Abstract

Although by the middle of the book beauty has been defined as a real, though general, property of things and phenomena when they are viewed through our cognitive desire to organize the world, and although beauty is referred to throughout, with great emphasis placed on the beauty of theories, this book is not a discursus on the nature of beauty in the traditional sense established in the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, as the book’s title might imply to some. Instead, in typical Zemachean fashion, hard-headed analytic techniques from logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language are applied to an array of aesthetic issues ranging from the ontology of aesthetic properties and the nature of aesthetic judgments to the fearing of fictional entities and the place of truth in aesthetics. The books defends a pervasively realistic view on these and many other matters, and does so with clear and provocative argumentation of real metaphysical sophistication. The book is a tour de force of analytic aesthetics and a welcome and courageous antidote to the current trends of relativism and deconstruction.