Abstract

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] you are philosophically uncurious or have no aesthetic life, Peter Kivy’s new book may not be for you. Otherwise you owe it to yourself to read it. Kivy’s question—why we argue about art—has received scant philosophical attention, yet the slightest philosophy is all you need to motivate it. Though aesthetic disputes are, as Kivy says, widespread, persistent, vigorous and often heated, we seem unable to account for why we engage in them. Kivy develops his own account with patience and good sense. He writes with unusual care for his reader. He is indeed unwilling to leave any intelligent layperson behind. Yet the force of his arguments and the novelty of his conclusions are likely to shake the assumptions of the most...