The Sublime in Modern Philosophy Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature [Hardcover]

A philosophical study of the sublime from the height of its popularity to its renewed importance as a form of appreciating and valuing nature.The Sublime in Modern Philosophy provides a systematic, accessible, and original philosophical study of the sublime from the height of its popularity in the eighteenth century to its renewed importance as a form of appreciating and valuing nature. The book's main aims are to reassess historical notions of the sublime to develop a new theory and to assert the value of the concept for contemporary debates in aesthetics and environmental thought. The book focuses more on the Anglo-American tradition of philosophy, in which the sublime has largely been ignored.The Sublime in Modern Philosophy provides a systematic, accessible, and original philosophical study of the sublime from the height of its popularity in the eighteenth century to its renewed importance as a form of appreciating and valuing nature. The book's main aims are to reassess historical notions of the sublime to develop a new theory and to assert the value of the concept for contemporary debates in aesthetics and environmental thought. The book focuses more on the Anglo-American tradition of philosophy, in which the sublime has largely been ignored.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 l£~