What is the highest good actually good for in Kant’s third Critique? While there are well-worked out answers to this question in the literature that focus on the highest good’s practical importance, this paper argues that there is an important function for the highest good that has to do exclusively with contemplation. This important function becomes clear once one notices that coherent [konsequent] thinking, for Kant, was synonymous with "bündiges" thinking, and that both are connected with the highest good in (...) the third Critique’s moral proof for God’s existence. I show that the original meaning of "bündig," which is from the carpentry trade and has been forgotten, illuminates the stakes of the highest good in Kant’s system. For us, as proverbial carpenters of reason, coherence is essential for the intellectual activity of constructing a philosophical worldview in his transcendental idealism. I motivate the reading further by showing how this function can neatly reconstruct Kant’s proof for God’s existence in the third Critique. I conclude by sketching Kant’s reasons for why the project of creating a coherent worldview grounded in the highest good is worth the labor costs. (shrink)

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic “self-organization” as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the epistemological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant’s heuristics of autonomous “self-organization” in the third Critique (...) amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought’s critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigenesis (still) marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of “self-organization,” allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present. (shrink)

The conception of disinterested pleasure is not only central to Kant’s theory of beauty but also highly influential in contemporary philosophical discourse about beauty. However, it remains unclear, what exactly disinterested pleasure is and what role it plays in experiences of beauty. This volume sheds new light on the conception of disinterested pleasure from the perspectives of both Kant scholarship and contemporary aesthetics. In the first part, the focus is on Kant’s theory of beauty as grounded on the conception of (...) disinterested pleasure. In the second part, disinterested pleasure is investigated in the light of contemporary debates on beauty. The third part is dedicated to the relation of theories of disinterested pleasure to the meta-aesthetical debate between realism and anti-realism. The volume clarifies the meaning, role, and implications of one of the most influential conceptions in traditional as well as contemporary approaches to beauty. (shrink)

Kant maintains that the only thing that is good in itself, and therefore good without limitation or qualification, is a good will. This is an objectionable claim in support of a controversial position. The problem is not just that the good will is not the only thing that is good in itself, which indeed it is not, but more importantly, that the good will is not so much a thing that is good in itself as it is the good kind (...) of a thing that is otherwise neither good nor bad in itself. The goodness of a good will is no more intrinsic than the goodness of a good act, good outcome, good attitude, good character, or good person. Nor is it even any more so than something as commonplace as a good laugh or a good cup of coffee. A good will, whatever else it may be, is a will that is good, much like how a good act is an act that is good, a good outcome is an outcome that is good, and so on with the other examples, not one of which is good for any reason other than the goodness predicated of the corresponding subject. This paper thus challenges Kant’s position on ontological grounds. It questions the validity of claiming intrinsic goodness for a complex construct whose goodness is, in fact, extrinsic to its substance. The objection is not that the good will might not turn out to be good after all, which is impossible by definition, designation, or stipulation, but that its goodness is axiomatic and derivative rather than intrinsic or fundamental. (shrink)

The article deals with Kant’s doctrine of genius, presented in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, in connection with the latest discussion of which author of that time could have a decisive influence on Kant’s conception. In the first section, I reconstruct the line of Kant’s argument in CPJ §§ 46-50 where he explicates the nature of genius and show that its characteristics such as contrast to rules, the complementarity of taste, spirit as a principle of aesthetic ideas, the (...) proportion between the power of imagination and understanding become constitutive for his theory. In the second section, I refer to opinio communis in the research literature that Kant formed his theory of genius under the influence of the Scottish philosopher Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Genius. This opinion is shared by the vast majority of contemporary researchers. Still, its origins go back to the monograph of O. Schlapp. At the same time, other researchers claim that C. F. Gellert, or merely German philosophy of the XVIII century, had a significant influence on Kant’s theory. In the third section, on the example of Kant’s four propositions about genius head, the productive power of imagination, the proportion of understanding and the power of imagination, the difference of genius and scientific talent), I claim that similar views were common among various German and foreign authors of that time. Based on this, I argue that Kant’s conception of genius as a complex theory cannot be reduced to the influence of one author or one tradition. Hence its correct reconstruction should consider the rich and diverse material from different sources from aesthetics, poetics, rhetoric, art, and literature up to metaphysics. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant claims that genius is a talent for art, but not for science. Despite his restriction of genius to the domain of fine art, several recent interpreters have suggested that genius has a role to play in Kant’s account of cognition in general and scientific practice in particular. In this paper, I explore Kant’s reasons for excluding genius from science as well as the reasons that one might nevertheless be tempted to think that his account (...) allows room for the scientific genius. I then argue that Kant’s concerns are not only epistemic, but also moral, and together, they give us good reason for resisting the veneration of genius. (shrink)

