In Shakespeare's Hamlet, when Ophelia tells King Claudius, -Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be, - she implies more than that we can never know what will happen next, that we have no grounds on which to make significant decisions in the conduct of our lives. She herself had done little or nothing to bring about her present state. Now she is quite mad. Claudius, too, could never have guessed where he would end. Yet the rest of us, although not significantly more knowing than they, profess to think we can actually make Me decisions which genuinely good reasons will...

This study is a fresh and original attempt to liberate the theory of criticism from the limitations of connoisseurship, and the assumptions of aesthetics from the difficulties and paradoxes of aesthetic relativism. It presents a picture of what rationality in the assessment of the arts would be like if one were expected to justify one's decisions in and about the arts.

Kadish focuses upon the way in which competent and reasonable people express their differences, not upon the way they instruct novices. Among good critics, the author proposes, differences are not managed as...