The human person is a truth seeker, and one of the most compelling ways human beings pursue truth is through the arts. In Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts, Daniel McInerny argues for an understanding of art as a form of inquiry into truth that proceeds by way of sensible beauty.

Drawing upon the thought of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, McInerny argues for the unfashionable yet philosophically compelling view that art is essentially mimetic, imitative of human action. But what does it mean for art to imitate human action? It means that art imitates the way human beings by nature quest for fulfillment, or happiness. In questing for fulfillment, human life takes the form of a story, and so the arts--all the arts, from painting to music, from fiction to film--are storytelling arts whose beauty reveals the truth about human happiness.

The first part of the book features a renewed defense of the ancient Aristotelian claim that art is mimetic and that its imitation of the human story takes the form of a moral argument. The second part shows how audiences are transformed by the moral arguments the mimetic arts make, and the third concludes with a guided tour of the mimetic arts, where specific arts are considered in light of the Aristotelian and Thomistic principles advanced earlier.

Kate Montclair is dying. She has arrived at late middle age loveless, childless, and having failed to achieve the career dreams of her youth. Now diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, she sees the next fourteen months of suffering as an intolerable prospect. Kate is desperate-not only for a miracle cure, but for some sense that her life, and life itself, amounts to something more than a catastrophe.

When she sees an advertisement for the Washington, DC Death Symposium, Kate investigates and learns that the monthly discussion group is led by none other than the idealistic and inimitable Adele Schraeder, an old friend she has not seen since their teaching days in Rome. On Adele's advice, Kate soon decides to break Virginia law with an assisted suicide.

But Adele Schraeder is not the only person Kate reconnects with at the Death Symposium. Also present is Benedict Aquila, another friend from Rome, who has been living in DC while nursing his mother through her final illness. And then there is the strange, mentally ill street woman sitting in the corner, drawing pad in hand. Who is she? She is the Ariadne's thread that will lead Kate on a journey back through the years to her youth, forcing her to come to grips with the love affair she had with a married man and the catastrophe that took his life.