The article explores Kant’s notion of the human being as the ultimate end of nature, presenting an ethical interpretation of this notion. The author of this article believes that the analysis of Kant’s assumptions will allow a deeper understanding of our own hermeneutical situation, in which ecological problems force us to rethink our relationship with nature and the meaning of human existence. Analyzing Kant’s early texts on Lisbon earthquake and his reflection on the sublime in the Critique of Judgement, the (...) author asks how the experience of an uncontrolled natural element complements Kant’s ethical vision of nature’s teleology. Emphasizing the importance of insight into human vulnerability for the implementation of moral purpose in nature, the article outlines guidelines for interpretation that allow the relevance of Kant’s position in the context of contemporary environmental ethics. (shrink)

I defend an interpretation of the first Critique’s category of totality based on Kant’s analysis of totality in the third Critique’s Analytic of the mathematical sublime. I show, firstly, that in the latter Kant delineates the category of totality — however general it may be — in relation to the essentially singular standpoint of the subject. Despite the fact that sublime and categorial totality have a significantly different scope and function, they do share such a singular baseline. Secondly, I argue (...) that Kant’s note (in the first Critique’s metaphysical deduction) that deriving the category of totality requires a special act of the understanding can be seen as a ‘mark’ of that singular baseline. This way, my aesthetical ‘detour’ has the potential of revealing how the subjective aspects of object-constitution might be accounted for in the very system of the categories (of quantity) itself. (shrink)

This paper claims that Kant’s conception of culture provides a new means of understanding how the two parts of the Critique of Judgment fit together. Kant claims that culture is both the ‘ultimate purpose’ of nature and to be defined in terms of ‘art in general’ (of which the fine arts are a subtype). In the Critique of Teleological Judgment, culture, as the last empirically cognizable telos of nature, serves as the mediating link between nature and freedom, while in the (...) Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, the connection between art and morality passes through culture. In either case, Kant offers distinct, yet interdependent, arguments for how culture demonstrates the amenability of nature to its supersensible ground: the central question Kant claims in the Introduction that the work seeks to answer. Thus, not only does this account advance a concept essential to both parts of the work; it also demonstrates how the two parts can be conceived as complementary, with each supplementing the other to solve Kant’s central question. As such, understanding the Critique of Judgment in terms of culture enables us to see how the two parts of the work do not merely share points of similarity or common themes, but presuppose one another in order to understand how nature is amenable to freedom. (shrink)

Whereas in Idea for a Universal History Kant without much hesitation resorts to biological concepts to understand history, this fundamentally changes in Critique of the Power of Judgment. In this work, history and biology are separated; they are understood as two different forms of teleological judgments. The teleological concepts that make history intelligible are divorced from their biological origins and introduced in an explicitly non-biological way of thinking. I argue that because of this shift, after the Critique of the Power (...) of Judgment Kant’s theory of history cannot any longer function as an independent confirmation of the possibility of human morality. Während es Kant in seiner Schrift Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht für unproblematisch erachtet, biologische Konzepte auf die Geschichte anzuwenden, steht er diesem Unterfangen in der Kritik der Urteilskraft kritisch gegenüber. In seiner dritten Kritik trennt Kant Geschichte und Biologie: In ihnen treten jetzt unterschiedliche Formen teleologischer Urteile auf. Die teleologischen Konzepte, welche die Geschichte verständlich machen, werden von ihrer biologischen Herkunft getrennt und in einer explizit nicht-biologischen Weise eingeführt. Wie ich argumentiere, kann Kants Theorie der Geschichte aufgrund dieser Verschiebung nicht länger als unabhängige Bestätigung der Möglichkeit menschlicher Sittlichkeit herangezogen werden. (shrink)

Although much attention has already been paid to Kant’s ideas on race, more research is needed to determine the sources that he used to support his portrayal of non-white races. A comprehension of the intellectual context gives us the opportunity to see the way in which Kant wished to contribute to discussions on inheritable human characteristics and the inferiority of certain races. This article will emphasize the relevance of the views of Joseph Priestley and Alexander Wilson for Kant’s hypothesis on (...) the relation between phlogiston and the black race. This allows us to comprehend the methodology that Kant prescribed for natural history and its consequences for his understanding of the inferiority of the black race. (shrink)

