In this seminar we will study the aesthetics of the sublime through a close reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). We will pay particular attention to the sublime as a planetary, environmental, and technological phenomenon, one that demarcates both the possibility and the limit of the human condition. Along the way we will also consider philosophical approaches to the sublime prior to and after Kant: from readings in classical Chinese and Japanese aesthetics, to the writings of Edmund Burke, Ann Radcliffe, Arthur Schopenhauer, and the gothic novel, to contemporary readings on the Anthropocene, “collapsology,” and the “technological sublime.”