ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the contingency and variety of aesthetic experience among individuals and across cultures and times. The very possibility of aesthetic, that is to say, fundamentally feeling-based, reflective judgment was a new development in Kant's critical philosophical system. He gestured towards it at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason, when he argued that moral feelings could be developed through certain techniques designed to invoke admiration for moral reasoning and awe for moral character in the mind of the student. If aesthetic reflective judgment is as foundational mental life as Kant suggests, then it seems reasonable to expect that aesthetic reflection is at work in all cases of judging where we recognise the need to detach from prejudicial feelings and where we attempt to develop more nuanced and sympathetic feelings towards others. In these cases, an expanded sensitivity to new ideas and new forms of aesthetic practice are called for.
