Aesthetics: The Philosophy of Art, Beauty, and the Sublime, Including the Nature of Taste, the Meaning of Artistic Truth, and the Question of Whether Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder

What makes a painting profound, a sunset breathtaking, or a tragic movie deeply moving?

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal to an art exhibition, called it art, and changed history. But if a simple plumbing fixture can be celebrated as a masterpiece... what exactly isn't art?

We organize our cities around museums, weep over fictional characters, and argue passionately over what constitutes "good" taste. Yet, the question of why we are so moved by beauty remains one of the gre...