Includes bibliographical references (p. 252-255) and index.

Art and pleasure -- Hume on taste and tragedy -- Collingwood on art as amusement -- Mill on higher and lower pleasures -- The nature of pleasure -- Art and beauty -- Beauty and pleasure -- Kant on beauty -- The aesthetic attitude and the sublime -- Art and the aesthetic -- Gadamer and art as play -- Art and sport -- Art and emotion -- Tolstoy and everyday expressivism -- Aristotle and Katharsis -- Expression and imagination -- Croce and 'intuition' -- Collingwood's expressivism -- Expression versus expressiveness -- Art and understanding -- Hegel, art and mind -- Art, science and knowledge -- Aesthetic -- Cognitivism, for and against -- Imagination and experience -- The objects of imagination -- Art and the world -- Understanding as a norm -- Art and -- Human nature -- Music and sonic art -- Music and pleasure -- Music and emotion -- Music as language -- Music and representation -- Musical vocabulary and musical grammar -- The uniqueness of music -- Music and beauty -- Music as the exploration of sound -- Sonic art and digital technology -- The visual arts -- What is representation? -- Representation and artistic value - Art and the visual -- Visual art and the non-visual -- Film as art -- Montage versus Longshot -- Talkies -- The 'auteur' in film -- The literary arts -- Poetry and prose -- The unity of form and content -- Figures of speech -- Expressive language -- Poetic devices -- Narrative and fiction -- Literature and understanding -- The performing arts -- Artist, audience, and performer -- Painting as the paradigm of art -- Nietzsche and the birth of tragedy -- Performance and participation -- The art of the actor -- Architecture as an art -- The peculiarities of architecture -- Form and function and 'the decorated -- Shed' façade, deception, and the 'Zeitgeist' -- Functionalism -- Formalism and 'space' -- Architectural expression -- Architecture and understanding -- Modern art -- The break with tradition -- Experimental art and the avant-garde - The art of the readymade -- Conceptual art -- The market in art -- Art and leisure -- The aesthetics of nature -- The objectivity of aesthetic evaluation -- The artist's intention -- The intentionalist -- 'Fallacy' -- Natural beauty -- Environmentalism and the aesthetics of nature -- Theories of art -- Defining art -- Art as an institution -- Sociology and the marxist theory of art - Lukacs and realism -- Levy-Strauss and structuralism -- Derrida and deconstruction -- Hegel and Schopenhauer : normative theory of art.

Philosophy of the Arts presents a comprehensive and accessible introduction to those coming to aesthetics and the philosophy of art for the first time. The third edition is greatly enhanced by new sections on art and beauty, modern art, Aristotle and katharsis, and Hegel. Each chapter has been thoroughly revised with fresh material and extended discussions. As with previous editions, the book: is jargon-free and will appeal to students of music, art history and literature as well as philosophy looks at a wide range of the arts from film, painting and architecture to fiction, music and poetry discusses a range of philosophical theories of thinkers such as Hume, Kant, Gaender, Collingwood, Derrida, Hegel and Croce contains regular summaries and suggestions for further reading.