Aesthetics is the philosophical domain consecrated to beauty, the sublime and to the pleasure they produce. But the main issue aesthetics addresses is the relation of art and of beauty to truth and to knowledge. This introductory course will address the question of what makes beauty and pleasure philosophical issues through the relation of beauty to truth in the history of thought about art. The course will address the following philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel and Nietzsche. The course will address the following topics: the artistic act and the artwork, the notion of beauty (as idea or as matter), art as representation and illusion, beauty and aesthetic judgment, the relation of the sensible image to the idea and the concept, what is aesthetic experience, why is there a plurality of arts, the artist as genius or as “everyman”, the politics of art.