John Sallis is a philosopher whose extensive writing has focused on figures in the “continental” tradition, such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. In an earlier book, Stone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), he wrote of the artistic power of stone, with reference to several of these thinkers, using them as voices to explore such forms as Egyptian pyramids, Greek temples, Gothic cathedrals, and the Jewish cemetery in Prague. In Shades Sallis continues to draw especially on Hegel and Heidegger, whose thought offers constant points of reference in Stone. This book will probably be of most immediate interest to theorists and philosophers of art who are somewhat familiar with the traditions on which Sallis draws; those with strong interests in some of the painters considered could also find the book an exciting introduction to those traditions. It is notable, and Sallis takes note of it, that in so far as philosophers and critics have attempted to make sense of painting, they have been especially concerned with its limits, in several senses of that term. Sallis observes this in the case of Kant and Hegel. Kant attempted to work out a division of the arts (although he regarded it as...