Sublime understanding Book

The topic of the sublime is making a return to contemporary discourse on aesthetics and cognition. In Sublime Understanding, Kirk Pillow makes sublimity the centre of an alternative conception of aesthetic response and interpretation. He draws on aesthetics of sublimity from Kant's Critique of Judgement, bolsters it with help from Hegel, and establishes its place in a broadened conception of human understanding (thus differing from the many scholars who use Hegel to dismiss Kant or vice versa). He argues that sublime reflection provides a model for an interpretive response to the uncanny Other outside our conceptual grasp; it advances our sense-making pursuits but eschews unified, conceptual determination. This sublime understanding is the always partial, indeterminate grasping of contextual wholes through which we make sense of the uncanny particular in both art and the lived world.