetics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind and theory of emotions. She has published two monographs, one edited collection, and numerous peer reviewed articles. She is on the editorial Board for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and was on the editorial board for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. She was president of the American Society of Aesthetics from 2009 until 2013. In 2007 she was a Leverhulme visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham and in 2006 she received a Rieveschl Award for Scholarly and/or Creative Works. She received the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in September 2002. She was interviewed by Hans Maes for his book Conversations on Art and Aesthetics, which also contains her portrait by American photographer Steve Pyke. Debates in Aesthetics, an open access journal published by the British Society of Aesthetics, dedicated Vol. 14 No. 1 to her work.

Robert Edward Norton is an American cultural and intellectual historian who specializes in European, and especially German, history and thought from the Enlightenment to the early twentieth century.

References

  1. ↑ Publications, Europa (2003). International Who's Who of Authors and Writers 2004. Psychology Press. ISBN   978-1-85743-179-7.
  2. ↑ "Jerrold Levinson | Department of Philosophy". www.philosophy.umd.edu. Archived from the original on 2020-03-03. Retrieved 2020-03-03.
  3. ↑ Publications, Europa (2003). International Who's Who of Authors and Writers 2004. Psychology Press. ISBN   978-1-85743-179-7.
  4. ↑ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by S. Sadie & J. Tyrell, 2nd ed., London, 2001, [ permanent dead link ]
  5. ↑ Alessandro Giovannelli, Aesthetics: the Key Thinkers, p. 309.
  6. ↑ Schellekens, Elisabeth; Goldie, Peter (2011-10-13). The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology. OUP Oxford. ISBN   978-0-19-161951-9.
  7. ↑ Fondation Francqui
  8. ↑ "Notes on Contributors". The British Journal of Aesthetics. 57 (3): 247. 2017-11-07. doi: 10.1093/aesthj/ayx025 . ISSN   0007-0904.
  9. ↑ Jerrold Levinson (Fall 2003). "Musical Thinking". Journal of Music and Meaning : vol. 1, section 2.
  10. 1 2 "University of Maryland: Department of Philosophy". Archived from the original on 2012-06-22. Retrieved 2012-06-22.
  11. ↑ Search JSTOR
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