Abstract
Karl Heinrich Heydenreich (1764-1801), a now almost forgotten German thinker of the late Enlightenment, attempted his own transcendental-philosophical definition of the aesthetic category of the sublime in the article "Grundriß einer neuen Untersuchung über die Empfindungen des Erhabenen" (1789), which preceded Kant's Critique of Judgment by a year. Thanks to this endeavor, he was often described in the history of aesthetics as being a Kantian in aesthetics before Kant, but his article has not to this point received a detailed analysis.
The present study shows that, in particular, Kant's moral-philosophical concept of respect for moral law played a crucial role in Heydenreich's reflections on the sensation of the sublime as a product of pure reason.