“When seeking to bring together two distinct practices or disciplines it is all too easy to confuse them or lose sight of what is most interesting about each. Pippin avoids this fate with remarkable grace and precision. His philosophical questions illuminate literature and art, and his interpretations of particular works invite a philosophical connection without depending on it. A wonderful, infinitely interesting project.”

- Michael Wood, Princeton University,

“These essays display the enormous range of Pippin’s intelligence as a commentator on philosophy and literature. Whether as an expounder of Hegel’s aesthetics or an interpreter of self-knowledge in <i>What Maisie Knew</i>, he offers discoveries that always reward the attention he demands.”

- David Bromwich, Yale University,

"Artworks are neither aesthetically rendered content ripe for philosophical articulation at a later stage, nor mere particulars resisting interpretation, but are revealed here as the friction that any thinking needs to make its concepts come alive for us. In this way, this book offers the finest compliment philosophy could give to art, not by defining it or grasping it in a comprehensive theory, but by engaging it and letting it offer us something to understand, again and again." 

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

"The book should likewise prove a rewarding read for those working in the field of literature and philosophy more generally, as Pippin treats the literary more seriously and with greater precision than just about any other contemporary American philosopher."

ALH Online Review