 Three books and a number of articles form the core of Beardsley’s work in aesthetics. Of the books, the first, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (1958; reissued with a postscript, 1981), is by far the most substantial, comprehensive, and influential. More than that, it’s also the first systematic, well-argued, and critically informed philosophy of art in the analytic tradition. Although not the main purpose of the book, it showed that analytic philosophy and a keen interest in the arts needn’t exist in isolation but can, and should, inform each other. It’s part of the book’s achievement that that’s taken for granted today. It wasn’t at the time it was written, and many people, both in Anglo-American philosophical circles and in art-critical circles, thought exactly the opposite in the mid-1950s. Given the wide range of topics covered in Aesthetics, the intelligent and philosophically informed treatment accorded them, the historically unprecedented nature of the work, and its effect on subsequent developments in the field, a number of philosophers, including some of Beardsley’s critics, have argued that Aesthetics is the most impressive and important book of twentieth century analytic aesthetics.