Kant says that the Critique of Judgment offers a “transcendental deduction” for the principle of the purposiveness of nature, or PPN. This is the proposition that empirical laws must be viewed as “having been given by an understanding (even though not ours)” so that they can be unified in a system. I argue that if we take the PPN to concern the application to appearances of ideas of pure reason, we can understand why its transcendental deduction is so (...) important to Kant’s philosophical project, and why he is correct in thinking that it does not mark a retraction of his central philosophical views. (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)

Kant has traditionally been viewed as an unhelpful resource for environmental concerns, despite his immensely influential moral and political philosophy. This paper shows that Kant’s Critique of Judgment can be a valuable resource for environmental ethics, with methodological implications for political action and environmental policy. I argue that Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful and Critique of Teleological Judgment provide philosophical tools for valuing nature aside from interest and for developing forms of environmental protectionism. My approach differs (...) from other Kantian accounts that discuss our moral relations to nonrational nature, since these usually rely on Kant’s limited statements about flora and fauna in his Lectures on Ethics, Metaphysics of Morals, and the Analytic of the Beautiful. Though we can defend indirect duties toward animals and beautiful plants, as these accounts convincingly show, they rarely engage with the possibility of us having moral views of ecosystems. Moral views of nature can be useful as methodological heuristics for mobilizing and instituting environmental policies regarding climate change such as biodiversity loss, and this paper will provide a defense of a Kantian moral view of nature from which subsequent climate-related actions can be motivated. (shrink)

Kant's Critique of Judgment has often been explained as relating aesthetics and morality by presupposing his ethics. This dissertation reverses this direction of inquiry by interpreting the third Critique in terms of the contributions it makes to Kant's philosophy of action. Central here is an exposition of presentation as it functions in Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy and takes on a special role in his aesthetics and natural teleology. ;The term action in Kant's thought indicates a much (...) larger field than pure ethics, which is restricted to determining and justifying the supreme principle of morality . The move from pure ethics to action is the move from the determination and justification of the moral law in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason to its application in individual human life. I argue that the Critique of Judgment contributes to Kant's philosophy of action by revealing the work of reflective judgment in applying the moral law. ;For Kant, any application of concepts or ideas to experience requires a presentation that relates it to space and time as the forms of our experience. For theoretical concepts, presentation is by means of constructions and schemata, which Kant outlines in the Critique of Pure Reason. Practical concepts receive a formal presentation in what Kant labels the "Typic of Pure Practical Judgment" in the second Critique. But the material presentation of ideas related to action, particularly that of the efficacy of the moral law, requires the aesthetic and teleological mediation of reflective judgment in the third Critique. Kant's claim that beauty is the symbol of morality is the central example of this mediation, but it extends as well to the ideal of beauty, the sublime, genius, and Kant's philosophy of organic nature. ;The examination of action here also contains an exposition of Triebfedern and of Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Metaphysics of Morals, and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Through the essay, "What Progress has Metaphysics Made in the Time since Leibniz and Wolff?", I relate presentation to practical cognition. (shrink)

