The Origins of Kant’s Aesthetics by Robert R. Clewis

marginalia, and handwritten notes (Reflexionen).Clewis elucidates the influences on Immanuel Kant's early, perfectionism-attuned views and consequent mature thinking on aesthetics.The novelty of Clewis's work lies in its chapters' respective attention to eight prominent themes in Kant's aesthetics: 'normativity, free (sensible) beauty, adherent (intellectual) beauty, creativity or genius, the fine artist, sublimity, ugliness and disgust, and humor' (p.5).In turn, Clewis's systematic processual analysis is more expansive than antecedent projects like David Berger's book -which solely deals with Kant on aesthetic beauty and normativity -but more focused than, for instance, Paul Guyer's recent three-volume historical conspectus. 1 Clewis's assiduous research is part of a most welcome tendency in recent Kant scholarship that exactingly engages with seventeenth-and eighteenth-century aesthetics qua Kant. 2 The Origins of Kant's Aesthetics will be of enormous interest to scholars and students of Kant's theoretical philosophy in general and Kant's aesthetics in particular, though, given Clewis's accessible writing, it will also duly service art historians and art critics interested in the