Are we really sure to correctly know what do we feel in front ofan artwork and to correctly verbalize it? How do we know what weappreciate and why we appreciate it? This paper deals with the problem ofintrospective opacity in aesthetics (that is, the unreliability of self-knowledge) in the light of traditional philosophical issues, but also of recentpsychological insights, according to which there are many instances ofmisleading intuition about one’s own mental processes, affective states orpreferences. Usually, it is assumed that (...) aesthetic statements are intuitivelyclear and self-evident. However, a long tradition in psychological researchhas called the idea of introspective transparency and the infallibility of self-knowledge into question (Wilson 2002). This topic has only recently beenrecognized as an interesting problem in aesthetics (Melchionne 2011, Irvin2014). In this paper I will discuss the main shortcomings in introspective self-knowledge, mostly referring to psychological findings. As a consequence, thedevelopment of a folk psychological account of aesthetic experience could beneeded, investigating how people develop intuitive and naïve theories abouttheir aesthetic reactions, taste, and feelings, distinct from a more objectiveand empirically grounded account of how judgment and preferences areactually formed in ourselves, even on a neurobiological level. However, itwill also be argued that bypassing the individual judgment and his expressedchoices in favor of allegedly more objective levels of description would notbe an innocent step to take. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that although Kant’s account of empirical schemata in the Critique of Pure Reason is primarily used to explain the shared content of intuitions and empirical concepts, it is also informed by methodological problems in natural history. I argue that empirical schemata, which are rules for determining the spatiotemporal form of objects, not only serve to connect individual intuitions with concepts, but also concern the very features of objects on the basis of which they were connected (...) and ordered in taxonomic systems based on similarity of form. I then suggest that Kant likely had scientific illustrations in mind in his discussion of empirical images in the Schematism chapter and that his account of schemata can help explain the epistemic function of these images in early modern science. (shrink)

The paper examines Kant’s self-criticism to the account of hypothetical imperatives given in the "Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals". Following his corrections in the introductions to the third "Critique", the paper traces the consequences of that change in his later writings, specifically with regard to the status of prudence. I argue that the revision of the account of hypothetical imperatives leads to differentiate, and ultimately separate, two functions in prudence: the setting of ends through maxims, and the pragmatic rules (...) establishing means to reach those ends. Accordingly, I furthermore argue, there is ultimately no genuine structural distinction between the rules of prudence and skill. The only difference lies in the domain in which prudence unfolds, that is, the field of human relations, and in the relevant cognitions. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss Kant’s views on the “American race.” Robert Bernasconi has pointed out that more research on the sources of Kant’s ideas on non-white races is needed in order to have a better understanding of his racism. This essay responds to that call in order to show how Kant contributed to on-going discussions on the causes and meaning of human differences. However, I will also focus on his influence on his contemporaries. The reason for doing so is (...) two-fold. Firstly, I will question Irene Tucker’s recent attempt to show that skin color was considered a racial sign because of its supposed self-evidence and immediate legibility. By way of a presentation of Kant’s views on the “American race,” I will show that race mixing formed the core of Kant’s racial theory and not the alleged immediacy of racial sight. Secondly, I will focus on his influence in order to question the popular idea that Kant had in his late work developed second thoughts on his racial hierarchy. His appraisal of the work of one of his contemporaries clearly shows that the matter is far more complicated than suggested in these interpretations of Kant’s racial work. (shrink)

This article shows that Johann Gottlieb Steeb supported different aspects of Kant's theory of race. Despite the growing research on Kant's racial and biological theory, one finds no mention of Steeb in these interpretations. However, his work is relevant because of his attempt in 1785 to synthesize Kant's preformationist terminology with Blumenbach's epigenetic theory. This article aims at understanding this synthesis. Recent interpreters of Kant presuppose that preformationism excluded epigenesis. But already in 1785 Steeb saw the possibility of integrating Kant's (...) germs into a discourse that was to a large extent dominated by Blumenbach. Steeb's synthesis primarily implied that the concepts of germs and race could be amended to Blumenbach's understanding of human diversity. (shrink)

This article explores the surprisingly decisive role that Kant’s “incongruity theory” of laughter plays in his aesthetic and broader critical philosophy. First, laughter constitutes a highly specific form of aesthetic judgment in Kant. Laughter involves a discordant relation between the cognitive faculties characteristic of the sublime, but this relation obtains between the understanding and the imagination, the two faculties at play in judgments of taste on the beautiful. Second, laughter is the transcendental condition of possibility for both the beautiful and (...) the sublime. While most commentators dismiss laughter as an afterthought of Kant’s aesthetics, laughter in fact constitutes the most basic aesthetic judgment in Kant. Third, an account of aesthetic judgment that begins with laughter transforms how we understand Kant’s argument that judgment unites nature and freedom. Namely, it reveals how an empirical world at odds with the subject’s purposes can nevertheless advance the subject’s rational vocation to think and act beyond the empirical. I conclude by arguing that Kantian critical philosophy is itself a philosophy of laughter. (shrink)

