Asked by a colleague, some time ago, to set out my account of philosophical aesthetics (and, associatedly, of art), my first response was that I had no such account: that any of my views was also held by someone else! But my colleague insisted that, on the contrary, my views both of aesthetics and of the nature of art were distinctive. So did that distinctiveness reside in the combination of these views on the various topics, rather than in any particular view of mine? To understand, I identified and explored each of these ‘distinctivenesses’ in turn. This exercise, first, prompted small-scale elaborations of specific issues: how did my institutional theory differ from those standardly offered? Did it succumb to the same objections? And so on. Second, it produced larger-scale explorations of the extent to which this account of philosophical aesthetics was illuminating (and perhaps even accurate). Issues here included the nature of truth, of rationality or of philosophy as much as aesthetic matters. So I planned a book to take all these topics further. And, dear reader, you are now looking at the outcome. This text presents a position both distinctive and powerful. At its heart, the pervasiveness of the artistic/aesthetic contrast combines with my ‘take’ on it. In this way, a framework for philosophical aesthetics is offered: that is, one for making sense of our appreciation and judgement of artworks of all kinds, and our appreciation and judgement of other objects in which we take an interest expressed in terms of grace, or line, or beauty—or their opposites. This is a framework partly in offering a fairly abstract picture, which would need application to, say, one’s concerns with the aesthetics of dance (a special favourite of mine). Further, illustrative examples are offered where they seem to occur naturally.