Colin McQuillan

This article considers the reasons Kant rejects the possibility of a science of aesthetics throughout his career. It begins by surveying the background of Kant’s denial, focusing first on the introduction of aesthetics as a new science in the works of Alexander Baumgarten and Georg Friedrich Meier. After showing that there are numerous ambiguities in the way Baumgarten and Meier present their new science, the article considers Kant’s account of the differences between aesthetics and logic in the transcripts of his Lectures on Logic. Because Kant uses the differences between aesthetics and logic to explain why logic is and aesthetics is not a science, these discussions provide a great deal of insight into his conception of science as well as his views on aesthetics. Finally, the article addresses the reasons Kant continues to insist that aesthetics is not a science but “a mere critique of taste” after he announces his discovery of the a priori principles of aesthetic judgment.

The editors of the French edition of Michel Foucault's Introduction to Kant's Anthropology claim that Foucault started rereading Kant through Nietzsche in 1952 and then began rereading Kant and Nietzsche through Heidegger in 1953. This claim has not received much attention in the scholarly literature, but its significance should not be underestimated. In this article, I assess the likelihood that the editor’s claim is true and show how Foucault’s introduction to Kant’s Anthropology and his comments about Kant in The Order of Things echo the concerns about finitude and subjectivity in Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. I then argue that Foucault's later preoccupation with Kant's essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? should be regarded as an attempt to develop an alternative to the Heideggerian interpretation of Kant, and the preoccupation with finitude, that had played such an important role in Foucault’s earlier works.

This article argues that Kant's essay on enlightenment responds to Moses Mendelssohn's defense of the freedom of conscience in Jerusalem. While Mendelssohn holds that the freedom of conscience as an inalienable right, Kant argues that the use of one's reason may be constrained by oaths. Kant calls such a constrained use of reason the private use of reason. While he also defends the unconditional freedom of the public use of reason, Kant believes that one makes oneself a part of the machinery of the church or state by swearing an oath to and assuming a position within those institutions. -/- The appendix to this article includes a translation of Mendelssohn's comments on Kant's enlightenment essay, "Public and Private Use of Reason.".

This article considers three objections Immanuel Kant raises against Alexander Baumgarten’s plan for a science of aesthetics at different points in his career. Although Kant’s objections appear to be contradictory, this article argues that the contradiction is the result of an anachronism in the composition of Kant’s Logic. When the contradiction is resolved, it becomes apparent that Kant’s main reason for rejecting Baumgarten’s aesthetics during the pre-critical period—the lack of a priori principles for a critique of taste—loses its force after Kant develops a kind of critique that yields a priori principles and then discovers a priori principles of aesthetic judgment. Instead of withdrawing his objections, Kant finds different reasons to deny that aesthetics can be a science, based on the distinction between determining and reflective judgments.

Most accounts of the historical a priori can be traced back to Husserlian phenomenology. Foucault’s appeals to the historical a priori are more problematic because of his hostility to this tradition. In this paper, I argue that Foucault’s diplôme thesis on Hegel, his studies of Kant’s Anthropology, his response to critics of The Order of Things, and his later work on Kant’s essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” all suggest that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy helped to shape his conception of the historical a priori.

This article argues that Agamben’s conception of fiction is crucial for understanding his recent works. I suggest that the key to understanding Agamben conception of fiction is to be found in a few curious remarks at the end of Language and Death. These remarks explain why the distinctions between life and death, animal life and human life, bare life and political forms of life, the outlaw and the sovereign, and the norm and the exception that continue to preoccupy Agamben are all fictions. After considering Agamben’s account of these fictions and their relation to the relevant passage in Language and Death, the article explores the ways Agamben thinks the fictions that govern human action and social life might be unworked

In this paper, I argue that Jacques Rancière does not propose a purely sensible conception of the aesthetic in his recent writings on art. Unlike many contemporary philosophies of art, Rancière’s aesthetics retains an important cognitive dimension. Here, I bring this aspect of Rancière’s aesthetics into view by comparing the conception of intelligence found in his earlier works with his more recent writings on art, showing that intelligence and sense are distributed in the same ways. The distinction between them is, moreover, governed by the same politics. Rancière’s analysis of the sensible and the intellectual breaks down the distinction between them and establishes their equality.