This article presents a new argument concerning the relation between Kant’s theory of race and aspects of the critical philosophy. It argues that Kant’s treatment of the problem of the systematic unity of nature and knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgment can be traced back a methodological problem in the natural history of the period – that of the possibility of a natural system of nature. Kant’s transformation of the methodological problem (...) from natural history into a set of philosophical problems proceeds by way of the working out of his own problem in natural history – the problem of the natural history of the human races – and specifically the problem of the unity in diversity of the human species, in response to which he develops a theory of race. This theory of race is, further, the first developed model of the use of teleological judgment in Kant’s work. The article thus argues that Kant’s philosophical position on the sy... (shrink)

In §76 of the 3rd Critique, Kant claims that an intuitive understanding would represent no distinction between possible and actual things. Prior interpretations of §76 take Kant to claim that an intuitive understanding would produce things merely in virtue of thinking about them and, thus, could not think of merely possible things. In contrast, I argue that §76’s modal claims hinge on Kant’s suggestion that God represents things in their thoroughgoing determination, including in their connection to God’s actual will. I (...) conclude by using my interpretation to argue that §76’s modal claims do not entail Spinozism. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to reconstruct Schelling’s theory of organism, primarily as it is elaborated in the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature and the Introduction to the Outline. First, I discuss the challenge that the properties of organisms presented to the dominant scientific viewpoint by the end of the eighteenth century. I present different responses to this challenge, including reductive materialism, metaphysical and heuristic vitalism, and the Kantian response, and I situate Schelling’s account of (...) organism with respect to these responses. I argue that while Schelling agrees with vitalism in that he wants to preserve the specificity of organic phenomena, he rejects principles such as vital forces or the formative drive postulated by vitalism, even for purely heuristic purposes. I argue that Schelling understands organisms fundamentally in terms of the coordinated functioning of their organs. I further clarify Schelling’s account of problematic organic phenomena by focusing on his treatment of the relation between organic activity and organic receptivity. For Schelling, organic activity and organic receptivity mutually condition each other. I provide a detailed account of how this is supposed to work. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that for Kant, a combination of epigenesis and monogenesis is the condition of possibility of anthropology as he conceives of it and that moreover, this has crucial implications for the biological dimension of his account of human nature. More precisely, I begin by arguing that Kant’s conception of mankind as a natural species is based on two premises: firstly the biological unity of the human species (monogenesis of the human races); and secondly (...) the existence of ‘seeds’ which may or may not develop depending on the environment (epigenesis of human natural predispositions). I then turn to Kant’s account of man’s natural predispositions and show that far from being limited to the issue of races, it encompasses unexpected human features such as gender, temperaments and nations. These predispositions, I argue, are means to the realisation of Nature’s overall purpose for the human species. This allows me to conclude that man’s biological determinism leads to the species’ preservation, cultivation and civilisation. (shrink)

A growing number of commentators have, in recent years, noted the important affinities in the views of Immanuel Kant and Niels Bohr. While these commentators are correct, the picture they present of the connections between Bohr and Kant is painted in broad strokes; it is open to the criticism that these affinities are merely superficial. In this essay, I provide a closer, structural, analysis of both Bohr's and Kant's views that makes these connections more explicit. In particular, I demonstrate the (...) similarities between Bohr's argument, on the one hand, that neither the wave nor the particle description of atomic phenomena pick out an object in the ordinary sense of the word, and Kant's requirement, on the other hand, that both ‘mathematical’ (having to do with magnitude) and ‘dynamical’ (having to do with an object's interaction with other objects) principles must be applicable to appearances in order for us to determine them as objects of experience. I argue that Bohr's ‘complementarity interpretation’ of quantum mechanics, which views atomic objects as idealizations, and which licenses the repeal of the principle of causality for the domain of atomic physics, is perfectly compatible with, and indeed follows naturally from a broadly Kantian epistemological framework. (shrink)

Kant states in §76 of the third Critique that the divine intuitive intellect would not represent modal distinctions. Kohl and Stang claim that this statement entails that noumena lack modal properties, which, in turn, conflicts with Kant’s attribution of contingency to human noumenal wills. They both propose resolutions to this conflict based on conjectures regarding how God might non-modally represent what our discursive intellects represent as modally determined. I argue that these proposals fail; the viable resolution consists in recognizing that (...) we modalize human noumenal wills as a merely regulative-practical principle in our judgements of imputation. (shrink)

Kant’s late essay ‘The End of All Things’ (1794) establishes a distinctly modern field of inquiry that has fittingly been called ‘philosophical eschatology’ by asking, ‘why do human beings expect an end of the world at all?’ (AA 8:330) Interpretation of the essay’s purpose and argument have usually taken one of two routes: Kant is either understood as writing an esoteric political critique under the guise of the philosophy of religion, or as being focused largely on problems related to the (...) immortality of the soul as a postulate of pure practical reason. In contrast, I argue that the essay presents the end of all things as a cosmological idea of reason. In this essay I trace Kant’s idea of an end as its preconditions are established through the three Critiques, and finally made explicit in his late work. (shrink)

