"A very serious undertaking by a scholar who has an excellent knowledge of Kant's philosophy. Kant's aesthetics is a hot topic right now, so this book will be of considerable interest to those in the field." - Donald Crawford, University of Southern California at Santa Barbara. "An alternative account of aesthetic judgment which is rich, interesting and provocative. This is a book which will certainly provoke engagement and debate." - Rachel Jones, Dundee University. Kant's "Critique of Judgment" is widely considered to be the seminal work of modern aesthetics. In recent years it has been the focus of intense interest and debate not only in philosophy but also in literary theory and other disciplines in which the nature of the aesthetic is an issue. "The Aesthetic in Kant" offers a new reading of Kant's problematic text, drawing on the great volume of recent philosophical work on the text and on the context of eighteenth century aesthetics. Kant's text is used as a basis on which to construct a radical alternative solution to the antinomy of taste, the basic problem of the aesthetic. Immanent in Kant's account is a theory of the aesthetic that, far from establishing its 'disinterested' nature, instead makes it symptomatic of what Kant himself describes as the ineradicable human tendency to entertain 'fantastic desires'.

Author Biography

James Kirwan is Associate Professor in the Dept of Anglo-American Studies at Kobe University of Foreign Studies, Japan, and author of Literature, Rhetoric, Metaphysics (Routledge, 1990), Beauty (Manchester University Press, 1999), and Sublimity (Routledge, 2004).