Understanding of art in modern philosophy in the context of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant

In this thesis a detailed research of "passions" and of "beauty" and "sublime" related to the pleasure and displeasure aroused on human being by these passions that could manage to show themselves for the first time in modern philosophy is aimed. Passions are given new contents which are very different from the old ones by Descartes, who is the founder of modern philosophy. This is investigated in the first part of the thesis. The idea that underlies modern aesthetics is that the passions are thought free from everything. In the second part of the thesis Burke's attempt of making the passions the subjects of beauty and sublime is discussed. These two aesthetic feelings are moved into the borders of the "faculty of judgement" where they must be positioned by Kant by means of an enquiry on faculties of mind. The properties of the faculty of judgement that is the mediator between understanding and reason determines domain of interest and artist of aesthetics. In this thesis how Kant supplies content for that is answered. In the last part of the thesis what Kant understands about the feelings of beauty and sublime is presented by an interpretation of the novel Tom Jones by Henry Fielding.