From 1810 to 1830, Viennese piano construction evolved in an attempt to combine the special sonority of Viennese instruments with new advances in technology. One important factor was the possibility of varying the sound between full and reduced or dampened action. A particularly striking change of sound could be produced by the soft or una corda pedal, which shifted the hammer rail so that the hammers struck only one rather than the standard three strings of a triple-strung piano. Although detailed knowledge of which composers wrote which works for which instrument is lacking, hypotheses can be advanced regarding the influence of the action of certain instruments on compositional style. A comparison of works by two composers from different generations – one earlier (Beethoven) and another later (Mendelssohn, who had a predilection for Viennese instruments in his youth) – sheds light on several peculiarities of Schubert’s piano music. Beethoven’s late works and Schubert’s works of the 1820s both exploit this potential in order to coordinate sonority and structure. However, the two composers differ in one key respect: Beethoven tended to use the sonic contrasts he exploited (and meticulously notated) to articulate the work’s architecture, whereas Schubert used them to refine atmosphere and mood.

Kant adopts and transforms the views on pleasure found both in the empirical psychology of the Wolffian tradition as well as those of critics of this tradition like Crusius. The latter proposed that pleasure in an object results from the satisfaction of a desire or interest while the former conceived of pleasure as the perception of an object’s perfection. Mendelssohn’s analysis of pleasure combined aspects of both views and led to a characterization of the feeling as a preference we have to maintain the representation of an object in our mind when it satisfies our interest in perfection. We find this explication in the third Critique under the title of a “transcendental definition” of pleasure, that is, a definition of an empirical concept that employs only pure concepts of the understanding. The definition, together with the assumption that faculties have interests, leads to the principle that pleasure consists in the satisfaction of such interests.

No work of art, however original, is created in isolation from the life and culture of its time and place. Politically and artistically, Berlioz lived in interesting times. The year of Symphonie fantastique, 1830, was a year of revolution and a key year in the development of French romanticism. In addition to reviewing the artistic scene, this chapter considers aspects of Berlioz’s musical education and earlier work. This is set in relief by comparing his ‘Fantastic’ symphony with the Reformation Symphony by Felix Mendelssohn, which was composed about the same time. Differences in their the two composers’ musical upbringing and religious views are reflected in the two symphonies, including their use of traditional musical material.

In 1772 Joseph Banks recorded observations on the Hebridean island of Staffa. His most striking ‘discovery’ was a sea cave resembling a cathedral. Banks claimed the cave was known by the name of the mythical Irish warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill, or Fingal, to use the variant made famous by Macpherson’s Ossian poems. The publication of Banks’s findings prompted a small industry of travel writing that combined lithic observations with minstrelsy and national history. In 1797 the French geologist Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond published his research on the topic, which suggested that the association with Ossian was the result of a misunderstanding: whereas the Gaelic for Fingal’s Cave would be ‘an-ua-fine’, the actual name was ‘an-ua-vine’, which translated as ‘melodious cave’. Far from settling the matter, Saint-Fond’s intervention only added to the mystique. In this chapter I argue that the cave’s fashionable status can be partly attributed to a series of re-soundings, by which printed texts and theatrical performances relayed aspects of on-site accounts to new readers and audiences. Where existing models of Romantic resonance have emphasized a correspondence between sound and thought, the fame of Fingal’s Cave emerges here as the result of almost mindless repetition.

This introduction offers an account of Jacobi’s importance for intellectual history and describes how he positioned himself at the centre of critical debates in a way that would shape the intellectual terrain for coming generations.

Chapter 8 shows that Kant’s thoughts on humor can be viewed as part of his wider aesthetic theory. Kant’s view of laughter at humor can be interpreted in terms of his theory of a harmonious free play of the faculties. What are the sources of his account of humor, and how did his thoughts about humor develop? Kant combines elements of incongruity, superiority, and release theories of humor. While responding to authors such as Moses Mendelssohn, Thomas Hobbes, and the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Kant adds his own, more original, thoughts about humor by appealing to his theory of a free play between the imagination and understanding. Once Kant begins to understand aesthetic responses in terms of a harmonious free play, it puts him in a position to connect humor to his aesthetic theory.

Chapter 3 examines adherent beauty or partly conceptual beauty. How are beauty and the good related? Like Johann Georg Sulzer and David Hume, Kant distinguishes between free beauty and purpose-based beauty, or the kind grounded in the purposes or aims of the object or artwork. Even in his early aesthetics, Kant holds that beauty and goodness are distinct concepts yet can be conjoined. Purpose-based beauty is central to Kant’s early aesthetics, and he calls it “self-standing.” This kind of beauty is retained in the third Critique in the form of adherent beauty, yet a fundamental shift occurs: he there calls free beauty “self-standing.”

Chapter 6 characterizes the development of Kant’s views of the sublime in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and other pre-Critical writings and materials. The description of the sublime in the third Critique is shaped by Kant’s moral turn and his interest in a principle of natural purposiveness. The chapter shows how the early Kant synthesizes the ideas of Edmund Burke on the one hand and Alexander Baumgarten and Moses Mendelssohn on the other. It reveals how Kant shifts from a psychological–anthropological account of the sublime to a non-empirical, transcendental one.

Chapter 7 explores ugliness and disgust (Ekel). In providing an overview of the third Critique position, the chapter argues that there cannot be pure aesthetic judgments of the ugly. In his early accounts, Kant views the responses to ugliness and disgust as unpleasant and therefore as (what Kant would call) “interested.” He typically discusses ugliness and disgust in connection with a teleological perspective of the whole of nature and of natural purposes. The ugly is disagreeable, since it is dysfunctional or asymmetrical (or both). A version of this view carries over into the third Critique. The ugly, if and when it is judged by the principle of nature’s purposiveness, would be contrapurposive and therefore disagreeable.

Kant is critical of many of the practices of Christianity in his time. But when we appreciate the dynamic relation between rational and revealed religion as Kant conceives them, the apparent opposition becomes more questionable and raises more questions than it answers. Kant’s project in the Religion bears important affinities with the religious philosophy of Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn’s philosophy of church and state and their relation involve a number of radical proposals expressive of Enlightenment religious consciousness. Mendelssohn’s concept of enlightened Judaism bears interesting comparison to Kant’s enlightened reflections on Christianity. Mendelssohn defends a form of evidentialism even more radical that Clifford’s. He also defends a conception of the freedom of religious conscience that inspires Kant’s treatment of that topic in part four of the Religion. Conscience is an important theme in Kant’s moral philosophy, which has special application to religious conscience and the freedom of conscience Kant and Mendelssohn both defend.

Kant’s reflections on religion represent a road not taken in the modern world – a way of reconciling religious faith and religious symbols with a modern scientific and Enlightenment culture. We may question Kant’s hope for a universal world faith in light of Mendelssohn’s defense of separate churches and religious ways of life. But the world would be a better place if the aspirations of Kant and Mendelssohn had shaped the relation of religion to culture in the past two hundred years.