 He adopted it for two reasons. First, approaches of the (a), (b), and (c) sort have numerous and serious problems (Aesth: 60–63). Second, if art criticism can amount to knowledge, as Beardsley believes it can, then what’s called for is an object of study that can be examined in its own right, in respect to its own objective qualities. Both of these factors led him in search of an objective definition of “aesthetic object”. Since, however, identifying necessary and sufficient conditions seemed out of the question—there was too much variety among aesthetic objects, and too much disagreement among philosophers—“divide and conquer” seemed a better strategy.