This paper argues that Kant presents two different accounts of beauty, one that applies properly to art and one that applies properly to nature. The judgment of beauty that applies properly to nature can be free and thus judged without concepts. The work of art, however, is judged beautiful when it expresses aesthetic ideas. This distinction then enables me to explain several problematic passages in Kant's text: those that serve to distinguish these two conceptions of beauty from one another as (...) well as those passages in which Kant views them as overlapping. With respect to the latter, I argue that Kant lays especial significance on cases where we apply the conception of artistic beauty to natural objects, as in doing so we view nature as expressing ideas that step beyond nature. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that for Kant, a combination of epigenesis and monogenesis is the condition of possibility of anthropology as he conceives of it and that moreover, this has crucial implications for the biological dimension of his account of human nature. More precisely, I begin by arguing that Kant’s conception of mankind as a natural species is based on two premises: firstly the biological unity of the human species (monogenesis of the human races); and secondly (...) the existence of ‘seeds’ which may or may not develop depending on the environment (epigenesis of human natural predispositions). I then turn to Kant’s account of man’s natural predispositions and show that far from being limited to the issue of races, it encompasses unexpected human features such as gender, temperaments and nations. These predispositions, I argue, are means to the realisation of Nature’s overall purpose for the human species. This allows me to conclude that man’s biological determinism leads to the species’ preservation, cultivation and civilisation. (shrink)

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic “self-organization” as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the epistemological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant’s heuristics of autonomous “self-organization” in the third Critique (...) amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought’s critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigenesis marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of “self-organization,” allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present. (shrink)

El objetivo principal de este artículo es sostener que el sentimiento de lo sublime - tal como es planteado por Kant en la Crítica de la facultad de juzgar- supone el vínculo de la mente con el cuerpo propio. De otro modo, no podríamos explicar la variación de las fuerzas vitales que caracteriza al sentimiento de lo sublime. Ahora bien, la conciencia de la propia corporalidad constituye una condición necesaria - aunque no suficiente- del sentimiento de lo sublime. Consideramos que (...) además de la conciencia de las propias fuerzas vitales, el sentimiento de lo sublime supone la referencia a un principio espiritual. Por estos motivos, creemos que el sentimiento de lo sublime implica una superposición del sentimiento de vida y el sentimiento del espíritu. Con el fin de iluminar algunos aspectos problemáticos presentes en la Crítica de la facultad de juzgar, analizaremos algunos pasajes pertenecientes a la Antropología en sentido pragmático. The principal aim of this article is to support that the feeling of the sublime -as it is considered by Kant in the Critique of the power of Judgment- supposes the link of the mind with the own body. Otherwise, we might not explain the variation of the vital forces that characterizes the feeling of the sublime. However, the conscience of the own corporeality constitutes a necessary condition -though not sufficient- of the feeling of the sublime. We think that besides the conscience of the own vital forces, the feeling of the sublime supposes the reference to a spiritual principle. For these reasons, we think that the feeling of the sublime implies an overlapping of the feeling of life and the feeling of the spirit. In order to illuminate some problematic aspects in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, we will analyze some passages belonging to the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. (shrink)

This paper examines the issue of the unity of the critical philosophy in Kant’s Critique of Judgment through a careful consideration of the actual bridge that joins nature and freedom. Kant argues that this bridge is made under the demand for the furtherance of life, and is accordingly to be equated with the demand of freedom. This article specifically focuses on this demand that is, in effect, carried out by the principle of purposiveness. It is argued that this demand is (...) somewhat artificial since it does not fully take into account the real struggle between nature and freedom. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I advance a new interpretation of the argumentative structure of the third Critique, which in turn clarifies the connection between its two apparently unrelated parts. I propose to read the third Critique as a response to Kant’s question of hope, which concerns the satisfaction of reason’s practical and theoretical interests. On this proposal, while the first part on aesthetics describes what we—as possessors of theoretical reason – may hope for, the second part, on teleology, describes what (...) we – as possessors of practical reason – may hope for. The main question of the third Critique is, ‘What may we hope if we act as we should, i.e. act rationally?’ Kant’s implicit answer is, ‘to attain the ideals of reason, which leads to happiness as a consequence of it.’ This novel reconstruction of the argumentative structure of the third Critique contributes to the literature by (i) explaining how the two parts of the third Critique on aesthetics and teleology are connected, (ii) clarifying how the ideals of reason are connected to hope and happiness, and (iii) showing how the spheres of nature and freedom can be synthetically unified through the faculty of judgment. (shrink)

