Kathleen Higgins

Who is Kathleen Higgins?

Kathleen Marie Higgins is an American Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin where she has been teaching for over twenty years. She earned her B.A. in music from the University of Missouri–Kansas City and completed her graduate work in philosophy at Yale University, receiving her M.A., M.Phil, and Ph.D.

Professor Higgins has taught at the University of California, Riverside, and she is a regular visiting professor at the University of Auckland. She has held appointments as Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center and as a Visiting Fellow of the Australian National University Philosophy Department and the Canberra School of Music, and also of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of KU Leuven. She received an Alumni Achievement Award from the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.

She was married to Professor Robert C. Solomon.

Professor Higgins specializes in aesthetics, philosophy of music, nineteenth and twentieth-century continental philosophy, and philosophy of emotion. Her books deal with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the ethical aspects of music, musical universality, and the emotion of grief. She has published over fifty articles are these topics as well as on beauty, kitsch, virtue, feminism, marketing environmentalism, Indian aesthetics, Chinese philosophy, musical emotion, synesthesia, television, death, and the philosophies of nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and contemporary philosophers Arthur C. Danto and Robert C. Solomon.