“For those of us who want to know what philosophers have said about beauty and the arts, this book will be especially useful.”- Philosophical Review;“Beardsley’s book accomplishes to perfection what the writer intended. It illuminates an area of history from a certain perspective as was never done before. . . . The distinguishing feature of his book is a n excitement over everything I aesthetics that has to do with symbols, meanings, language, and modes of interpretation. And this excitement has brought to light facets of the history of the subject never noticed before, or at least, not so clearly.”- Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

• Part 1 First thoughts. Part 2 Plato: art and imitation; beauty; morality; bibliography. Part 3 Aristotle: the proper pleasure of tragedy; Aristotle's answer to Plato. Part 4 The later classical philosophers: Hellenism and Roman Catholicism; Plotinus. Part 5 The Middle Ages: St Augustine; St Thomas Aquinas; the theory of interpretation. Part 6 The Renaissance: Neoplatonism; theory of painting; music and poetry. Part 7 The Enlightenment: Cartesian rationalism: poetics; theory of painting and music; toward a unified aesthetics. Part 8 The Enlightenment: empiricism - imagination and artistic creation; the problem of taste - Shaftsbury to Hume; the aesthetic qualities - Hogarth to Alison. Part 9 German idealism: Immanuel Kant; objective idealism. Part 10 Romanticism: the aesthetics of feeling; theories of the imagination; Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Part 11 The artist and society: art for art's sake; realism; social responsibility. Part 12 Contemporary developments: Croce and the metaphysicians; Santayana and Dewey; semiotic approaches; Marxism-Leninism; phenomenology and existentialism; empiricism.

“For those of us who want to know what philosophers have said about beauty and the arts, this book will be especially useful.”- Philosophical Review;“Beardsley’s book accomplishes to perfection what the writer intended. It illuminates an area of history from a certain perspective as was never done before. . . . The distinguishing feature of his book is a n excitement over everything I aesthetics that has to do with symbols, meanings, language, and modes of interpretation. And this excitement has brought to light facets of the history of the subject never noticed before, or at least, not so clearly.”- Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

• Part 1 First thoughts. Part 2 Plato: art and imitation; beauty; morality; bibliography. Part 3 Aristotle: the proper pleasure of tragedy; Aristotle's answer to Plato. Part 4 The later classical philosophers: Hellenism and Roman Catholicism; Plotinus. Part 5 The Middle Ages: St Augustine; St Thomas Aquinas; the theory of interpretation. Part 6 The Renaissance: Neoplatonism; theory of painting; music and poetry. Part 7 The Enlightenment: Cartesian rationalism: poetics; theory of painting and music; toward a unified aesthetics. Part 8 The Enlightenment: empiricism - imagination and artistic creation; the problem of taste - Shaftsbury to Hume; the aesthetic qualities - Hogarth to Alison. Part 9 German idealism: Immanuel Kant; objective idealism. Part 10 Romanticism: the aesthetics of feeling; theories of the imagination; Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Part 11 The artist and society: art for art's sake; realism; social responsibility. Part 12 Contemporary developments: Croce and the metaphysicians; Santayana and Dewey; semiotic approaches; Marxism-Leninism; phenomenology and existentialism; empiricism.