Kant’s distinction between the determining and reflecting power of judgment in the third Critique is not well understood in the literature. A mainstream view unifies these by making determination the telos of all acts of judgment (Longuenesse 1998). On this view, all reflection is primarily in the business of producing empirical concepts for cognition, and thus has what I call a determinative ideal. I argue that this view fails to take seriously the independence and autonomy of the ‘power of judgment’ (...) [Urteilskraft] as a higher cognitive faculty in its own right with its own a priori principle. Instead of seeing merely reflecting judgments as failed or incomplete acts of judgment, I argue that these are in fact paradigmatic of the activity of the power of judgment. More precisely, the reflecting power of judgment just is the power of judgment. Accordingly, reflecting judgment takes precedence over determining judgment; while the former operates according to a law that it gives itself, the latter requires another higher cognitive faculty to provide its principle. On my view, reflecting judgment should be understood as the capacity for purposive subsumption—most clearly seen in the activity of mere reflection. (shrink)

The harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding is at the heart of Kant’s account of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, but interpreters have long struggled to determine what Kant means when he claims the faculties are in a state of free play. In this article, I develop an interpretation of the free play of the faculties in terms of the freedom of attention. By appealing to the different way that we attend to objects in (...) aesthetic experience, we can explain how the faculties are free, even when the subject already possesses a concept of the object and is bound to the determinate form of the object in perception. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the role of attention in Kant’s aesthetic theory in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. While broadly Kantian aestheticians have defended the claim that there is a distinct way that we attend to objects in aesthetic experience, Kant himself is not usually acknowledged as offering an account of aesthetic attention. On the basis of Kant’s more general account of attention in other texts and his remarks on attention in the Critique of the Power of (...) Judgment, I reconstruct Kant’s account of aesthetic attention. On this account, aesthetic attention is simultaneously directed at the form of an object and at the judging subject’s own mental states as she attends to the object. In the experience of beauty, we specifically attend to the harmonious relation between the faculties of imagination and understanding. (shrink)

Kant often seems to suggest that a cognition – whether an everyday cognition or a scientific cognition – cannot be beautiful. In the Critique of Judgment and the Lectures on Logic, he writes: ‘a science which, as such, is supposed to be beautiful, is absurd.’ (CJ 184 (5:305)) ‘The expression "beautiful cognition" is not fitting at all’ (LL 446 (24:708)). These claims are usually understood rather straightforwardly. On the one hand, cognition cannot be beautiful since on Kant’s account, it is (...) all about concepts whilst beauty is defined by its non-conceptual nature. On the other hand, beauty cannot contribute to cognition since the former is grounded on subjective feelings whilst cognition is all about objective knowledge. However, I will argue that Kant’s view of the relationship between cognition and beauty is not as straightforward as it may seem, and that both of these claims are in fact false. As I will show, cognition can be beautiful, and the feeling of beauty is cognitively valuable. Yet it is not because beauty is a sign of the truthfulness of a theory. Nor is it because the process that gives rise to the feeling of beauty, the free play, furthers scientific progress. Rather, it is because the experience of beauty stimulates our cognitive powers and thereby enhances our cognitive activity. On this basis, contrary to what is usually thought, cognition can, and in fact should, be beautiful for Kant. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉJe conteste l'affirmation de Harbin selon laquelle les jugements esthétiques, pour Kant, ne sont pas normatifs. En me concentrant sur la nature systématique de la philosophie critique de Kant, je montre que les jugements esthétiques, comme les jugements dans les domaines théorique et pratique, doivent être normatifs, bien que de tels jugements affichent un type distinct de normativité, qui s'exprime dans leur subjectivité, leur indétermination et leur affectivité.

This thesis explores what an aesthetic judgment would be if we take existence to be non-duallyinterconnected. Interconnectedness and aesthetic judgment does not seem to be compatible becauseaesthetic judgment seems to depend on, at least, the dualism of the beautiful and the ugly and that ofsubject and object. In contrast, interconnectedness can not accept these dualisms.Zen philosopher Dōgen provides a non-dually interconnected framework that allows for aestheticjudgments in an interconnected view of existence. Zen philosophy concludes that we can both havedualism and (...) non-dualism and that the ideas do not cancel each other out but deal with differentaspects of existence. Dualism with a centric view where existence is viewed from a standpoint andthus is restricted by a perspective, and enlightenment, where existence is perceived non-duallyinterconnected, can coexist. Because Aesthetic judgments are dependent on dualism, they must takeplace on the centric plane of existence. However, because, in enlightenment, everything is seen asBeautiful, it can not reveal much about an object’s beauty. Instead, the aesthetic judgment revealssomething about the standpoint taken in judgment. In light of this reformulation of the meaning ofaesthetic judgments, aesthetics will become phenomenological no matter if you deal with howcentric or enlightened ways of existence reveal themselves. Whether your focus is on aestheticjudgments, appreciation, or artistic practice, you will always deal with aesthetic experiences. (shrink)