What’s the Big Idea?: On Emily Brady’s Sublime

This review essay of Emily Brady’s book The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (2013) first gives background on the sublime and offers an overview of Brady’s study. It then addresses four main topics: the possibility of the sublime in art (artistic sublimity); the way “adherent” or dependent sublimity, which is partly intellectual or conceptual, can help resolve a debate with “scientific cognitivism” regarding the aesthetic appreciation of nature; the relationship of Brady’s project to environmental ethics; and the role of culture in a theory of the sublime.