 Developments in philosophy were a different story. In general, the philosophy of art has always been regarded as a backwater by philosophers, as by far the least rigorous and least important of the major branches of the field (a sentiment that remains widespread today), but the low regard in which aesthetics was held was even more pronounced at the time that Beardsley began work on Aesthetics. In its early, palmy days, analytic philosophy tended toward logical positivism, which dismissed judgments of aesthetic value—the core of art criticism, in Beardsley’s estimation—as cognitively meaningless, and ordinary language philosophy, a species of analytic philosophy that flourished briefly after World War Two, was unsystematic in its treatment of problems and even anti-systematic in its objectives—strong philosophical theses were either verboten, a sign of mistake, or an aberration. Neither brand of analytic philosophy boded well for aesthetics as a systematic field of study. There was, however, also a general form of analytic philosophy not connected with either approach, that is, analytic philosophy without an overarching commitment to the scientism of logical positivism or the dogged adherence to everyday language of ordinary language philosophy. Philosophers like Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and C.D. Broad, among many others, were analysts without an agenda, and Beardsley was more in their camp—that is, no definite camp of analytic philosophy at all—than anyone else’s. For him, an analytic approach to the philosophy of art meant no more than critically examining the fundamental concepts and beliefs underlying art and art criticism. Doing philosophy of that sort required clarity, precision, and a good eye for identifying, exposing, and evaluating arguments, but left aesthetics, as a systematic study, as a real possibility.