This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition -- Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno -- attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. Ayon Maharaj argues that the aesthetic speculations of these thinkers provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of "aesthetic agency"-- art's capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality.

Blending careful philosophical analysis with an intellectual historian's...

This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition -- Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno -- attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. Ayon Maharaj argues that the aesthetic speculations of these thinkers provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of "aesthetic agency"-- art's capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality.
Blending careful philosophical analysis with an intellectual historian's...