The notion of aesthetic ideas is of great importance to Kant's thinking about art. Despite its importance, he says little about it. He characterizes aesthetic ideas as representations of the imagination and says that the gift of artistic genius is the inscrutable capacity to envision them. Furthermore, they are counterparts of rational ideas. Works of art thus sensibly present rational ideas; the pleasure they occasion is a consequence of the enriching process of reflection upon the wealth of content they sensibly (...) present. The purpose of this article is to ask whether all rational ideas have aesthetic ideas as counterparts, and so can be presented in art, or whether only some do and which. The answer should reveal what, for Kant, is the subject-matter of art. I argue that for Kant art is concerned with the range and variety of human freedom as well as with its highest fulfillment in morality. (shrink)

In the Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant claims that the Critique of Pure Reason accounted for the necessary conditions of experience and knowledge in general, but that it was not a complete transcendental account of the possibility of a particular empirical experience of objects and knowledge of empirical laws of nature. To fill this gap the third Critique puts forward, as an additional transcendental condition, the regulative principle of the purposiveness of nature. In this paper, (...) I will attempt to show how Kant’s account of pure aesthetic judgment can be read as articulating an aesthetic non-conceptual condition of the search for the conceptual order of nature and so as constituting an essential part of the account of the transcendental conditions of empirical experience and knowledge. (shrink)

This paper argues for a metacognitive reading of Kant’s doctrine of ‘aesthetic ideas’, according to which they enjoy the functional role of licensing a theory of art interpretation. I begin by offering a textualist reading of Kant’s doctrine of ‘aesthetic ideas’ and contest the received ‘semantic paradigm’ according to which aesthetic ideas either approximate the form or content of a rational idea. After showing the relationship between aesthetic ideas and artistic interpretation, I assess whether Kant’s theory delivers what we want (...) from a theory of artistic interpretation. I subsequently show how Schelling’s conception of artistic production and reception in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) draws from Kant’s doctrine of ‘aesthetic ideas’. After analyzing the relationship between Kant and Schelling’s accounts of art interpretation, I evaluate which account we ought to prefer. (shrink)