The precise nature of the relation between cognition and aesthetic judgment is clearly central to an understanding of Kant’s theory of taste in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.” The Critique of Judgment itself is necessary, Kant says, because judgment constitutes a cognitive power in its own right, and its critique is therefore necessarily a part of the overall critique of pure reason. More particularly, however, the connection between cognition and aesthetic judgment (...) plays a crucial role in Kant’s deduction of judgments of taste: That deduction is intended to vindicate the claim to intersubjective validity implicit in the judgment of taste. This claim can only be justified, Kant thinks, if the judgment of taste has as its “determining ground” some form or aspect of cognition, for “[n]othing... can be communicated universally except cognition, as well as presentation insofar as it pertains to cognition.” The “purposiveness without purpose” exhibited by the beautiful object must therefore be purposiveness for “cognition in gener¬al.”[Erkenntnis überhaupt, V:217] But this use of cognition to establish the intersubjective validity of judgments of taste is also the source of the most serious problem with Kant’s theory. Kant clearly holds the view that to judge an object to be beautiful is to judge that it is in some sense suited for cognition. The theory of knowledge presented in the Critique of Pure Reason, however, concludes that all objects of experience are cognizable in the sense of being susceptible of subsumption under pure concepts of the understanding. If to say that an object is beautiful is to say that it is cognizable, and all objects are cognizable, then Kant’s theory has the consequence that all objects are beautiful. Furthermore, this connection between beauty and cognition threatens to make beauty a determinate concept, like the concepts of ‘cause’ or ‘chair.’ The result is that dealing with what I will call the problem of ugliness has become, in the words of one commentator, the “pre-eminent task” of interpretation of the third Critique. I will argue that this problem is best solved if we recognize a connection between Kant’s need in both the first and third Critiques for a defense of reason, and his claim, at the end of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” that “beauty is the symbol of the morally good.”[V:353] The latter claim is the culmination of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” the argument of which is intended by Kant to show that every rational being must view at least some objects in nature as being suited for inclusion in a philosophical system organized around ideas of pure reason. In this system moral reason and theoretical understanding are related in a harmonious whole, with moral reason taking the leading role. The cognizability which is claimed for the object in the judgment of taste does not consist in the object’s being susceptible of subsumption under a concept. Rather, to say that an object is suited for “cognition in general” is to attribute to it the more specific property of being subsumable under a concept which can in turn be included in a unified philosophical system. At the same time, the relation between beauty and morality is only “indirect,” which is why beauty is the symbol but not the schema of the morally good. A key aspect of this reading will be the claim that from an epistemological standpoint the relation between natural beauty and the idea of the morally good is just the same as that between appearances and ideas of pure reason if the systematization of cognition is to be possible– the existence of beauty in nature serves to “establish the reality” of these ideas. Adopting this reading of the argument of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” not only allows us to avoid saddling Kant with the view that all objects are beautiful, but also makes clear the hitherto less than clear relation between the published Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, in which Kant is primarily concerned with the concept of a philosophical system, and the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” which centers on the seemingly unrelated notion of beauty as “purposiveness without purpose.”. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationships between Romantic painting, poetry, and philosophy, historically tracing the circulation of images used to communicate sublimity (for example, images of ruins, storms, volcanoes, and so on). Kant's "Critique of Judgment" deployed the same vocabulary of images that appear in Coleridge and Shelly, in Church and in Turner. The discussion thereby places Kant's 3rd Critique within its cultural context. But it also reveals the massive shift from Enlightenment rationalism to 19th century historicism that (...) Romanticism enacted, and Kant's resistance to, and unwilling participation, in that shift. For the nostalgic logic of ruins, and the irruption of geological time, both of which were conceived and negotiated through sublimity, cannot be assimilated within Kant's philosophy. The treatment of the sublime in the "Critique of Judgment" represents Kant's philosophy straining at its own limits in the attempt to develop a philosophy of history and to articulate an historicized philosophical anthropology. Therefore, read through art history, Kant's 3rd. Critique represents a vital transition between Enlightenment rationalism/beauty and Romantic historicism/sublimity, along with the work of Beethoven, Goya, and the Marquis de Sade. (shrink)

Judgment has two functions therefore: determining and reflecting. Determining involves finding the right 'universal', that is concept or word for the situation at hand. Thus this function covers the choice of rule or aesthetic, that is, the metric of measurement. Reflective judgment is particularly relevant to the related activities of aesthetic choice and purposeful behaviour. It is the source of what Kant calls 'empirical concepts', that is, for my purposes, the range of aesthetic rules or metrics that one (...) has at one's disposal. Kant's ideas about beauty, although stimulating for my purposes, are not directly relevant to the issues of measurement. But his concept of the Sublime is. \"The experience of the sublime consists in a feeling of the superiority of our own power of reason, as a supersensible faculty, over nature.\" The specific category of the 'mathematically sublime' appears especially important for empirical measurement. (shrink)

According to the transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of pure reason, there are two properties of time that cannot be intellectualized: passage and infinitude. This study tries to show that these essential properties of time come to light in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The contemplation of beauty will be understood as a non-successive time and the wonder that we experience in seeing the sublime will be understood through Kant’s concept of infinite moment. These two aesthetic concepts of (...) time will be integrated into Kant’s broader view of time as developed in the first Critique. (shrink)

Kant and the Feeling of Life positions Kant's concept of life as a guiding thread for understanding not only Kant's approach to aesthetics and teleology but the underlying unity of the Critique of Judgment itself. The "feeling of life," which Kant describes as affecting us in various ways--as animating, enlivening, and quickening the mind--lies at the heart of Kant's philosophical project, but it has remained understudied for a theme of such centrality. This volume brings together, for the first (...) time, essays focused on the topic of life in Kant's work, providing a wealth of perspectives and analyses ranging from the Critique of Judgment to Kant's early aesthetics, his social and political philosophy, his work connected to the body and health, and his moral theory. (shrink)

There is a general impression among Kant scholars that he has no robust theory of work. Most of his references to the topic appear in his historical and anthropological writings, where he tells us that work is burdensome, and valuable only for the sake of whatever we produce. In this paper, I argue that Kant has an under-explored theory of work in the third Critique. This theory bears little resemblance to his depiction of work in the historical and anthropological (...) writings. The third Critique will depict work as self-expressive, creative, and free, features Kant will go on to associate with art. Kant’s contention is that when work resembles art, it is both agreeable and something we enjoy for its own sake. However, when work fails to resemble art — when it is, in Kant’s words, natural, scientific, and mercenary — it is both disagreeable and constrained, and begins to sound like his description of work from the historical and anthropological writings. Kant’s theory of work in the third Critique has a number of important implications. The first is that it provides a new foundation for a contemporary philosophy of work that places freedom and creativity at the center of the labor process. My analysis also engages a part of Kant scholarship that has, until recently, been largely neglected. It is only in the last decade that the English-language Kant literature has taken up the question of how to make sense of Kant’s remarks about work. However the focus is rarely on Kant’s aesthetic theory of work, but rather on the place of work in his moral and political philosophy. I discuss the implications of Kant’s third Critique theory of work for these other debates, as well as for our understanding of the third Critique as a whole. (shrink)

