behaviour. If such they arc, then they are matters of fact from any point of view, of course. Even if positive economists are persuaded that ethical deliberation does affect human behaviour, why should they try to move economics closer to ethics? For ethics does not describe what our actual ethical deliberation is like. What does ethics do? Relevantly here, we can pick out that understanding of ethics which suggests that structures of proper ethical thinking are provided. The status of such structures raises the same problem as that of the status of the ‘rational economic man’ assumptions about self-interest maximising. Sen wishes to alter the assumptions about self-interest maximising because he thinks that they are empirically false, and that ethical deliberations actually affect behaviour. But it is a familiar claim of positive economists that the ‘rational economic man’ assumptions, while ‘empirical’ in the sense that they can be used to generate falsifiable predictions, merely ‘model’ behaviour. People behave, it has been said by Milton Friedman, ‘as if’ they were rational self-interest maximisers with full relevant knowledge of their circumstances. Nothing whatever is said by Sen to warrant his at best simplistic claims that the rational economic man assumptions are simply false empirically, and that ethical theory is a proper characterisation of the ‘ethical’ deliberation which actually affects behaviour. The ‘ideal’ assumptions intended to model motivation, whether ‘rational’ or ‘ethical’, are massively underdetermined by behaviour, and the very relevance of empirical checking here is itself open to doubt. THE QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY OF BELFAST J. L. GORMAN Aesthetics: A n Introduction to the Philosophy of Art Oxford University Press, 1987. 172 pp. L15.00 cloth, i4.95 paper By ANNE SHEPPARD This book is a valuable addition to introductory literature on aesthetics for students, and perhaps more general readers. It does not have either of the failings commonly found in books on the philosophy of art, for though its concern is with philosophical issues that arise out of reflection upon art, it keeps both the different forms of art and particular examples clearly in view. The impression is never given, as it so often is, that art is just the springboard, or even merely the excuse, for doing some philosophy. At the same time, the philosophical arguments are never side-tracked by the examples. The book is structured around the question ‘Why bother about art?’. In the belief that the answer to this question depends upon what we take to be the distinctive feature of art, Mrs Sheppard goes on to survey and to criticise most of the familiar theories. She examines first those theories which focus upon the nature of works of art - art as imitation, as expression and as form. In the course of these three chapters the reader is given useful summaries of the views of many influential writers - Plato, 186