Three mutually incompatible stances toward the idea of artistic truth characterize recent philosophy in Anglophone countries: sober rejection, enthusiastic affirmation, and deep skepticism. Rejection has been the majority opinion. Historically it stems from a combination of scientism and aesthetic modernism for which Monroe Beardsley's Aesthetics is emblematic. The enthusiasts, a tiny minority among professional philosophers, tend to combine an antipositivist conception of knowledge with a high view of art. The skeptics, informed by postpositivism in analytic philosophy of science and by postmodernism in continental aesthetics, question the ontological premises on which both rejection and affirmation rely.

This array of positions is far from transparent, however, and the philosophers who hold them rarely engage in sustained debates. Nor do the “final vocabularies” of each position readily translate into those of the others. My first task, then, is to consider a representative formulation of each position and to place it in conversation with the other two. For this conversation I have selected books from different decades by Beardsley (1958), Albert Hofstadter (1965), and Herman Rapaport (1997). After discussing them in Chapters 1 and 2, I turn to a common source for all three positions, namely, the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant. Chapter 3 revisits Kant to discover how a more viable idea of artistic truth would need to be reconstructed, once rejection, affirmation, and skepticism all prove insufficient.