 The ease of these dismissals, though, serves as a reminder of the fact that classical definitions of art are significantly less philosophically self-contained or freestanding than are most contemporary definitions of art. Each classical definition stands in close and complicated relationships to its system’s other complexly interwoven parts – epistemology, ontology, value theory, philosophy of mind, etc.  Relatedly, great philosophers characteristically analyze the key theoretical components of their definitions of art in distinctive and subtle ways. For these reasons, understanding such definitions in isolation from the systems or corpuses of which they are parts is difficult, and brief summaries are invariably somewhat misleading.  Nevertheless, some representative examples of historically influential definitions of art offered by major figures in the history of philosophy should be mentioned.