Beautiful Mind, Unconquerable Soul

In this paper, I examine the scope and relevance of Lara Ostaric’s thesis on “The ‘Moral Image’ of the ‘Supersensible within’” and the productive imagination that generates schema-analogues, as presented in her book The Critique of Judgment and The Unity of Kant’s Critical System. In the first part, I argue that this thesis represents a kind of a missing link connecting the first and the second of Kant’s Critiques, but also unites two aspects of Kant’s aesthetics: the one I call analytic and the one I call speculative. I further argue that productive imagination, in this way, allows us to glimpse beyond the limits of possible experience. In the second part, I argue that, starting from here, one could defend the view that Kant was an aesthetic cognitivist in a strong sense of the word. In the third part, I apply Ostaric’s thesis to Kant’s concept of the dynamically sublime.