Examines the aesthetics of Plotinus, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Describes the Platonic bases of the aesthetics of Plotinus, and the Plotinian bases of the aesthetics of Schelling and Hegel in the Philosophy of Spirit, Identity Philosophy (the relation between intellect and nature), and Transcendental Idealism. The book explores the concept of art as philosophy, as a product of mind, and as an instrument of intellect in the relation between reason and perception. Particular concepts analyzed include the dialectics of universal and particular, subjective and objective, consciousness and self-consciousness, thought and matter in representation (Darstellung), and being-in-itself (Ansich) and being-for-self (Fursich), as they are manifest in artistic representation.

Chapters: 1. Introduction; 2. The Symposium and the Aesthetics of Plotinus; 3. The Aesthetics of Schelling: The Philosophy of Art; Bruno, or On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things; System of Transcendental Idealism; 4. Plotinian Hypostases in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit; 5. The Aesthetics of Hegel: Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics; Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Mind; 6. Architecture and the Philosophy of Spirit