Contemplating Art

Contemplating Art is the third of essay collections in philosophy of art, following clearly in the line of Music, Art, and Metaphysics (1990) and The Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996). All three volumes are situated in what may be called ‘mainstream analytic aesthetics’, or ‘aesthetics in the tradition of analytic philosophy’. The present volume brings together the bulk of work in this vein in the past ten years, and contains twenty four essays, making it considerably larger than its predecessors. That it covers a decade of work accounts in part for its size, but also relevant is the inclusion of one essay, ‘Film Music and Narrative Agency’, that is almost a small book in itself.