A curious feature in Immanuel Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime is the choice of examples, namely, the Pyramids of Egypt and St. Peter’s Basilica. In the paragraph following these examples, Kant suggests that the sublime does not exhibit itself in works of art. This ambiguity has led scholars to question the possibility of “artistic sublimity.” The scholarship has prompted discussions about whether works of art that evoke the sublime feeling are genuine sublime experiences. A representational account of artistic sublimity (...) restricts the sublime to experiences in raw nature. Art can depict the sublime stylistically; however, it cannot evoke the feeling of sublimity. On an opposing interpretation, the sublime occurs because of a conflict between imagination and reason; any work of art that provokes this conflict is sublime. As a result, the power of the sublime overrides and annihilates determinate ends, allowing pure aesthetic judgments. The alleged contradiction in Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime is also read as an interpretive issue regarding purity, prompting the pure-impure distinction. Art that has the power to evoke the feeling of sublimity is deemed “impurely sublime” because of the admixture of interest. Alternatively, if aesthetic judgments of the sublime are satisfied irrespective of the object, then art is purely sublime without needing a further determination. Following Henry Allison, I defend the view that we should preserve a pure–impure distinction. A concept of impure sublimity allows us to account for an emotionally motiving satisfaction akin to the sublime in the presence of some works of art while maintaining a close reading of the Kantian account of pure sublimity as an exclusive consequence of raw nature. (shrink)

The Concepts of Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste -/- The way Bourdieu introduces foreign concepts (habitus, doxa, logic of practice) is through jumping straight and enthusiastically into his deep thoughts, instead of clearly and logically defining them first. -/- Accepting these dominant characteristics of taste is, according to Bourdieu, a form of \" symbolic violence .\" That is, the fact of considering these distinctions between tastes as natural, and believing that they are necessary, denies (...) the dominated classes the possibility of defining their own world, which puts those with less general capital at a disadvantage. Moreover, even when the dominated social classes come to have their own ideas about what it is \"good taste \"and what is not,\" the aesthetics of the working class is dominated aesthetic, which it is obliged to always defined in terms of the aesthetics of the ruling class . (shrink)

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)

In his influential book Truth, Paul Horwich deploys a philosophical method focused on linguistic usage, that is, on the function(s) the concept of truth serves in actual discourse. In doing so Horwich eschews abstract metaphysics, arguing that metaphysical or ontological conceptions of truth rest on basic misconceptions. From this description, one might reasonably expect Horwich's book to have drawn inspiration from, or even embodied philosophical pragmatism of some kind. Unfortunately Horwich relies upon Russell's tired caricature of pragmatism about truth (''p' (...) is true if and only if it is useful to believe p' (Ibid., p. 34, p. 47)), and as a result underestimates the challenge it poses to Minimalism. This paper develops a pragmatist critique of minimalism that focuses on the seemingly central, plausibly constitutive role played by the concept of truth in the speech-act of assertion. The critique suggests that Horwich's Minimalism does not and cannot accomplish its stated goal of explaining all of the facts involving truth. Indeed, the kind of thorough-going deflationism sought by Horwich and others (including pragmatist sympathizer Bob Brandom) is incompatible with an adequate account of assertion, and perhaps other concepts (like belief, judgement and inquiry) as well. (shrink)

