Ekin Erkan

In this paper, I offer an interpretation of Kant’s conception of the productive imagination in the judgment of taste as outlined in the third Critique’s ‘General Remark on the First Section of the Analytic’. The view I offer is an alternative to Alexander Rueger’s ‘comparison model’, according to which the productive imagination invents a counterfactual form without constraint by the understanding, subsequently comparing this form to the empirically given one, experiencing (contingent/accidental) agreement in cases of the pleasure of taste. Drawing on the ‘General remark’ and related passages from Kant’s Anthropology lectures and related texts, I offer an interpretation that, like Rueger’s, emphasizes the findings of the ‘General remark’ but moderates the possible form the productive imagination might invent. Specifically, I argue that the object of taste’s aesthetic attributes delimit the perceptual relations of complementarity and contrast that the productive imagination can author. After appraising the textual and substantive validity of Rueger’s view, I argue that my interpretation has the benefit of servicing the ambit of art criticism.

Résumé Christine Korsgaard affirme que la valeur que nous accordons à des choix personnels spécifiques — compris comme des objectifs ou des fins — implique de s’y engager ou de se soucier de ceux-ci, ce qui est en soi conditionné par la capacité du valorisateur à conférer de la valeur. En d’autres termes, l’autonomie personnelle implique la valeur objective du choix autonome de l’agent et de ses projets de soins contemporains. Des commentateurs tels que Andrea Sangiovanni, Paul Guyer et Rae Langton critiquent cette conception du choix autonome fondée sur l’engagement. Cet article examine ces objections, puis propose un cadre korsgaardien modifié concernant la valeur objective du choix autonome, qui, selon moi, évite ces objections critiques.

This paper argues for a metacognitive reading of Kant’s doctrine of ‘aesthetic ideas’, according to which they enjoy the functional role of licensing a theory of art interpretation. I begin by offering a textualist reading of Kant’s doctrine of ‘aesthetic ideas’ and contest the received ‘semantic paradigm’ according to which aesthetic ideas either approximate the form or content of a rational idea. After showing the relationship between aesthetic ideas and artistic interpretation, I assess whether Kant’s theory delivers what we want from a theory of artistic interpretation. I subsequently show how Schelling’s conception of artistic production and reception in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) draws from Kant’s doctrine of ‘aesthetic ideas’. After analyzing the relationship between Kant and Schelling’s accounts of art interpretation, I evaluate which account we ought to prefer.

According to commentators like Rosalind Krauss, Briony Fer, Caroline Jones, and Michael Fried, Clement Greenberg’s formalist/positivist device of “medium-specificity” debars errant affective aesthetic experiences that are embodied; despite significant differences in how these theorists arrive at this conclusion, one shared point of emphasis is Greenberg’s inheriting Kant’s disinterested conception of pleasure in reflective judgments of beauty. Offering a textualist review of Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful, I seek to demonstrate that neither Greenberg, nor Greenberg’s critics, are correct in their account of Kant’s judgments of beauty.1 Specifically, I argue that Greenberg conflates Kant’s conception of judgments of free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) with merely adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). In formulating a rejoinder to Greenberg and the misplacement of Greenberg as a Kantian, and following Diarmuid Costello, I hope to save a path for a Kantian aesthetics of the present, much in the spirit of other broadly Kantian art historians and philosophers of art/aesthetics (e.g., Thierry de Duve, Paul Guyer, Ido Geiger, etc.).

This paper seeks to show how Kant’s epistemological conception of the transcendental faculties of cognition relates to his ontological conception of the transcendental distinction between mind-dependent, ideal appearances (viz., empirical objects) and mind-independent, transcendentally real things in themselves, as they relate to the self. I engage the metaphysical foundations of Kant’s account of self-consciousness and how this account relates to the self as an empirically perceivable and conceptualizable object of observation. This paper also connects Kant’s work in the Transcendental Deduction on the transcendental unity of apperception with Kant’s work on “clear” and “obscure” representations.

This paper seeks to show how Kant’s epistemological conception of the transcendental faculties of cognition relates to his ontological conception of the transcendental distinction between mind-dependent, ideal appearances (viz., empirical objects) and mind-independent, transcendentally real things in themselves, as they relate to the self. I engage the metaphysical foundations of Kant’s account of self-consciousness and how this account relates to the self as an empirically perceivable and conceptualizable object of observation. This paper also connects Kant’s work in the Transcendental Deduction on the transcendental unity of apperception with Kant’s work on “clear” and “obscure” representations.

This paper looks at dialectical inferences as they relate to Hegel’s modal metaphysics, closely examining the Actuality section of Hegel’s Science of Logic and positing a reading of Hegel’s modal actualism that engages with two strains of secondary commentary. Responding to commentators, we make the case that Hegel’s ‘das Logische’ avoids presupposing possibility’s being prior to actuality insofar as actuality and the derivation of possibility is considered as the in-itselfness of actuality, an implicit inner moment whereby actuality further determines itself. Actuality is immediate yet derived as an identity from the logic of inner and outer. If actuality as immediacy is explicit/outer, then its opposition, its implicitness/innerness, has to be possibility in the logic of modality. In order to conceive of actuality as existence, and particularly as an emerging process, we must already conceive the problem of presupposing an alien form within the logic of actuality.