This collection includes all but one of the essays on Kant's aesthetics that I have written since the publication of my earlier study, Kant and the Claims of Taste, in 1979 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), as well as several essays that directly explore the place of feeling, the paradigmatic form of aesthetic experience, in Kant's moral philosophy. (The one essay omitted from this collection, “Pleasure and Society in Kant's Theory of Taste,” in Essays in Kant's Aesthetics, edited by Ted Cohen and myself [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], had actually been written in 1975, and while providing a useful introduction to Kant and the Claims of Taste, it does not extend its approach to the issues considered in these essays.)

These essays were written for different occasions and attack a set of variously interrelated issues from several angles. When I first published Kant and the Claims of Taste, I naturally assumed that I had said everything I could possibly have to say on the subject of the book and turned back to the Critique of Pure Reason, which had been my first love in Kant. But there were some glaring omissions in Kant and the Claims of Taste, and I did take the opportunity provided by several of the invitations that came to me in the wake of that book to rectify several of those in the oldest of the essays reprinted here, Chapter 6, on the differences between the beautiful and the sublime (originally published in 1982), and Chapter 8, on Kant's theory of genius and its implications for the conception of art history (originally published in 1983).