This thesis sets out an argument in defence of moral objectivism. It takes Mackie as the critic of objectivism and it ends by proposing that the best defence of objectivism may be found in what I shall call Kantian intuitionism, which brings together elements of the intuitionism of Ross and a Kantian epistemology. The argument is fundamentally transcendental in form and it proceeds by first setting out what we intuitively believe, rejecting the sceptical attacks on those beliefs, and by then (...) proposing a theory that can legitimize what we already do believe. Chapter One sets out our intuitive understanding of morality: that morality is cognitive, moral beliefs can be true or false; that morality is real, we do not construct it; that morality is rational, we can learn about it by rational investigation; and that morality places us under an absolute constraint. The chapter ends by clarifying the nature of that absolute demand and by arguing that the critical idea within morality is the idea of duty. In Chapter Two Mackie’s sceptical attack on objectivism is examined. Four key arguments are identified: that moral beliefs are relative to bfferent agents; that morality is based upon on non-rational causes; that the idea of moral properties or entities is too queer to be sustainable; and that moral objectivism involves queer epistemological commitments. Essentially all of these arguments are shown to be ambiguous; however it is proposed that Mackie has an underlying epistemological and metaphysical theory, scientific empiricism, which is hostile to objectivism and a theory that many find attractive for reasons that are independent of morality. Chapter Three explores the nature of moral rationality and whether scientific empiricism can use the idea of reflective equilibrium to offer a reasonable account of moral rationality. It concludes that, while reflective equilibrium is a useful account of moral rationality, it cannot be effectively reconciled with scientific empiricism. In order to function effectively as a rational process, reflective equilibrium must be rationally constrained by our moral judgements and our moral principles. Chapter Four begins the process of exploring some alternative epistemologies and argues that the only account that remains true to objectivism and the needs of reflective equilibrium is the account of intuitionism proposed by Ross. However this account can be developed further by drawing upon number of Kantian ideas and using them to supplement Ross’s intuitionism. So Chapter Five draws upon a number of Kant's ideas, most notably some key notions from the Critique of Judgement. These ideas are: that we possess a rational will that is subject to the Moral law and determined by practical reason; that we possess a faculty of judgement which enables us to become aware of moral properties and that these two faculties together with the third faculty of thought can function to constitute the moral understanding. Using these ideas the thesis explores whether they can serve to explain how intuitions can be rational and how objectivism can be justified. (shrink)

Our understanding of Schelling’s internal critique of German idealism, including his late attack on Hegel, is incomplete unless we trace it to the early “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” which initiate his engagement with the problem of systematicity—that judgment makes deriving a system of a priori conditions from a first principle necessary, while this capacity’s finitude makes this impossible. Schelling aims to demonstrate this problem’s intractability. My conceptual aim is to reconstruct this from the “Letters,” which reject (...) Fichte’s claim that the Wissenschaftslehre is an unrivalled system. I read Schelling as charging Fichte with misrepresenting a system’s livability or commensurability with our finitude. My historical aim is to provide a framework for understanding Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, which argues that a system’s liveability depends on its incompleteness or limitation by our finitude. On my reading, Schelling is early and continually committed to systematicity within the bounds of human finitude. (shrink)

In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates’ second account of ‘false’ pleasure (41d-42c) outlines a form of illusion: pleasures that appear greater than they are. I argue that these pleasures are perceptual misrepresentations. I then show that they are the grounds for a methodological critique of hedonism. Socrates identifies hedonism as a judgment about the value of pleasure based on a perceptual misrepresentation of size, witnessed paradigmatically in the ‘greatest pleasures’.

This article develops a criticism of Alain Badiou’s assertion that “mathematics is ontology.” I argue that despite appearances to the contrary, Badiou’s case for bringing set theory and ontology together is problematic. To arrive at this judgment, I explore how a case for the identification of mathematics and ontology could work. In short, ontology would have to be characterised to make it evident that set theory can contribute to it fundamentally. This is indeed how Badiou proceeds in Being and (...) Event. I review his descriptions of the ontological problematic at some length here, only to argue that set theory is a poor fit. Although philosophers working on questions of being were certainly occupied with matters of oneness and the part-whole relationship, I argue that Badiou’s discussion of philosophical sources points towards a mereological treatment, not a set-theoretic one. Finally, I suggest that Badiou’s philosophical interpretations of key set-theoretic results are better understood as some sort of analogising between mathematics, ontology, and philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Nichols’s view of empathy (in Sentimental Rules) in light of experimental moral psychology suffers from several deficiencies: (1) It operates with an impoverished view of the altruistic emotions (empathy, sympathy, concern, compassion, etc.) as mere short-term, affective states of mind, lacking any essential connection to intentionality, perception, cognition, and expressiveness. (2) It fails to keep in focus the moral distinction between two very different kinds of emotional response to the distress and suffering of others—other-directed, altruistic, emotions that have moral value, (...) and self-directed emotional responses, such as personal distress, that do not. (3) Nichols is correct to see morality as requiring affectivity, and the capability of emotional response to others; but his incorrect view of altruistic emotions (and of emotions in general) leads him to misstate the connection between morality and emotion. (4) Nichols’s specific attempt to ground moral judgment in emotion fails, but the argument he provides for it is part of the explanation of point (2), his failure to sustain the distinction between egoistic and altruistic emotions. (5) Without in any way denying that moral philosophy is strengthened by knowledge of empirical psychology, I suggest that the foregoing failures of Nichols’s argument are partly due to his misuse of particular empirical results and findings, and possibly in part to a weakened commitment to the distinctive contribution the humanistic methods of philosophy make to our understanding of the moral dimension of life. (shrink)

