We have reached the end of art, states Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in The Philosophy of Art. Hegel charts the progression of art in order to show how it reached its full and final development. But that does not mean that art is dead to us-far from it. Hegel argues for the significance of the philosophy of art, which for him ranks higher than the study of nature in terms of aiding our understanding of reality. Accompanying Hegels overview of his science of aesthetics are a laudatory introduction by the prominent nineteenth-century scholar and translator W. Hastie and an extensive elaboration of Hegels ideas by his student C. L. Michelet.
