Creatures of Attention: Aesthetics and the Subject Before Kant - Paperbackby Johannes Wankhammer (Author) Creatures of Attention excavates the early modern prehistory of our late modern crises of attention. At the threshold of modernity, philosophers, scientists, and poets across Europe began to see attention as the key to autonomous agency and knowledge. Recovering the philosophical and literary works from eighteenth century Germany in which "attention," "subject," and "aesthetics" developed their modern meanings, Johannes