The existing body of scholarship on Kant’s Critique of Judgment is rife with disagreement. At the centre of much of this disagreement is the issue of precisely what Kant understands to be taking place in a harmonization of the cognitive faculties. Is aesthetic reflective judgment to be identified with, or separated from, this harmonious state of the faculties of imagination and understanding? If aesthetic judgment is identified with this state, as is argued herein, then upon what (...) is a judgment of beauty to be based? These questions are addressed by focussing on two closely related aspects of Kant’s theory of reflective judgment; the role Kant assigns to the power of desire (i.e., to the will) and to the causal structure implicated in reflective judgment. In brief, we argue that a judgment of beauty is not, strictly speaking, something that I do, but is better described that something that happens of itself. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a solution to a notorious puzzle that lies at the heart of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The puzzle arises because Kant asserts two apparently conflicting claims: (1) F→J: A judgment of beauty is aesthetic, i.e., grounded in feeling. (2) J→F: A judgment of beauty could not be based on and must ground the feeling of pleasure in the beautiful. I argue that (1) and (2) are consistent. Kant’s text indicates that he (...) distinguishes two feelings: the feeling of the harmony of the cognitive faculties that is the ground of judgments of beauty (F1 → J), and the feeling of pleasure that is its consequence (J → F2). I develop and defend a view of Kant’s account of the structure of judgments of beauty that incorporates this crucial distinction. Next, I argue that my view resolves another long-standing problem for Kant’s “Deduction” of judgments of beauty: it allows him to claim that the harmony of the faculties is a condition of judgment in general without implying, absurdly, that all judgments are pleasurable. (shrink)

The book, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy (1995), by Alfred R. Mele, deals primarily with two main concepts, “self-control” and “individual autonomy,” and the relationship between them. The book is divided into two parts: (1) a view of self-control, the self-controlled person, and behaviour manifesting self-control, and (2) a view of personal autonomy, the autonomous person, and autonomous behaviour. Mele (Ibid.) defines self-control as the opposite of the Aristotelian concept of akrasia, or the contrary of akrasia, which implies weakness (...) of will, incontinence, or lack of self-control—the state of mind in which one acts against one’s better judgement. According to Mele, the concept of self-control can be approached from two perspectives: (a) how self-control affects human behaviour, and (b) how self-control-associated behavior can enhance our understanding of ‘personal autonomy’ and ‘autonomous behaviour’—personal autonomy requires self-control, and autonomous persons and autonomous behaviour are naturally found together. Therefore, I might say that self-control is essential to enhancing one’s autonomy. -/- In part I, we find an account of self-control where Mele argues that even an ideally self-controlled person might lack autonomy. In part II, Mele gives an explicit account of autonomy and explains what must be added to self-control to achieve autonomy. This is the pivotal claim made by Mele (dismantling the intuitively connected notions of self-control and autonomy). (shrink)

Kant describes the understanding as a faculty of spontaneity. What this means is that our capacity to judge what is true is responsible for its own exercises, which is to say that we issue our judgments for ourselves. To issue our judgments for ourselves is to be self-conscious – i.e., conscious of the grounds upon which we judge. To grasp the spontaneity of the understanding, then, we must grasp the self-consciousness of the understanding. I argue that what Kant requires for (...) explaining spontaneity is a conception of judgment as an intrinsic self-consciousness of the total unity of possible knowledge. This excludes what have been called ‘relative’ accounts of the spontaneity of the understanding, according to which our judgments are issued through a capacity fixed by external conditions. If so, then Kant conceives of understanding as entirely active. Or, to put it another way, he conceives of this capacity as absolutely spontaneous. (shrink)

The article re-examines the Aristotelian backdrop of Arendt’s notion of action. On the one hand, Backman takes up Arendt’s critique of the hierarchy of human activities in Aristotle, according to which Aristotle subordinates action (praxis) to production (poiesis) and contemplation (theoria). Backman argues that this is not the case since Aristotle conceives theoria as the most perfect form of praxis. On the other hand, Backman stresses that Arendt’s notion of action is in fact very different from Aristotle’s praxis, to (...) the extent that Arendt thinks of action as an external to the means-ends scheme, whereas Aristotle ultimately remains caught in this scheme proper to poiesis in thinking of praxis as its own end. According to Backman, Arendt’s concept of action can therefore be understood as a critique, rather than as a rehabilitation, of Aristotelian praxis. (shrink)

Within critical realist circles, the development of knowledge in the natural and social domains has thus far been much stronger by comparison with its respective development within the personal domain. What I want to explore here is how knowledge can be positively used to have emancipatory effects at the level of the individual. The way in which we are able to achieve this is by coming to have what Spinoza calls more adequate ideas of ourselves, other beings, and our place (...) in nature through strengthening the explanatory power and minimizing the fallibility of the knowledge we use in our judgements and progressive articulations of personal situations by making use of explanatory critique and cause-object matching techniques. This article explains what an explanatory critique actually is and does before turning to explain why it interests us in relation to Spinoza’s thought and then how it is specifically useful in connection with emotional revision and control. (shrink)

