1 - Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime (1764)

Summary

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

Kant's little book Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime was submitted to the Dean of the University of Königsberg for approval of publication on October 8, 1763, and its first edition was published in Königsberg by Johann Jacob Kanter with the date of 1764. Kant's then friend Johann Georg Hamann reported on February 1, 1764 that he was at work on a review of the work (which would appear in the Königsberger gelehrte und politische Zeitungen on April 30, 1764), so the work was actually published no later than January, 1764.

The book was thus written at the end of the period of exceptional productivity in which Kant had composed The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (1762), the Inquiry concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (also 1762, although not published until 1764, when it was published by the Berlin Academy of Sciences as the runner-up to Moses Mendelssohn's essay On Evidence in the Metaphysical Sciences, which was awarded the first prize in the Academy's 1762 competition on the question of whether philosophy could employ the mathematical method), the Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763), and the Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (1763).