Since the 1990s, there has been talk of art as research and research as art. The concept seeks to bring the arts and sciences closer together in their methods of working, yet the question of what kind of knowledge the arts produce in contrast to the sciences is rarely addressed. Dieter Mersch traces the long philosophical tradition of grappling with the epistemological status of the aesthetic and its relationship to truth, working to deconstruct and shift the underlying terminology. His aim is to discover within artistic practices a mode of thinking that neither relies on language and its form of 'statement' nor can be translated into the discursive forms of the sciences: an aesthetic thinking beyond the 'linguistic turn' and the self-understanding of philosophy.