In his well-known work of art criticism Art of the Modern Age, Jean-Marie Schaeffer offered a lucid and powerful critique of what he identified as the historically dominant thinking about art and aesthetics from the Jena Romantics, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, and beyond, which he termed the speculative theory of art. Here, in Beyond Speculation, Schaeffer builds from this significant work, rejecting not only the identification of the aesthetic with the work of art, but also the Kantian association of the aesthetic with subjectively universal judgment. In his analysis of...