When aesthetics emerged as a discipline in the 18th century, it marked not only the beginning of a new way of thinking about beauty. Aesthetics detached itself from the contemplation of art and began to redefine fundamental philosophical concepts. In his historical and systematic reconstruction of the aesthetic debates of the 18th century, Christoph Menke offers a new perspective on the highly productive conflict between "capacity" and "force" as fundamental concepts of aesthetics. He interprets this conflict as the matrix of crucial positions in contemporary philosophy, to which he contributes with this book.