"Kant and the Capacity to Judge" will prove to be an important and influential event in Kant studies and in philosophy.

The purpose of this paper is to give an interpretation of what Kant takes to be the moral importance of aesthetic experience. On my interpretation aesthetic experience pleases since, in general, it is the experience of our finding an object first the aim of our reflective judging efforts. However, satisfying such an aim only makes sense within Kant 's further account of beauty as the expression of aesthetic ideas. In the end I hold that on Kant 's account it is (...) only because beauty can express aesthetic ideas that aesthetic experience can be of moral importance. (shrink)

A number of recent studies have claimed to explain how Kant can or cannot accommodate pure judgements of ugliness in his aesthetic theory. In this paper I critically review the arguments on each side of the debate and then develop a new account of how Kant might explain the pure judgement of the ugly, namely, by appeal to the quickening of the faculties in their harmonious free play. Some implications and applications of such an explanation are then explored, including a (...) rethink of the nature of beauty and ugliness. (shrink)

Beauty, or at least natural beauty, is famously a symbol of the morally good in Kant's theory of taste. Natural beauty is also, we argue, a symbol of the systematicity of nature. This symbolic connection of beauty and systematicity in nature sheds light on the relation between the principles underlying the use of reflecting judgement. The connection also motivates a more general interpretive proposal: the fact that the imagination can symbolize ideas plays a crucial role in the theory of taste; (...) it is the mechanism that underlies pure judgements of taste, the operation by which the imagination ‘schematizes without a concept’. (shrink)

According to Kant, the singular judgement ‘This rose is beautiful’ is, or may be, aesthetic, while the general judgement ‘Roses in general are beautiful’ is not. What, then, is the logical relation between the two judgements? I argue that there is none, and that one cannot allow there to be any if one agrees with Kant that the judgement ‘This rose is beautiful’ cannot be made on the basis of testimony. The appearance of a logical relation between the two judgements (...) can, however, be explained in terms of what one does in making a judgement of taste. Finally, I describe an analogy between Kant's treatment of judgements of taste and J. L. Austin's treatment of explicit performative utterances, which I attribute to a deeper affinity between their respective projects. (shrink)

What does the faculty of Understanding do during the execution of a judgement of taste? How are singular judgements of beauty related to general judgements of beauty? For what reason is beauty the symbol of morality? The first question has a tentative answer, although one not obviously congenial to Kant. The second two questions have no compelling answers.

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)

My plan in this article is to begin by raising the question of the point of judgements of beauty, and then to examine Kant's account of beauty in the third Critique from the perspective opened up by that question. Having raised the question of the point, I will argue, first, that there is an implied answer to it in Kant's text, and, second, that the answer is ultimately unsatisfying in that it falsely assumes that there is a ‘need’, or ‘task’, (...) or ‘purpose’, that we all necessarily share, to conceptualize all that encounters us in our experience, and fit it into one unified and comprehensive system. It is only against this assumption of our transcendental cognitive interest that Kant can so much as seem to have a real story to tell about where the value that we claim for things in calling them ‘beautiful’ derives from. This, in effect, means that to the extent that Kant offers us any answer at all to the question of the point of judgements of beauty, that answer testifies to his general neglect of the question of the point of judgements. And my purpose is to draw attention to that neglect, and to begin to assess its significance for Kant's transcendental project in general and for his conception of beauty in particular. (shrink)

Many recent aestheticians have criticized the notion of disinterest. The aestheticians in question take the notion to have a vaguely Kantian pedigree. And in attacking this notion, they think of themselves as attempting to remove a cornerstone of Kant’s aesthetics. This procedure is hardly likely to be effective if what they attack bears little resemblance to Kant’s original notion. In this brief note, I want to show how far these anti-Kantian aestheticians have missed their mark.

