With his usual lucidity, Etienne Gilson addresses the idea that "art is the making of beauty for beauty's own sake." By distinguishing between aesthetics, which promotes art as a form of knowledge, and philosophy, which focuses on the presence of the artist's own talent or genius, Gilson maintains that art belongs to a different category entirely, the category of "making." Gilson's intellectually stimulating meditation on the relation of beauty and art is indispensable to philosophers and artists alike.

James G. Colbert is a philosophy professor at Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts. He is the author or co-author of books on symbolic logic, Marxism, and the family. Colbert has translated six books, including Gilson's Greco-Arabic Sources of Avicennist Augustinianism.