This research aimed to explain the Enlightenment bases of aesthetic anthropology elaborated by Kant in his Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime and to trace the consequences of these assumptions for the understanding of the structure of the work and the place occupied by it in the development of Kantian thought. The hypotheses defended for that were, firstly, that the Enlightenment concept of reason was, among other things, gradual, in a methodological and corroborative sense; secondly, that the critique of taste and the philosophy of history, made possible by this conception of reason, supported Kant's aesthetic anthropology; thirdly, that the sublime was an axis that connected appearance, nature and consciousness in the Observations. Methodologically, a textual corpus was selected to characterize the historical-philosophical movement of the 18th century, analyzing and reconstructing it structurally and genealogically. The concepts and themes that give unity to the corpus were, at the same time, observed according to definitions, functions and limits internally established by each of the works that compose it, stressing specificities and continuities.
Keywords: Enlightenment; Aesthetics; Anthropology; Epistemology.