Jean-Marie Schaeffer is a key figure of modern French philosophy, mainly working in the field of visual and verbal aesthetics, with major publications on the aesthetic experience and fundamental categories of art such as genre and fiction. His work, however, remains little known in the English-speaking world. As far as I know, only three of his books are available in English today: Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art From Kant to Heidegger, Why Fiction? and Beyond Speculation: Art and Aesthetics without Myths. The reasons for this (relative) neglect are not easy to understand, given the exceptional quality of Schaeffer’s production. Perhaps he does not match the bankable idea of the “public intellectual” (Schaeffer is more “just” an intellectual than a thinker-cum-political activist). Perhaps his highly erudite work is too nuanced (he has strong opinions on a lot of questions, but he always voices his...

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