Nichols’s view of empathy (in Sentimental Rules) in light of experimental moral psychology suffers from several deficiencies: (1) It operates with an impoverished view of the altruistic emotions (empathy, sympathy, concern, compassion, etc.) as mere short-term, affective states of mind, lacking any essential connection to intentionality, perception, cognition, and expressiveness. (2) It fails to keep in focus the moral distinction between two very different kinds of emotional response to the distress and suffering of others—other-directed, altruistic, emotions that have moral value, (...) and self-directed emotional responses, such as personal distress, that do not. (3) Nichols is correct to see morality as requiring affectivity, and the capability of emotional response to others; but his incorrect view of altruistic emotions (and of emotions in general) leads him to misstate the connection between morality and emotion. (4) Nichols’s specific attempt to ground moral judgment in emotion fails, but the argument he provides for it is part of the explanation of point (2), his failure to sustain the distinction between egoistic and altruistic emotions. (5) Without in any way denying that moral philosophy is strengthened by knowledge of empirical psychology, I suggest that the foregoing failures of Nichols’s argument are partly due to his misuse of particular empirical results and findings, and possibly in part to a weakened commitment to the distinctive contribution the humanistic methods of philosophy make to our understanding of the moral dimension of life. (shrink)

Moral realism faces two worries: How can we have knowledge of moral norms if they are independent of us, and why should we care about them if they are independent of rational activities they govern? Kantian constitutivism tackles both worries simultaneously by claiming that practical norms are constitutive principles of practical reason. In particular, on Stephen Engstrom’s account, willing involves making a practical judgment. To will well, and thus to have practical knowledge (i.e., knowledge of what is good), the (...) content of one’s will needs to conform to the formal presuppositions of practical knowledge. Practical norms are thus constitutive of practical knowledge. However, I will argue that the universality principles from which Engstrom derives the formal presuppositions of practical knowledge are reflectively and psychologically unavailable. As a result, they cannot help Kantian constitutivism provide an answer to moral realism's worries. (shrink)

Although scholarly attention has been mostly paid to the many connections existing between Kant and the exact sciences, the landscape of Kant studies has begun to noticeably change during the last decade, with many new pieces devoted to a consideration of Kant’s relation to the life sciences of his day. It is in this vein, for example, that investigators have begun to discuss the importance of Kant’s essays on race for the development of Anthropology as an emerging field. The bulk (...) of the contributions to this recent trend, however, have focused on Kant’s remarks on organic life in the Critique of Judgment, such that Kant’s “theory of biology” is now seen to be firmly located in that text. Amidst such consolidation, there are a few pieces that have begun to address Kant’s appeal to organic vocabulary within the context of his theory of cognition, though these too remain dominated by the interpretive template set by the third Critique. My own strategy in this essay will be different. Kant did indeed borrow from the life sciences for his model of the mind, but in a manner that would reject a naturalized account. His preference for epigenesis as a theory of organic generation needs to be carefully distinguished, therefore, from the use he would make of it when discussing a metaphysical portrait of reason. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a reading of the 1790 Introduction to the Critique of Judgement intended to show that the Critique of Judgement itself attempts to make good a serious deficit in the argumentation of the Critique of Pure Reason. In effect, the conditions outlined in the Critique of Pure Reason could be fulfilled without experience being constituted. There must therefore be additional conditions for the possibility of experience. And an account of these is to (...) be found in the Critique of Judgement, despite the repeated insistence in the text itself that its strictures operate on the level of a merely 'reflective' judgement, quite distinct from the 'determinant' judgements underwriting the time-determination of logical operations in the first Critique. The new transcendental elements for the condition of possibility of experience turn out, through an analysis of the concept of affinity, to table a novel, transcendental, conception of matter irreducible to the experiential understanding of matter and conditioning its possibility. In conclusion, I suggest that the structure of reflective judgement can itself be understood as a description of the operation of this transcendental matter in the special case of the transcendental spontaneity required by the Kantian subject to constitutive experience. (shrink)

In a recent series of papers, Jane Friedman argues that suspended judgment is a sui generis first-order attitude, with a question as its content. In this paper, I offer a critique of Friedman’s project. I begin by responding to her arguments against reductive higher-order propositional accounts of suspended judgment, and thus undercut the negative case for her own view. Further, I raise worries about the details of her positive account, and in particular about her claim that one (...) suspends judgment about some matter if and only if one inquires into this matter. Subsequently, I use conclusions drawn from the preceding discussion to offer a tentative account: S suspends judgment about p iff S believes that she neither believes nor disbelieves that p, S neither believes nor disbelieves that p, and S intends to judge that p or not-p. (shrink)

In this thesis I provide an account of the faculty of the mind that Kant calls ‘the power of judgment’ [Urteilskraft]. While there is an abundance of literature on various aspects of Kant’s theory of judgment in the Critical philosophy, there has been no sustained treatment of the nature of the faculty that is the subject of the third Critique (1790). I argue that the power of judgment is a fundamentally reflective, affective, and orientational capacity that (...) occupies a central place within Kant’s account of the human mind. To this end, I trace the development of Kant’s thinking on judgment—from the pre-Critical to the Critical period, as well as from the first to the third Critique—to show how it continues to gain prominence within Kant’s taxonomy of the mind. (shrink)

