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30SynopsisBritish Journal of Aesthetics 56 (4): 383-387. 2016.GinsborgHannah, The Normativity of Nature: Essays on Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Oxford: OUP, 2015. pp. 376. £25.
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69Oughts without Intentions: A Kantian Approach to Biological FunctionsIn Eric Watkins & Ina Goy (eds.), Kant's Theory of Biology, De Gruyter. pp. 259-274. 2014.
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1478Kant and the Problem of ExperiencePhilosophical Topics 34 (1-2): 59-106. 2006.As most of its readers are aware, the Critique of Pure Reason is primarily concerned not with empirical, but with a priori knowledge. For the most part, the Kant of the first Critique tends to assume that experience, and the knowledge that is based on it, is unproblematic. The problem with which he is concerned is that of how we can be capable of substantive knowledge independently of experience. At the same time, however, the notion of experience plays a crucial role in the central arguments of …Read more
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8The Role of Taste in Kant's Theory of CognitionRoutledge. 1990.First published in 1990. This title, originally a Ph. D. dissertation submitted to the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University in July 1988, grew out of an interest in the foundations of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Believing that the idea of the primacy of judgment was an important one for understanding more recent issues in analytic philosophy, the author started to think about its historical antecedents. By examining Kant’s _Critique of Judgement_, Ginsborg explores the notio…Read more
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59L’idée d’un jugement [Urteil], et du pouvoir de juger [Vermögen zu urteilen], joue un rôle cardinal dans l’argumentation de la Critique de la raison pure. L’argument central de la première Critique vise à montrer comment les concepts purs de l’entendement peuvent s’appliquer aux objets qui nous sont donnés dans l’expérience. Cet argument dépend de l’idée que l’expérience n’est pas l’affaire de la sensibilité à elle seule, mais qu’elle implique, dès le début, le concours de l’entendement. Or, l’e…Read more
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245Empirical concepts and the content of experienceEuropean Journal of Philosophy 14 (3): 349-372. 2006.The view that the content of experience is conceptual is often felt to conflict with the empiricist intuition that experience precedes thought, rather than vice versa. This concern is explicitly articulated by Ayers as an objection both to McDowell and Davidson, and to the conceptualist view more generally. The paper aims to defuse the objection in its general form by presenting a version of conceptualism which is compatible with empiricism. It proposes an account of observational concepts on wh…Read more
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28Two Debates about Absolute MusicBritish Journal of Aesthetics 57 (1): 77-80. 2017.Mark Evan Bonds makes a distinction between two concepts of absolute music: as repertory, and as ‘regulative concept’. This paper explores the distinction, and distinguishes further two debates associated with these two concepts: one about the value of absolute music in the repertory sense, the other about the extent to which music is ‘absolute’ in the sense of lacking expressive or representational content. It ends with a proposal about how reflection on the first debate can help provide a reso…Read more
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29Purposiveness and NormativityProceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress 2 453-460. 1995.
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192Kant's Biological Teleology and Its Philosophical SignificanceIn Graham Bird (ed.), A Companion to Kant, Blackwell. 2006.The article surveys Kant’s treatment of biological teleology in the ’Critique of Judgment’, with special attention to the question of whether the notion of natural teleology is coherent. It argues that our entitlement to regard nature as teleological is not established by the argument of the ’Antinomy’, but rather results from our entitlement to regard the workings of our own cognitive faculties in normative terms. This implies a view of the relation between biological teleology and the represen…Read more
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232Thinking the particular as contained under the universalIn Rebecca Kukla (ed.), Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant's Critical Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. 2006.In a well-known passage from the Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Kant defines the power or faculty of judgment [Urteilskraft] as "the capacity to think the particular as contained under the universal" (Introduction IV, 5:179).1 He then distinguishes two ways in which this faculty can be exercised, namely as determining or as reflecting. These two ways are defined as follows: "If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then judgment, which subsumes the particular u…Read more
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1274Inside and Outside Language: Stroud's Nonreductionism about MeaningIn Jason Bridges, Niko Kolodny & Wai-Hung Wong (eds.), The Possibility of Philosophical Understanding: Essays for Barry Stroud, Oxford University Press. 2011.I argue that Stroud's nonreductionism about meaning is insufficiently motivated. First, given that he rejects the assumption that grasp of an expression's meaning guides or instructs us in its use, he has no reason to accept Kripke's arguments against dispositionalism or related reductive views. Second, his argument that reductive views are impossible because they attempt to explain language “from outside” rests on an equivocation between two senses in which an explanation of language can be fro…Read more
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208Two kinds of mechanical inexplicability in Kant and AristotleJournal of the History of Philosophy 42 (1): 33-65. 2004.I distinguish two senses in which organisms are mechanically inexplicable for Kant. Mechanical inexplicability in the first sense is shared with artefacts, and consists in their exhibiting regularities irreducible to the regularities of matter. Mechanical inexplicability in the second sense is peculiar to organisms, consisting in the reciprocal causal dependence of an organism's parts. This distinction corresponds to two strands of thought in Aristotle, one supporting a teleological conception o…Read more
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204Perception, generality, and reasonsIn Andrew Reisner & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (eds.), Reasons for Belief, Cambridge University Press. pp. 131--57. 2011.During the last fifteen years or so there has been much debate, among philosophers interested in perception, on the question of whether the representational content of perceptual experience is conceptual or nonconceptual. Recently, however, a number of philosophers have challenged the terms of this debate, arguing that one of its most basic assumptions is mistaken. Experience, they claim, does not have representational content at all. On the kind of approach they suggest, having a perceptual exp…Read more
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |