ISBN 0198250258 Zonder inscripties e.d.
Contributors: Paul Guyer, Nick Zangwill, John W. Bender, Gary Iseminger, Malcolm Budd, Robert Stecker, Stephen Davies, David Davies, Alan H. Goldman, Aaron Ridley, Stephanie Ross, Philip Alperson, Dennis Dutton, Paisley Livingston, Gregory Currie, Noel Carroll, Ted Cohen, Peter Lamarque, George M. Wilson, Alex Neill, Berys Gaut, Matthew Kieran, Lydia Goehr, Susan Feagin, Gordon Graham, Robert Hopkins, Paul Woodruff, Nigel Warburton, Mary Devereaux, John A. Fisher, Kathleen Higgins, Richard Eldridge, David Novitz, Gregg Horowitz, Crispin Sartwell, Richard Shusterman, Deborah Knight

Jerrold Levinson (born 11 July 1948 in Brooklyn) is distinguished university professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is particularly noted for his work on the aesthetics of music, as well as for his search for meaning and ontology in film, art and humour.
Levinson's interest in the aesthetics of music led to an examination of musical ontology from a historical-contextual perspective, and of performance with an emphasis on performing means. He has posited theories of evaluating music and has considered the legitimacy of emotional response in musical appreciation. Within his study of performance he has also examined the distinctness of performing and critical 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."
This raises interesting points in the debate on absolute music.
(Wikipedia)