Hannah Ginsborg

While Kant is perhaps best known for his writings in metaphysics and epistemology (in particular the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, with a second edition in 1787) and in ethics (the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals of 1785 and the Critique of Practical Reason of 1788), he also developed an influential and much-discussed theory of aesthetics. This theory is presented in his Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, also translated as Critique of the Power of Judgment) of 1790, a two-part work which deals successively with aesthetics and with the role of teleology (that is, appeal to ends or goals) in natural science and in our understanding of nature more generally. Although Kant's theory of teleology has traditionally been both less influential, and less widely discussed, than his aesthetic theory, its historical and philosophical importance is increasingly coming to be recognized.

I draw a connection between the question, raised by Hume and Kant, of how aesthetic judgments can claim universal agreement, and the question, raised in recent discussions of nonconceptual content, of how concepts can be acquired on the basis of experience. Developing an idea suggested by Kant's linkage of aesthetic judgment with the capacity for empirical conceptualization, I propose that both questions can be resolved by appealing to the idea of "perceptual normativity". Perceptual experience, on this proposal, involves the awareness of its own appropriateness with respect to the object perceived, where this appropriateness is more primitive than truth or veridicality. This means that a subject can take herself to be perceiving an object as she (and anyone else) ought to perceive it, without first recognizing the object as falling under a corresponding concept. I motivate the proposal through a criticism of Peacocke's account of concept-acquisition, which, I argue, rests on a confusion between the notion of a way something is perceived, and that of a way it is perceived as being. Whereas Peacocke's account of concept-acquisition depends on an illicit slide between these two notions, the notion of perceptual normativity allows a legitimate transition between them: if someone's perceiving something a certain way involves her taking it that she ought to perceive it that way, then she perceives the thing as being a certain way, so that the corresponding concept is available to her in perceptual experience.

Davidson claims that nothing can count as a reason for a belief except another belief. This claim is challenged by McDowell, who holds that perceptual experiences can count as reasons for beliefs. I argue that McDowell fails to take account of a distinction between two different senses in which something can count as a reason for belief. While a non-doxastic experience can count as a reason for belief in one of the two senses, this is not the sense which is presupposed in Davidson's claim. While I focus on McDowell's view, the argument generalizes to other views which take experiences as reasons for belief.

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 the Critique. For, again as most readers of the Critique know, Kant aims to show how we can have synthetic a priori knowledge by showing that the categories, or pure concepts of the understanding, are conditions of the possibility of experience. This means that, whether or not Kant is concerned with the notion of experience for its own sake, his account of a priori knowledge carries with it at least some commitments regarding the character of experience. If the account of a priori knowledge is to be successful, then experience has to be the kind of thing for which the categories can, in principle, serve as conditions of possibility. More specifically, experience must involve not only the senses, but also thought or understanding, for otherwise the claim that it presupposes a certain specific set of concepts is simply unintelligible. And indeed at least some parts of the Critique, in particular the so-called subjective deduction in the first edition, and the briefer passages which correspond to it in the second edition, seem to be intended to show how this requirement is met. That is, they are concerned not so much with showing that experience is governed by the categories, as with elaborating a view of experience as involving conceptual activity überhaupt.

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 notion of a judgment of taste, as a judgment which has intersubjective validity without being objectively valid, and therefore bear’s directly on the notion of the primacy of judgment as an aspect of Kant's account of objectivity. This title will be of interest to students of philosophy.

L’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’entendement n’est rien d’autre que la capacité de faire des jugements. Comme dit Kant, «nous pouvons ramener tous les actes de l’entendement à des jugements, de telle sorte que l’entendement peut être représenté en général comme un pouvoir de juger» (CRP, A69/B94).1 Cette identification est au coeur de la déduction métaphysique des catégories, où Kant affirme découvrir, suivant le fil conducteur offert par les formes logiques du jugement, les concept purs de l’entendement. Et elle réapparaît dans la déduction transcendantale, où il s’agit non pas d’établir la table des categories, mais de prouver que les catégories s’appliquent à l’expérience. Car si l’expérience exige le concours de l’entendement, et l’entendement est un pouvoir de juger, il s’ensuit que le divers de représentations données doit être...

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 which possession of such a concept involves more than the ability for perceptual discrimination, but less than the capacity to employ the concept in inferences: it consists in the capacity to perceptually discriminate objects with the awareness that one is discriminating as one ought. This understanding of concept-possession allows us make sense of experiences' having conceptual content without supposing that the subject must grasp the relevant concepts prior to having those experiences

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 resolution of the second.

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 representational character of mind which is the reverse of that adopted by naturalistic theorists of mind like Fred Dretske and Ruth Millikan.