The antinomy of teleological judgment is one of the most controversial passages of Kant’s "Critique of the Power of Judgment". Having developed the idea of an explanation of organized beings by mechanical and teleological natural laws in §§ 61-68, in §§ 69-78 Kant raises the question of whether higher order mechanical and teleological natural laws, which unify the particular empirical laws of organized beings, might pose an antinomy of conflicting principles within the power of judgment. I (...) will argue against alternative views that this antinomy is neither a conflict between objective constitutive principles of the determining power of judgment nor a conflict between an objective constitutive principle of the determining power of judgment and a subjective regulative maxim of the reflecting power of judgment nor does it consist in a confusion of a pair of subjective regulative maxims of the reflecting power of judgment with a pair of objective constitutive principles of the determining power of judgment, but does consist in an apparent conflict between mechanical and teleological natural laws as subjective regulative maxims of the reflecting power of judgment. I will further argue that Kant’s resolution of the antinomy consists in the regulative idea of a supersensible that represents the unity of both kinds of natural laws and justifies the unification of both kinds of natural laws in the human power of judgment. Kant uses three notions when he talks about the supersensible – the regulative idea of a divine artisan, the regulative idea of a divine intuitive understanding, and the regulative idea of an underdetermined, supernatural ground of nature. I will show how each of these notions accounts for the unity of both kinds of natural laws and will discuss possible correlations between them. I will then explain how the unity of both kinds of natural laws in the regulative idea of a supersensible accounts for the unification of both kinds of natural laws in the human power of judgment. While the divine intuitive understanding is perfect and uncreated and, thus, capable of a representation of the unity of both kinds of natural laws, the human discursive understanding is imperfect and created; it is capable only of the representation of the unification of both kinds of natural laws in form of a hierarchy of laws. (shrink)

Necessity can be ascribed not only to propositions, but also to feelings. In the Critique of Judgment (KdU), Immanuel Kant argues that a feeling of beauty is the necessary satisfaction instantiated by the ‘free play’ of the cognitive faculties, which provides the grounds for a judgment of taste (KdU 5:196, 217-19). In contradistinction to the theoretical necessity of the Critique of Pure Reason and the moral necessity of the Critique of Practical Reason, the necessity assigned (...) to a judgment of taste is exemplary necessity (KdU 5:237). Necessity can also be assigned by employing the de re/de dicto distinction, namely, by ascribing entailments of what must necessarily hold to either a thing (de re) or to a proposition (de dicto). Although Kant does not use the distinction in any of the three Critiques, this omission has not prevented Kant scholars from applying the distinction in their analyses of the first two Critiques. In this paper, I examine the role that modality plays in Kant’s third Critique and I attempt to bring the de re/de dicto distinction to bear on Kant’s famous aesthetic theory. Ultimately, I perform a retrospective classification of the modality of taste by arguing that because a judgment of taste is not a statement about an objective fact, a judgment of ‘x is beautiful’ can only be read as de dicto necessary. (shrink)

In the 'Critique of Pure Reason' Kant appears to characterize analytic judgments in four distinct ways: once in terms of “containment,” a second time in terms of “identity,” a third time in terms of the explicative–ampliative contrast, and a fourth time in terms of the notion of “cognizability in accordance with the principle of contradiction.” The paper asks: Which of these characterizations—or apparent characterizations—best captures Kant’s conception of analyticity in the first Critique? It suggests: “the second.” It argues, (...) further, that Kant’s distinction is intended to apply only to judgments of subject–predicate form, and that the fourth alleged characterization is not properly speaking a characterization at all. These theses are defended in the course of a more general investigation of the distinction’s meaning, its epistemology, and its tenability. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that there is a genuine difficulty in Kant’s argument regarding the connection between mechanism and teleology. But this difficulty is not the one that is usually underlined. Far from consisting in a contradiction between the first and the third Critique, I argue that the genuine difficulty is intrinsic to the antinomy of reflective judgement: rather than having any hope of resolving anything, it consists in an inescapable conflict. In order to support (...) this claim, I show firstly why converting the thesis of the antinomy about mechanism into reflective judgement does not require renunciation of the universality of causality demonstrated in the first Critique. Then, I suggest that the actual difficulty with Kant’s argument is that there is a genuine conflict inherent in the reflective form of the antinomy. Finally, I examine in detail the antinomy of reflective judgement and compare it to the other Kantian antinomies in order to show that its uniqueness makes it uniquely troubling. This leads me to conclude that the Kantian resolution of the conflict between mechanism and teleology is unsatisfactory. (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)

