This course will pursue a critical history of modern aesthetics. We will begin by exploring how aesthetics emerged as a philosophical discourse in the late-18th and early-19th centuries to respond to a unique pressure on cognition and recognition that was conceptualized as ‘aesthetic experience.’ Our key texts here will be Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, and Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art. We will then examine criticisms of the idea that it is in the power of philosophy to circumscribe such experience. The key texts here will be Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and essays by Emerson and Freud. Finally, to investigate what remains of the task of aesthetic theory in the wake of the criticisms of Nietzsche, Emerson, and Freud, we will read texts by Adorno, Cavell, Kristeva and Danto.