This volume contains papers based on the Royal Institute of Philosophy's annual lecture series given in London in 2010–1. In the series a group of distinguished aestheticians were asked to speak about different forms of art, highlighting where possible the distinctive ways in which each medium approached its subject matter, and also suggesting what each added to our aesthetic understanding more generally. So we had lectures on painting, sculpture, music, poetry and the cinema. To these medium-specific presentations there were more general discussions of artistic value, artistic truth, the value of performance and the problem of fakes, to round off what we hope will be a valuable and somewhat novel collection, of interest both to aestheticians and philosophers more generally.

The Royal Institute of Philosophy would like to thank the lecturers for their presentations, both oral and written, and also Adam Ferner for his work on copy-editing, proof-reading and indexing.