It is well known that Kant connects judgment and feeling in the third Critique. However, the precise relationship between these two faculties remains virtually unexplored, in large part due to the unpopularity of Kant’s faculty psychology. This paper considers why, for Kant, judgment and feeling go together, arguing that he had good philosophical reasons for forging this connection. The discussion begins by situating these faculties within Kant’s mature faculty psychology. While the ‘power of judgment’ [Urteilskraft] is (...) fundamentally reflective, feeling [Gefühl] reveals itself as essentially non-discursive. Their systematic connection emerges through the principle of purposiveness [Zweckmäßigkeit], which the former legislates for the latter. I claim that we must understand this notion in terms of the suitability of the faculties for each other, as displayed in mere reflection. That is, we can only recognize the fitness of two things for each other through feeling, which, in turn, is the only way that we can engage in the activity of merely reflecting judgment. I conclude by gesturing at an even further way in which judgment and feeling are related, based on their mutual role in orienting all of the faculties of the human mind. (shrink)

Do claims of taste function as validity claims? Our ordinary use of aesthetic notions suggests as much. When I assert that Rodin’s Camille Claudel is ‘beautiful’ I mean my claim to be, in a sense, correct. I expect others to concur and if they do not I think that they are mistaken. But am I justified in attributing an error to the judgment of someone who, unlike me, does not find Rodin’s Camille Claudel beautiful? Not obviously. For it looks, (...) on the other hand, that my assertion “The sculpture of Camille Claudel is beautiful” is not an assertion about a property of that sculpture, not, that is, about a feature of the world which exists for others as well as for me. Quite the opposite, I seem to base my claim on a subjective response, on a certain feeling of mine. I maintain that the sculpture of Camille Claudel is ‘beautiful’ because it produces a particular effect upon me, namely it pleases me aesthetically. But how can the feeling of pleasure, being a subjective response on my part, serve as a normative ground for a claim? (shrink)

In his critical works of the 1780's, Kant claims, seemingly inconsistently, that (1) theoretical and practical reason are one and the same reason, applied differently, (2) that he still needs to show that they are, and (3) that theoretical and practical reason are united. I first argue that current interpretations of Kant's doctrine of the unity of reason are insufficient. But rather than concluding that Kant’s doctrine becomes coherent only in the Critique of Judgment, I show that the (...) three statements are compatible, providing a new and more coherent account of Kant's 1780's doctrine of the unity of reason. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of Rudolph Otto's understanding of the structures of human consciousness making possible the appropriation of revelation. Already in his dissertation on Luther's understanding of the Holy Spirit, Otto was preoccupied with how the " outer " of revelation could be united to these inner structures. Later, in his groundbreaking Idea of the Holy, Otto would explore the category of the numinous, an element of religious experience tied to the irrational element of the holy. This paper (...) first provides a brief account of Otto's account of the holy, especially its numinous, irrational elements. Second, the paper analyzes Otto's understanding of the structures of consciousness grounding the experience of the numinous and allowing the irrational element to be " schematized " by the rational element. Otto's exposition of these structures is heavily influenced by his reception of Kant's analysis of the two stems of human cognition, namely understanding and sensibility, and their possible relation to a common root, which Otto identified with what the mystics called the ground of the soul. Yet it is in Otto's reception of Kant's Critique of Judgment that all of these ideas find their completion, and it is here where we must look to understand the relation between the religious a priori and Otto's category of the numinous. Kant's aesthetic idea is a singular representation given in intuition; it is infinitely saturated and as such intimates the ideas of God, the soul, and the world as a whole. I show how Otto appropriates Kant's aesthetic idea and its relation to ideas of reason in order to make sense of how an empirically given revelation, for instance, an experience of the numinous, can connect with the inner structures of consciousness and thereby have the singular import that it does. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a selective, systematic rather than historical account of Merleau-Ponty’s highly complex relation to classical German philosophy, focussing on issues which bear on the question of his relation to transcendentalism and naturalism. I argue that the concerns which define his project in Phenomenology of Perception are fundamentally those of transcendental philosophy, and that Merleau-Ponty’s disagreements with Kant, and the position he arrives at in The Visible and the Invisible, are helpfully viewed in light of issues which (...) Merleau-Ponty identifies as raised by Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement, and Schelling’s conversion of Kantian idealism into a Real-Idealismus. Finally I address the question of whether, and on what basis, Merleau-Ponty’s claim to have surpassed systematic philosophy can be defended. (shrink)

This article argues that Kant’s attack on the ars oratoria in §53 of the Critique of the Power of Judgement is directed against eighteenth-century school rhetoric, in particular against the ‘art of speech’ (Redekunst) of Johann Christoph Gottsched. It is pointed out that Kant suggests a revision of Gottsched’s conception of ‘true eloquence’, which was the predominant rhetorical ideal at the time. On this basis, and in response to recent discussions on ‘Kantian rhetoric’, Kant’s own ideal of speech is (...) adressed. It emerges that he favours a culture of speech embedded in moral cultivation, which excludes any disciplinary form of rhetoric. (shrink)