“The Place of the Sublime in Kant’s Project”

I emphasize the harmony between the sublime and the underlying concept of the purposiveness of nature, i.e. that the sublime is purposive through its initial contrapurposiveness. One favorable outcome of this reading is that it locates further unity in the Critique of Judgment, e.g. it helps make sense of why, besides historical reasons, Kant may have turned to the sublime in the first place in the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” (Part One of the CJ). I question some prominent readings of Kant’s theory, e.g. that as a mere ‘appendix’ to his theory of nature, Kant’s account of the sublime has little connection to his project’s main aims. The place of the sublime is thus near the middle.