In the contemporary age, aesthetics seem to shatter and can no longer be reduced to a coherent image. Yet, due to the amount of aesthetic texts, the last hundred years can be called the "century of aesthetics". Starting from four conceptual fields - life, form, knowledge, action - Perniola identifies the lines of aesthetic thought and refers to different authors: from Dilthey to Foucault (aesthetics of life), from Wölfflin to McLuhan and Lyotard (aesthetics of the form), from Croce to Goodman (aesthetics and knowledge), from Dewey to Bloom (aesthetics and action). Then a fifth is added, which touches the sphere of affectivity and emotionality (Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Lacan and Deleuze). The volume concludes with a large chapter on non-Western aesthetic thought.