Peter Kivy is Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous books and articles on aesthetics and philosophy of art, including De Gustibus: Arguing About Taste and Why We Do It (OUP, 2015), Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Cornell UP, 2009), The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics (2004) and Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel Between Literature and Music (OUP, 2009). Several of his books have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and a past President of the American Society for Aesthetics.

Preface; Introduction; PART I: I. Mattheson as philosopher of art; II. Mainwaring's Handel: its relation to English aesthetics; III. Charles Burney, music critic; IV. Kant and the Affektenlehre: what he said, and what I wish he had said; V. Mozart and monotheism: an essay in spurious aesthetics; VI. Child Mozart as an aesthetic symbol; VII. Something I've always wanted to know about Hanslick; VIII. What was Hanslick denying?; IX. Charles Darwin on music; X. Herbert Spencer and a musical dispute; PART II: XI. The fine art of repetition; XII. Platonism in music: a kind of defense; XIII. Platonism in music: another kind of defense; XIV. Orchestrating platonism; XV. Opera talk: a philosophical 'phantasie'; XVI. How did Mozart do it?: living conditions in the world of opera; XVII. How did Mozart do it?: Replies to my critics; XVIII. Live performances and dead composers: on the ethics of musical interpretation; XIX. On the concept of the 'historically authentic' performance; XX. Paul Robinson's Opera and Ideas; XXI. From ideology to music: Leonard Meyer's theory of style change; XXII. Music and liberal education; XXIII. A new music criticism?; XXIV. Is music an art?

Peter Kivy is the author of many books on the philosophy of art and, in particular, the aesthetics of music. This collection of essays spans a period of some 30 years and focuses on a richly diverse set of issues--ranging from the biological origin of music to the very nature of music itself. Kivy uses no musical notation, so no technical knowledge is required to appreciate his work.