Aesthetic Ideas and Art Interpretation in Kant's Third Critique and Schelling's 'System of Transcendental Idealism'.

This article examines Immanuel Kant's doctrine of "aesthetic ideas" and argues that it functionally licenses a theory of art interpretation by enabling a free play of imagination and understanding that invites open-ended, conceptually guided reflection on artworks. Kant's aesthetic ideas are defined as imaginative representations that provoke thought without being fully capturable by determinate concepts, thus allowing multiple valid interpretations constrained by the artwork's aesthetic attributes and the artist's purposive intent. The paper contrasts Kant's view with Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's conception of artistic production and reception in his *System of Transcendental Idealism* (1800), where art manifests the identity of conscious and unconscious activity as an expression of the Absolute, but where all artworks share a singular infinite meaning, limiting interpretive differentiation. Ultimately, the article favors Kant's account for meaningful artworks due to its licensing of pluralistic yet constrained interpretations, while acknowledging Schelling's approach may better explain purely sensuous, non-meaningful art.