This anthology provides comprehensive coverage of the major contributions of analytic philosophy to aesthetics and the philosophy of art, from the earliest beginnings in the 1950s to the present time. The volume presents the classics of this tradition, and in so doing displays the very foundations of modern debates. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art also features a selection of key papers from subsequent contributors that illustrate how the debates developed and how issues arose as analytic philosophers increasingly turned their attention to this area.The volume is a comprehensive guide for students and researchers in aesthetics and philosophy of art, conveniently making available all those papers most often cited. The papers are grouped into sections, ordered chronologically, and covering theoretical topics - identifying art, ontology, aesthetic properties, intention and interpretation, values of art, fictionality - as well as particular art forms, including pictorial art, literature, music, and the popular arts. A final section looks at the aesthetics of nature.

Author Biography

Peter Lamarque is Professor of Philosophy and Head of Department at the University of York. He has published widely on fictionality, philosophy of literature, and aesthetics, including Truth, Fiction, and Literature (1994, with Stein Haugom Olsen) and Fictional Points of View (1996). He is Editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics and was also philosophy subject editor for the 10-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Stein Haugom Olsen is Chair Professor of Humanities and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He is the author of The Structure of Literary Understanding (1978) and The End of Literary Theory (1987), as well as more than forty articles on literary theory, literary criticism, and aesthetics. He is an elected fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.