Many historical studies tend to underline two central Kantian themes frequently emerging in Georges Canguilhem’s works: (1) a conception of activity, primarily stemming from the Critique of Pure Reason, as a mental and abstract synthesis of judgment; and (2) a notion of organism, inspired by the Critique of Judgment, as an integral totality of parts. Canguilhem was particularly faithful to the first theme from the 1920s to the first half of the 1930s, whereas the second theme became important in the (...) early 1940s. With this article, I will attempt to show that a third important theme of technique arose in the second half of the 30s also in the wake of Kant’s philosophy, especially Sect. 43 of the Critique of Judgment. This section, which states that technical ability is distinguished from a theoretical faculty, led Canguilhem to a more concrete and practical conception of activity. I will then suggest that it was by considering technique that the concept of normativity, which characterizes Georges Canguilhem’s philosophy of life, also took shape. (shrink)

In his 1786 essay on the pantheism controversy, ‘What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’, Kant implies that ‘the maxim of reason's self-preservation [Selbsterhaltung]’ is reason's first principle for orienting itself in thinking supersensible objects. But Kant does not clearly explain what the maxim or principle of reason's self-preservation is and how it fits into his larger project of critical philosophy. Nor does the secondary literature. This article reconstructs Kant's discussion of the principle of reason's self-preservation in ‘What (...) Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’ It suggests that this principle is best understood as the discipline of pure reason. The principle of reason's self-preservation performs the same methodological function that Kant assigns to the discipline of pure reason. This principle establishes the rule of law in reason and subjects reason to its own laws. In so doing, it prevents reason's dialectical errors and also grounds reason's faith (Vernunftglaube), which in turn systematically conditions the practical use of reason. (shrink)

Al netto di alcune eccezioni, non si può certo affermare che la concezione kantiana dell’organismo abbia rappresentato un modello frequente per le spiegazioni del funzionamento dell’organismo nella filosofia della biologia del ventesimo e del ventunesimo secolo. Tuttavia, il filosofo francese della biologia Philippe Huneman fa riferimento a questo tipo di concezione in alcune opere dedicate alla filosofia dell'organismo. Prendendo in analisi alcuni passaggi degli scritti del filosofo Gérard Lebrun, che fu il supervisore della tesi dottorale di Huneman, questo articolo si (...) propone di indagare le possibili influenze che la lettura di Kant proposta da Lebrun potrebbe aver avuto sulla biologia francese contemporanea, in particolare su Huneman. Kant; Lebrun; filosofia; biologia; organismo. (shrink)

The present work proposes to examine the problem of the empirical thing in itself and the objective sensation as an access route to the concrete content of empirical reality in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. The main notion of ‘empirical thing in itself’, offered by Gerold Prauss’ interpretation, provides a key to understand and solve central problems of transcendental philosophy. Nevertheless Prauss’s position still exhibits certain imperfections that might lead any lecture of Kant towards a phenomenalist understanding. In order to avoid this (...) misleading, it will be intended to complement Prauss’s interpretation, analyzing the objectivity of sensation, trying within to restore the objectivity of appearance. Finally, it will be possible to make an evaluation about advantages and limits of Prauss’s hermeneutical reconstruction of this problematic. (shrink)

This thesis is devoted to studying two historical philosophical events that happened in the West and the East. A metaphysical crisis stimulated Kant’s writings during his late critical period towards the notion of the supersensible. It further motivated a methodological shift and his coining of reflective judgment, which eventually brought about a systemic unfolding of his critical philosophy via Kantian moral teleology. Zhu Xi and his Neo-Confucian contemporaries confronted a transformed intellectual landscape resulting from the Neo-Daoist and Buddhist discourses of (...) “what is beyond the form”. The revival of Confucianism required a method in order to relocate the formless Dao back into daily life and to reconstruct a meta-ethical foundation within a social context. This led to the Neo-Confucian recasting of “investigation of things” from The Great Learning via complex hermeneutic operations. By the respective investigation on, as well as the comparative analysis of the two events, I reveal the convergence and incommensurability between the two distinct cultural traditions concerning the metaphysical quests, the mechanism of intellectual development, and moral teleology, so as to capture the intrinsic characteristics of philosophical research in general. (shrink)

(1999). Sublime Waste: Kant on the Destiny of the ‘Races’. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 29, Supplementary Volume 25: Civilization and Oppression, pp. 99-125.

