Peter Kivy

Who is Peter Kivy?

Peter Kivy is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. He studies aesthetics and the philosophy of art, particularly the philosophy of music.

He earned master's degrees in both philosophy and musicology. He earned his PhD at Columbia University in 1966. He joined the faculty at Rutgers the following year, and became full professor in 1976. He taught there for his whole career except one year as a visiting professor at University of California, Santa Barbara.

His early work is on the 18th-century British aesthetics, and was influenced by Francis Hutcheson. From there he developed an interest in analytic aesthetics. From the late 1970s on, he has been interested mainly in music philosophy. His book The Corded Shell made him a central figure in music aesthetics.

One preoccupation of his has been the problem of what it means for instrumental music to "express" an emotion. His answer is that common emotions have physical behavioral expression in people that can be understood by appearance and imitated in music; thus, music cannot express more complex emotions that do not have an obvious behavioral expression. A similar position is followed by Stephen Davies.