International conference proceedings.

Includes bibliographical references.

Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics invites us to think the intensity of aesthetic contemplation asfreeing the mind of its “pathological” subordination to desires and other empirical interests.For Kant, what is at stake in contemplation can never be understood as merely sensory: itinvolves a special disposition (Stimmung) that directs the mind to the supersensible, whichhe determines as the idea that transcends all sensibility. Beyond interpreting the domain ofthe ideal as an immaterial, self-sufficient realm, this collection of essays opens up thequestion of its ‘life’, suggesting an interrelation with the pathological that is more intimatethan Kant himself seems to have surmised.