In the third Critique Kant shifts the focus in his enquiry from the status of factual statements in the Critique of Pure Reason and the grounding of moral imperatives in the Critique of Practical Reason to investigating two methods of considering the world which go beyond the strictly verifiable. This is a move from evaluating the interplay of a ‘determinate’ set of facts and intellectual preconditions to forming what Kant calls ‘reflective’ judgements on these facts. There are two major questions (...) which the Critique of Judgement tackles. On the one hand Kant ambitiously considers how we might properly interpret a set of facts as comprising a larger teleological system and, on the other hand, he is interested in the seemingly quite separate issue of the appreciation of objects as beautiful. It is this latter issue which shall concern us here. Consistent with the reflective stand in the third Critique, Kant argues from the very outset that beauty is not an empirical concept with which we might describe the world. Beauty is not objective in the sense that size, colour or weight might be. Objective properties of this kind belong to the world of scientific understanding. Instead, he holds that judgements of aesthetic merit should be based upon the subjective pleasure we take in experiencing works of art and natural objects. (shrink)

o objetivo deste artigo é , em primeiro lugar, reconstruir o chamado "problema de Hume", analisando-o como dois problemas distintos (causalidade e inducao), embora intimamente relacionados -a contar, sobretudo, pela propria tentativa humeana de soluciona-los mediante uma concepcao unitaria de necessidade. Em segundo lugar, o objetivo é analisar a resposta de Kant a Hume, compreendendo-a, do mesmo modo, como duas respostas distintas: a primeira (causalidade) contida na "Segunda Analogia da Experiencia" da Critica da Razao Pura e a segunda (induçáo), principalmente, (...) nos prefacios e na segunda parte ("Critica da Faculdade de Juizo Teleologica") da Critica da Faculdade do Juizo. Isso denotaria uma certa assimetria entre as determinacoes decorrentes de cada uma das duas solucoes, pois enquanto a necessidade imposta pelo principio dos juizos de causa e efeito possui vinculos imediatos com as condicces da realidade objetiva dos fenomenos, a necessidade imposta pelo principio dos juizos teleologicos possui vinculos apenas indiretos com as mesmas condicoes, po is decorrem tao-somente das condicoes subjetivas da experiencia. A duvida seria em que medida, nesse ultimo caso, a solucao transcendental kantiana distingue-se da solucao empirista humeana, cuja deficiencia, apontada por Kant, foi justamente fazer "passar uma necessidade subjetiva, isto e, urn habito, par uma necessidade objetiva". A doutrina kantiana dos fins essenciais da razáo parece ser o único elemento a justificar uma distinçáo substantiva entre ambas as soluções. (shrink)

Abstract Kant claims that the basis of a judgment of taste is a merely subjective representation and that the only merely subjective representations are feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Commentators disagree over how to interpret this claim. Some take it to mean that judgments about the beauty of an object depend only on the state of the judging subject. Others argue instead that, for Kant, the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is best understood as a response to its (...) qualities, and that, accordingly, feelings of pleasure or displeasure are no different from other representations, such as colors or smells. While I agree that the judgment of taste is best understood as asserting a claim about an object's qualities, I argue that the distinction Kant makes between feelings of pleasure or displeasure and other representations should not be ignored. I show that one's liking or disliking for an object is merely subjective in the sense that its significance depends on what one has made of oneself through one's aesthetic education. The judgment of taste, then, is merely subjective because one must first become the kind of person whose feelings have the right significance at the right time before one can determine whether an object's qualities make it beautiful. (shrink)

This paper seeks to characterize how the study of nutrition processes contributed to revisit the problem of vital organization in the late eighteenth century. It argues that focusing on nutrition leads to reformulate the problem of the relation between life and organization in terms of processes, rather than static or given structures. This nutrition-centered approach to life amounts to acknowledge the specific strategic role nutrition played in the development of a materialist approach to the generation of vital organization. The paper (...) proposes a clarification of the multiple meanings of the concept of organization in the context of Enlightenment physiology and nascent biology, before focusing on the century long analogy between nutrition and generation. It shows how, by contrasting different uses of this analogy, nutrition was employed as a key vital phenomenon in the development of epigenetic theories of generation, i.e. how a nutritive modeling of generation was used in the undermining of preformationism. To this purpose I contrast two seemingly opposite theories of generation, Buffon’s and Bonnet’s, and show that despite the obvious metaphysical discontent, their views of generation share a common mechanical conceptual frame in which nutrition is conflated with growth and repair. I then turn to the role nutrition played in the epigenetic conception of generation in C. F. Wolff’s embryology and analyze this rival understanding of nutrition as an organizing process. (shrink)

