Why Plato Banished the Artists , based on the 1976 Romanes Lecture, in 1977. Two Platonic Dialogues appeared in 1996. The predominant influence on her philosophical thought is Plato, but Kant, Freud, Sartre, Wittgenstein and Weil have been important at various stages of her development. While she was primarily a moral philosopher, engagement with issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of art was never far from the center of her theoretical concerns. Their essence is the same.
Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. With various extensions, qualifications, and clarifications this is the vision she attempted to communicate in all her subsequent work. These essays, which were published together with a third essay as The Sovereignty of Good , are probably her most influential pieces of philosophy. Proper attention to a great work of art will lead us out of ourselves into a clear vision of reality, and beauty is the means that mediates this. The Fire and the Sun is her fullest and most concentrated treatment of these matters, in which her long preoccupation with Plato bears fruit .