Jerrold Levinson

Jerrold Levinson is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. His philosophical interests include aesthetics of music, aesthetics of film, ontology of art, definition of art, art and emotion, the nature of interpretation, theory of humor, theory of value, the metaphysics of properties, and relations between aesthetics and ethics. He is the author of Music, Art, and Metaphysics (1990), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996), Music in the Moment (1998), L'art, la musique, et l'histoire (1998), and La musique de film: fiction et narration (2000), editor of Aesthetics and Ethics (1998) and The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (2003), and co-editor of Aesthetics Concepts (2001). A third collection of his essays, Contemplating Art (2006), appeared recently from Oxford University Press. Levinson is Past President of the American Society for Aesthetics (2001-2003), serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and has been a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, University of London, University of Canterbury [New Zealand], Université de Rennes [France], Université Libre de Bruxelles [Belgium] and Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana [Switzerland]. Some directions of current research in aesthetics include the particularities of vocal jazz interpretation, the divergent species of visual beauty, the nature of aesthetic experience, and the philosophy and psychology of the minor mode.