ABSTRACT. The intention of the present study is to bring the sublime back into the light in contemporary philosophical debates, in order to present its significance both for aesthetics and in the field of art in particular, as well as for the sphere of cultural creation in general. In this sense, in the first part of the study we shall emphasize the specificity of the sublime as a fundamental aesthetic category located in the proximity of the beauty, revealing both the similarities and the differences between them. In the second part of the study, we will discuss several hypotheses of the sublime in philosophical aesthetics, having as a theoretical benchmark, in this sense, the ideas of Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Hartmann, with the aim of shedding light on the necessity of the presence of the sublime in the sphere of human values and cultural creation.

Keywords: sublime; beauty; aesthetic category; ethics; Kant; Schiller