The Sublime in Modern Philosophy

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 aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important if sometimes challenging aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world.