Sublime in Modern Philosophy

About this book

In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetic and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, the sublime, Brady argues, is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world."--Book Jacket.