While Schelling had broad impact on the thought of literary writers during the first part of the nineteenth century, the aesthetics of Hegel had the greatest influence on the development of academic aesthetics in Germany during the three decades following his death in 1831 – the span of a generation, what we might call the post-Hegelian generation. The leading figures of this generation were Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Karl Rosenkranz, and Hermann Rudolf Lotze, and what is common to all of them is that they made at least tentative efforts to find room for the approaches that Hegel’s single-mindedly cognitivist approach to aesthetics had excluded, namely the Kantian idea of the free play of imagination and the ultimately Dubosian recognition of the emotional impact of art. But before we turn to these figures, we will briefly consider one who was more of a contemporary of Hegel, K.W.F. Solger, who, like Hegel, adopted an essentially cognitivist approach to aesthetics but who, unlike Hegel, did not think that the cognitive limits of art needed to be remedied by higher forms of knowledge such as religion and philosophy, because for him the content of art is essentially religious. Yet at the same time he claimed that art is essentially ironical, that it promises a reconciliation of our spiritual and material natures that it can never fully deliver, and in this sense Solger’s theory points the way toward the twentieth-century aesthetics of Theodor W. Adorno, whose own cognitivist approach to art is that it holds out to us what we might call the logical possibility of a fully reconciled life while at the same time revealing the real impossibility of such a life. In his own time, Solger’s lectures were immediately overshadowed by Hegel’s, but in the long run they may have had at least one important reverberation in the following century.