An Essay on Beauty and Judgment

"Alexander Nehamas (born 1946) is Professor of philosophy and Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. He works on Greek philosophy, aesthetics, Nietzsche, Foucault, and literary theory. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1967, and completed his doctorate on Predication in Plato's Phaedo under the direction of Gregory Vlastos at Princeton in 1971. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Princeton faculty in 1990. He is currently the Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Nehamas

Excerpt from "An Essay on Beauty and Judgment"

"The better you come to know something you love in itself, the better you understand how it differs from everything else, how it does something that has never been done before. But the better you understand that, the more other things you need to know in order to compare them to what you love and to distinguish it from them. And the better you know those things, the more likely you are to find that some of them, too, are beautiful, which will start you all over again in an ever-widening circle of new communities and new things to say. It is a dangerous game, pursuing the beautiful. You may never be able to stop."