Until recently, it was customary to regard Kant as the thinker who definitively separated aesthetic knowledge from the domains of reason and morality by identifying its core epistemological activity as a kind of judgment that he qualified as a matter of taste. The postmodern rejection of the “modernist” practice of aesthetic theory, however, has done much to undermine Kant’s position in both the arts and in philosophy. This course aims to re-examine Kant’s aesthetic theory as set out in his Critique of Judgment of 1790 from the vantage point of the art theoretical literature that preceded it vis a vis the integral place of the aesthetic in both premodern ethics and theology. In an effort to better understand Kant’s contribution to the history of thought about art and its purposes, it will seek to contextualize such “Kantian” themes as judgment, taste, genius, beauty, sublimity and purposiveness. It will also consider to what degree our understanding of Kant has been shaped by later modernist assumptions about the character of his contribution.
