Kant is open to both the British tradition and to the rationalism in which he had been trained.The to most important thinkers for the aesthetic developed in the Critique of judgment are thus Burke,to whom kant's distinction between the beautiful and the sublime owes a great adeal,and Baumgarten.As we shall see, Kant's personal taste in art was very much in tune with the then reigning neo-classicism,as represented by winckelmann .
For a long time kant has felt that the beautiful was not really capable of a genuinely philosophical treatment , as would in deed have to be the case if the beautiful were indeed appreciated by something like a sixth sense . Thus his early observations on the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime written in 1763 were written very much in the spirit of English discussions of taste ,especially of Burke .