My thesis reads Ernst Bloch’s materialist ontology with the aim of producing a utopian perspective on language’s materiality. As my Introduction outlines, set against the backdrop of a contemporary renewal in speculative philosophy, the present context is marked by a twofold limitation: (1) the perdurant marginalisation of Bloch’s form of utopian speculation, serving to couch contemporary materialism in thoroughly un-prospective tendencies; and (2), a relative failure of contemporary speculative philosophy to reflect on language, a failure attributable to the long drawn-out (...) dominance of post-structuralism’s linguistic form of relativism. To overcome these limitations I dedicate Chapter I of my thesis to expounding the core categories of Bloch’s materialism, casting a light on what I call its fundamental compositional structure: Incompleteness → Process → (possibility of an) Outfall, i.e. completion or arrival. In light of this, I argue that, placed within the horizon of Bloch’s materialism, incompleteness, process, and futural-directedness ought to be taken as cornerstones of language’s materiality. So as to better position what this means, in Chapter II a reading of the metaphysical Sens of Bloch’s materialism is given. There I consider Bloch’s materialism as a novel form of analogic metaphysics. Insofar as at the core of Bloch’s materialism there lies a metaphysical conception whereby being as such (e.g. Aristotle’s ontōs on) names an ultimate desire and not—pace the classical metaphysical tradition—an already existent beingness—a metaphysical conception Bloch proleptically terms the “ontology of not-yet being“—so then the essential dynamic of this materialism hinges on an incomplete analogy, for all things relate to that which is not-yet in existence; this not-yetness is the sustaining meaning of what is. In the final chapter I concretise my findings by turning to the question of language proper, reading “anacoluthon” as a speculative materialist figure of language which expressive this utopian analogic metaphysics. Anacoluthon denotes an interruption in syntactical flow (Greek: an-akóluthos, “not following“; German: Satzbruch, “sentence fracture/rupture“) and marginally features in Bloch’s corpus. But precisely because of its marginal status the figure possesses a real force in understanding language’s utopian materiality. Indeed, I read anacoluthia as expressive of the Blochian ontological composition. Anacoluthic discontinuities of speech are read as linguistic expressions of ontological incompleteness, ontological novelty, and ontological directedness to what is not yet. They linguistically express both the non-existence of ontological totality, but also, crucially, a real and open intending towards it: a utopian, creative, linguistically-based transgressiveness expressive of the world’s ontology. (shrink)

This paper defends Hegel’s positive contribution in the Subjective Logic and argues that it can be understood as presenting a compelling account of the space of reasons as a form of second nature. Taking Hegel’s praise of Kant’s conception of internal purposiveness and its connection to what he calls the Idea as a point of departure, I argue that Hegel’s theory of the Idea that concludes theLogicmust be understood in direct reference to Kant’s argument in the thirdCritiquethat purposiveness defines the (...) space of judgement’s power. I take up two arguments that help to understand Hegel’s appropriation and transformation of Kant’s purposiveness thesis: first, Hegel’s contention that internal purposiveness must have primacy over external purposiveness when considered in relation to judgement; and second, Hegel’s presentation of a logical concept of life as the immediate form of the Idea. (shrink)

In order to secure the limits of the critical use of reason, and to succeed in the critique of speculative metaphysics, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) had to present a full account of human cognitive experience. Perception in Kant’s Model of Experience is a detailed investigation of this aspect of Kant’s grand enterprise with a special focus: perception. The overarching goal is to understand this common phenomenon both in itself and as the key to understanding Kant’s views of experience. In the process, (...) the author argues against any such reading of Kant that puts too much emphasis on concepts and understanding in perception. This means that claims of the sort that intuitions cannot play their role without concepts, that sensibility cannot bring anything to cognition without being mediated through the functions of understanding, or that there is no such thing as concept-independent perception, are shown to be either plainly false or misleading at best. Together with the contemporary topics examined by the end of the book, the findings suggest how the role of conceptual thinking in human cognition has been exaggerated partly because of a misplaced interpretation of Kant, which not only makes perception far more intellectual in character than what was intended by Kant himself, but distorts Kant’s account of cognition by overlooking what there is at the heart of his critical philosophy: the revaluation of sensible cognition. (shrink)

In 1764, Kant published his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and in 1790 his influential third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The latter contains two parts, the ‘Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment’ and the ‘Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment’. They reveal a new principle, namely the a priori principle of purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit) of our power of judgment, and thereby offer new a priori grounds for beauty and biology within (...) the framework of Kant's transcendental philosophy. They also unite the previous two Critiques, the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. Besides contributing to general and systematic aspects within his transcendental philosophy, Kant's aesthetics also offers new insights into old problems. It deals with feeling versus experience, subjectivity versus objectivity, disinterested pleasure, aesthetic universality, free and adherent beauty, the sensus communis, genius, aesthetic ideas, beauty as the symbol of morality, beauty of nature versus beauty of art, the sublime, and the supersensible. In this article I will limit myself to this critical aesthetics of Kant. But I will also discuss the ugly and the possibility of beauty in mathematics and see whether Kant's theory can successfully explain or deal with them. I will also compare his theory with philosophical ideas from a very different tradition, namely from Confucius, not only as a challenge to Kant's theory, but also because there is a growing interest from the Chinese side in combining ideas from Confucius and Kant, an interest that might well become influential in both East and West during the 21st century. (shrink)