Jerrold Levinson

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Jerrold Levinson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is particularly noted for his work on the aesthetics of music, as also for a search for meaning and ontology in film and art, humour, and their links to emotion and interpretation.

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.^[1]

This raises of course interesting points in the debate on absolute music.

Levinson is the author Music, Art, and Metaphysics (1990), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996), Music in the Moment (1998), in French, L’art, la musique, et l’histoire (1998). He was also a contributing editor for the The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (2003).

In 2003 Levinson directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, Art, Mind, and Cognitive Science.