Jerrold Levinson

Jerrold Levinson (PhD, Michigan) is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy. His main philosophical interest is aesthetics, with 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, the nature of humor, sexual morality, jazz improvisation, the expressive specificity of jazz, the ethics of jokes, the analysis of artistic achievement, and the varieties of visual beauty. Levinson has been visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, the University of London, the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), the Universite de Rennes (France), the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), the Unversidade de Lisboa (Portugal) and the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland). Levinson is Past President of the American Society for Aesthetics, 2001-2003, was general editor of the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford UP, 2003), and was an invited fellow of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University in September 2007. During academic year 2008-2009 Levinson was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Kent in Canterbury (England), and during academic year 2010-2011 Levinson held an International Francqui Chair in the Institute of Philosophy of the Katholieke Universitet Leuven (Belgium). In 2010 Levinson was awarded the International Prize of the Societa Italiana d'Estetica. Professor Levinson is also an Affiliate Faculty Member of the School of Music at the University of Maryland.