Jerrold Levinson

Jerrold Levinson was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 11 July 1948. He is an American philosopher specialising in aesthetics, and in particular the aesthetics of music. His work belongs to the analytic philosophy of art in the second half of the twentieth century and has become a point of reference for those who ask what a musical work is and how it should be evaluated.

He began his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he graduated in 1969 with a degree in Philosophy and Chemistry. He then studied at the University of Michigan, where he received his PhD in Philosophy in 1974. Between 1974 and 1976 he was an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Albany and at Fairleigh Dickinson University. In 1976 he joined the University of Maryland, where he was promoted to associate professor in 1982 and to full professor of Philosophy in 1991. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of London (1991), at Johns Hopkins University (1993) and at the University of Rennes (1998). Since 1993 he has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and in 1999 he was elected vice-president of the American Society for Aesthetics.

His interest in music has led him to examine its ontology from a historical-contextual perspective and to study interpretation, with particular attention to the means of performance. He has put forward theories of musical evaluation, above all in Music in the Moment (1998), and has debated whether emotional response is legitimate in the appreciation of music. Within this field he has also distinguished between performative and critical interpretation.

His legacy lies in having brought to the philosophy of music questions about the identity of works, the role of the performer and aesthetic pleasure, through a body of work that includes key articles from the 1980s and 1990s and several collections of essays.