Lydia Goehr
Lydia Goehr is an American philosopher and musicologist. She is the Fred and Fannie Mack Professor of Humanities, Department of Philosophy, at Columbia University. Her research specialties include the philosophy of music, aesthetics, critical theory, the philosophy of history, and 19th- and 20th-century philosophy.
Early life and education
Goehr was born on January 10, 1960 in London, daughter of composer Alexander Goehr and granddaughter of Walter Goehr and photographer Laelia Goehr. She received her Ph.D. from Cambridge University, where Bernard Williams supervised her dissertation on the ontology of music.Career
In addition to her permanent appointment at Columbia, Goehr has accepted a number of visiting appointments, including a position as Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor at UC Berkeley's music department in 1997, as the visiting Aby Warburg Professor at the University of Hamburg in 2002–2003, as a visiting professor at the Freie Universität in Berlin in 2008, and as a visiting professor in the FU Berlin SFB Theater und Fest in 2009.Goehr's work focuses on the history of aesthetic theory, attempting to understand the relational nature of norms and power dynamics with the structure that confines them and regulates their practice. Most of her work has focused on the musical arts, and some of it has explored the complicated and often hostile relationship between the various arts, and between the arts and philosophy and religion. She has also engaged with ideas about violence in the arts from a critical theory standpoint, as well as dealt with the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy.