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This defensiveness is historically understandable. Much of what psychology offered to aesthetics in the last century—the dogmas of Freud, speculations of Jung, the sterile formulas of behaviorism, all variously empty or misleading—have proved to be intellectual dead ends. Moreover, left just to itself, philosophy of art has not done badly. For example, the sharply analytic writing of Frank Sibley, the generously broad but acutely worked-out views of Monroe C. Beardsley, and the probing aesthetics of Francis Sparshott together make an impressive body of information and argument. Theirs is the kind of work you might expect when brilliant minds with a deep appreciation for the arts engage in intense and extended philosophical analysis of what they love. But as with much else in the last fifty years of analytic or Continental-inspired art theory, empirical psychology is almost entirely absent.

As a subdivision of general philosophy, aesthetics analyzes and our basic intuitions about art and beauty—the pleasures that derive from art, the factors that draw us to it. In the next chapter I provide a list of criteria for art, and one way to understand these is as a systematic enumeration of the most important of these intuitions. As will make clear, the value intuitions that motivate an interest in can be matched by contrary intuitions—conflicting interests taken from the list itself, or interests that can come from outside the realm aesthetics altogether. We might admire the skill displayed by an artist work of art, say, but deplore the artist personally. Perhaps the formal beauty of the work conflicts in our minds with an immoral content. The phers of art, academic careers are made out of reconciling such paradoxes of intuition, or showing that the conflicts are illusory, or why side is decisively right, the other wrong. Along with most critics and historians, modern philoso phers of art have assiduously avoided asking where the intuitions themselves come from or have simply assumed they culturally induced.

This latter move—to assume that all our artistic and aesthetic values come to us from our culture—has been highly influential in recent philosophy but has led aes theticians into peculiar situations. The influential institutional theory of art, proposed in the 1970s by the philoso pher George Dickie, for instance, argues that art is defined by social institutions and is thus a purely cultural product. It follows, therefore, there point in challenging whether something like Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, such as his urinal, Fountain, are works of art. They have to be works of art because they are recognized as such by recognized art institutions. To be a work of art is just to be socially sanctioned such.

Yet, when his guard is down, even the theory’s founding philoso pher inadvertently betrays its limitations. In a notable passage explaining how institutional theory applies to the arts, Dickie uses the theater as an of the durability of an art institution. His intention is to show an art form can persist over time because the institutions persist: they are simply two sides of the same phenomenon. “George Bernard Shaw,” Dickie writes, “speaks somewhere of the apostolic line of succession stretching from Aeschylus to himself.” Typical Shavian vanity, Dickie points out, but the remark does, he says, imply “an important truth.” There is a long tradition of theater going back to the Greeks, Dickie observes, and it continues to this day. He goes on to make a striking, and inadvertently revealing, comment: “That tradition has run very at times and perhaps even ceased to exist altogether during some periods, only to be reborn out of its memory and the need for art.”

The need for art? Given that this phrase appears in the context passage arguing that art is virtually defined by its institutions and their attendant cultural practices, this reference to an underlying need for comes as a jolt. A human “need for art,” presumably some kind of psychological ensuring