Kant and the Power of Imagination

In this book Jane Kneller focuses on the role of imagination as a creative power in Kant’s aesthetics and in his overall philosophical enterprise. She analyzes Kant\'s account of imaginative freedom and the relation between imaginative free play and human social and moral development, showing various ways in which his aesthetics of disinterested reflection produce moral interests. She situates these aspects of his aesthetic theory within the context of German aesthetics of the eighteenth century, arguing that Kant’s contribution is a bridge between early theories of aesthetic moral education and the early Romanticism of the last decade of that century. In so doing, her book brings the two most important German philosophers of Enlightenment and Romanticism, Kant and Novalis, into dialogue. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in both Kant studies and German philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

• Focuses on important but neglected aspects of Kant’s aesthetic theory • Views Kant in an unusual light as a precursor to early German Romanticism • Explores the interface between Enlightenment and Romanticism

Introduction: Kant and the power of imagination; 1. Kant and Romanticism; 2. The power of imaginative freedom; 3. The interest of disinterest; 4. Aesthetic reflection and the primacy of the practical; 5. The failure of Kant’s imagination; 6. Imaginative reflections of the self in Hölderlin and Novalis; 7. Novalis’ Kantianism and Kant’s Romanticism.