• Introduction
    In Seana Valentine Shiffrin (ed.), Democratic Law, Oxford University Press. 2021.
  •  171
    Critique of the Power of Judgment
    with Immanuel Kant, Paul Guyer, and Eric Matthews
    Philosophical Review 111 (3): 429. 2002.
    This new translation is an extremely welcome addition to the continuing Cambridge Edition of Kant’s works. English-speaking readers of the third Critique have long been hampered by the lack of an adequate translation of this important and difficult work. James Creed Meredith’s much-reprinted translation has charm and elegance, but it is often too loose to be useful for scholarly purposes. Moreover it does not include the first version of Kant’s introduction, the so-called “First Introduction,” w…Read more
  •  1
  • Empiricism and normative constraint
    In Johan Gersel, Rasmus Thybo Jensen, Morten S. Thaning & Søren Overgaard (eds.), In the light of experience: new essays on perception and reasons, Oxford University Press. 2018.
  •  42
    1. Skepticism and Quietism about Meaning and Normativity
    In Matthew Boyle & Evgenia Mylonaki (eds.), Reason in Nature: New Essays on Themes From John Mcdowell, Harvard University Press. pp. 19-39. 2022.
  •  484
    Kripke’s thesis that meaning is normative is typically interpreted, following Boghossian, as the thesis that meaningful expressions allow of true or warranted use. I argue for an alternative interpretation centered on Wittgenstein’s conception of the normativity involved in “knowing how to go on” in one’s use of an expression. Meaning is normative for Kripke because it justifies claims, not to be saying something true, but to be going on as one ought from prevous uses of the expression. I ar…Read more
  •  190
    Aesthetic Normativity and Knowing How to Go On
    Con-Textos Kantianos 1 (12): 52-70. 2020.
    This paper addresses a problem about aesthetic normativity raised by Kant. Can aesthetic experiences be appropriate or inappropriate to their objects? And, if so, how is that possible given that, according to Kant, aesthetic experience is not objective? Kant thought the answer to the first question was yes. But his official answer to the second question, in terms of the free play of the faculties, is obscure. The paper offers a clearer answer, inspired by Kant, which invokes Wittgenstein’s notio…Read more
  •  2
    Normativity and Concepts
    In Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, Oxford University Press. pp. 989-1014. 2018.
    A number of philosophers, including Kant, Kripke, Boghossian, Gibbard and Brandom, can be read as endorsing the view that concepts are normative. I distinguish two versions of that view: a strong, non-naturalistic version which identifies concepts with norms or rules (Kant, Kripke), and a weaker version, compatible with naturalism, on which the normativity of concepts amounts only to their application’s being governed by norms or rules (Boghossian, Gibbard, Brandom). I consider a problem for the…Read more
  •  9
    Kant’s ‘Young Poet’ and the Subjectivity of Aesthetic Judgment
    In Violetta L. Waibel, Margit Ruffing & David Wagner (eds.), Natur und Freiheit. Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, De Gruyter. pp. 291-306. 2018.
  •  211
    Wittgenstein on Going On
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (1): 1-17. 2020.
    In a famous passage from the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein describes a pupil who has been learning to write out various sequences of numbers in response to orders such as “+1” and “+2”. He has shown himself competent for numbers up to 1000, but when we have him continue the “+2” sequence beyond 1000, he writes the numerals 1004, 1008, 1012. As Wittgenstein describes the case: We say to him, “Look what you’re doing!” — He doesn’t understand us. We say “You should have added two; look…Read more
  •  23
    Empiricism and Normative Constraint
    In Johan Gersel, Rasmus Thybo Jensen, Morten S. Thaning & Morten Overgaard (eds.), In the Light of Experience: New Essays on Perception and Reasons, Oxford University Press. pp. 101-136. 2018.
  •  16
    4. Interesseloses Wohlgefallen Und Allgemeinheit Ohne Begriffe
    In Otfried Höffe (ed.), Immanuel Kant. "Kritik der Urteilskraft", Akademie Verlag / De Gruyter. pp. 55-72. 2008.
  •  294
    In Defence of the One-Act View: Reply to Guyer
    British Journal of Aesthetics 57 (4): 421-435. 2017.
    I defend my ‘one-act’ interpretation of Kant’s account of judgments of beauty against recent criticisms by Paul Guyer. Guyer’s text-based arguments for his own ‘two-acts’ view rely on the assumption that a claim to the universal validity of one’s pleasure presupposes the prior existence of the pleasure. I argue that pleasure in the beautiful claims its own universal validity, thus obviating the need to distinguish two independent acts of judging. The resulting view, I argue, is closer to the tex…Read more
  •  809
    Anandi Hattiangadi packs a lot of argument into this lucid, well-informed and lively examination of the meaning scepticism which Kripke ascribes to Wittgenstein. Her verdict on the success of the sceptical considerations is mixed. She concludes that they are sufficient to rule out all accounts of meaning and mental content proposed so far. But she believes that they fail to constitute, as Kripke supposed they did, a fully general argument against the possibility of meaning or content. Even though…Read more
  •  1611
    I—Hannah Ginsborg: Meaning, Understanding and Normativity
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 86 (1): 127-146. 2012.
    I defend the normativity of meaning against recent objections by arguing for a new interpretation of the ‘ought’ relevant to meaning. Both critics and defenders of the normativity thesis have understood statements about how an expression ought to be used as either prescriptive or semantic. I propose an alternative view of the ‘ought’ as conveying the primitively normative attitudes speakers must adopt towards their uses if they are to use the expression with understanding.
  •  23
    Synopsis
    British 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.
  •  1277
    Kant and the Problem of Experience
    Philosophical 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
  •  8
    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
  •  57
    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’e…Read more
  •  630
    Kant's Perceiver
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (1): 221-228. 2013.
  •  242
    Empirical concepts and the content of experience
    European 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
  •  22
    Two Debates about Absolute Music
    British 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
  •  18
    Purposiveness and Normativity
    Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress 2 453-460. 1995.
  •  186
    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
  •  219
    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