In der Reihe werden herausragende monographische Untersuchungen und Sammelbände zu allen Aspekten der Philosophie Kants veröffentlicht, ebenso zum systematischen Verhältnis seiner Philosophie zu anderen philosophischen Ansätzen in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Veröffentlicht werden Studien, die einen innovativen Charakter haben und ausdrückliche Desiderate der Forschung erfüllen. Die Publikationen repräsentieren damit den aktuellsten Stand der Forschung.

I try to identify the characteristic and distinguishing features of a theory of natural beauty (as opposed to the sublime) that can be found in Kant's Critique of Judgement. Lest this may seem superfluous, I argue first that, contrary to a common view, Kant's theory does not take the experience of beauty in nature as theoretically basic and that he does not deal with beauty in art only as a derivative case of aesthetic experience. I then try to understand what (...) it means to require, as Kant famously does, that beautiful nature has to look as if it were art. Does this commit him to a projectionist view, according to which we appreciate nature aesthetically only for what it really is not (namely art) rather than for what it is? Pursuing this question we find that for Kant nature can be the object of pure judgements of taste only insofar as nature can be explained scientifically, which in Kant's framework means purely mechanically. This ‘blind mechanism’ of nature plays an important role in Kant's explication of the moral significance the experience of beautiful nature has for us. (shrink)

Concerned with topics at the heart of Kant's aesthetics, this provoking reading of The Critique of Judgement focuses on often misunderstood or neglected themes. Starting from the issues of the truth and justifiability of our critical assertions, Anthony Savile develops Kantian theory broadly across the arts, and shows it working with subtlety and rigour in cases as diverse as music and architecture. New light is thrown on the exemplary necessity of our aesthetic pleasures, on the Antimony of Taste, on the (...) distinction between free and dependent beauty, on the supposed idealism of taste, and on the a priori limits of fine art. Eminently subjective material is here given a place in Kant's overall idealism in a sophisticated discussion that will invite the close attention of Kant scholars and aestheticians alike. (shrink)

Biographical note: The author is associate professor in ethics and political philosophy, Department of Philosophy, NTNU Trond.

I offer a critical reconstruction of Kant's thesis that aesthetic judgement is founded on the principle of the purposiveness of nature. This has been taken as equivalent to the claim that aesthetics is directly linked to the systematicity of nature in its empirical laws. I take issue both with Henry Allison, who seeks to marginalize this claim, and with Avner Baz, who highlights it in order to argue that Kant's aesthetics are merely instrumental for his epistemology. My solution is that (...) aesthetic judgement operates as an exemplary presentation of our general ability to schematise an intuition with a concept at the empirical level. I suggest that this counts as an empirical schematism. Although aesthetic judgement is not based on empirical systematicity, it can nevertheless offer indirect support for the latter in so far as it is a particular revelation of purposiveness in general. (shrink)

The study is carried out in five chapters, with the first two offering a reconsideration of the function of the imagination in the Transcendental Deduction and Schematism of the first Critique. The last three follow the order of topics discussed by Kant in the third Critique in regard to judgments of taste, the sublime, and teleology; they conclude with an interpretation of "productive imagination" as a "model for the ideal of intellectual intuition". The comparison between "human and divine spontaneity" is (...) introduced in the first chapter, where Gibbons notes that while we have "Kant's explicit and repeated emphasis on the difference" between these, "in considering the similarity of these types of spontaneity," she wishes "to correct a possible imbalance in Kant's exposition": there are, she suggests, "formal similarities between these types of spontaneity". The main thrust of the first chapter is to respond to a particular reading of Kant—namely, to those unsympathetic interpreters who see in the Deductions an "imaginary subject of transcendental psychology" and also to those who give a "sympathetic reading" but do so in terms of an identification of "all aspects of synthesis with concept application," thereby reducing the "role of the transcendental synthesis of the imagination to that of unifying a manifold of intuition under a concept". Gibbons holds instead that the "theory of synthesis... focuses on the nature of human cognition and what is required for us to know anything about objects" and, further, that it presupposes "the broader function of the imagination as grounding the possibility of concept-application in the first place". (shrink)