There are many different ways of doing philosophy. One way, which will be familiar from previous chapters, is to take a word in common parlance (say, “art”) and try to give a precise statement of its meaning. A problem arises if common parlance does not use the word in a particularly systematic manner. If our use of the word is very loose, possibly even contradictory, then any precise statement of its meaning is either going to be a suggestion for tightening up the use or is going to be an inaccurate statement of what, in common parlance, the word means. That was the case, as we saw, with “art”; it is also the case with “beauty”.

The question of the value of works of art is one we have returned to frequently in the course of this book. One value can be summed up in the term “beautiful”; a work is valuable to the extent that it is beautiful. However, as we saw in Chapter 2, this raises more questions than it settles. If being beautiful is merely a matter of eliciting pleasurable feelings, then being beautiful cannot be the same as being valuable. A work can elicit pleasurable feelings without our taking it to be valuable, and we can take a work to be valuable without it eliciting pleasurable feelings. However, there does seem to be some connection between art and beauty. What I shall try to do in this chapter is to say something illuminating about that connection.