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Kant on Understanding Organisms as Natural PurposesIn Eric Watkins (ed.), Kant and the Sciences, Oxford University Press. 2001.This paper explains why Kant thinks that organisms must be regarded as purposes, and how this can be done while respecting their status as natural products rather than artifacts. Kant’s premise that organisms are mechanically inexplicable is interpreted as the claim that biological regularities are irreducible to regularities in the behavior of matter as such. His conclusion that they are purposive is interpreted as the claim that they must be regarded in normative terms. This conclusion is defe…Read more
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KantIn Theodore Gracyk & Andrew Kania (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, Routledge. 2011.
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74 Interesseloses Wohlgefallen und Allgemeinheit ohne Begriffe (§§ 1–9)In Otfried Höffe (ed.), Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, De Gruyter. pp. 55-72. 2018.
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111Critique of the Power of JudgmentPhilosophical 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
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8The Appearance of SpontaneityIn Dina Emundts (ed.), Self, World, and Art: Metaphysical Topics in Kant and Hegel, De Gruyter. pp. 119-144. 2013.
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14Kant on the Subjectivity of TasteIn Herman Parret (ed.), Kants Ästhetik · Kant's Aesthetics · L'esthétique de Kant, De Gruyter. pp. 448-465. 1998.
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94. Interesseloses Wohlgefallen und Allgemeinheit ohne Begriffe (§§ 1–9)In Otfried Höffe (ed.), Immanuel Kant. "Kritik der Urteilskraft", Akademie Verlag / De Gruyter. pp. 59-77. 2008.
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Empiricism and normative constraintIn 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.
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511. Skepticism and Quietism about Meaning and NormativityIn Matthew Boyle & Evgenia Mylonaki (eds.), Reason in Nature: New Essays on Themes From John Mcdowell, Harvard University Press. pp. 19-39. 2022.
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564Going on as one ought: Kripke and Wittgenstein on the normativity of meaningMind and Language 37 (5): 876-892. 2022.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
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283Aesthetic Normativity and Knowing How to Go OnCon-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
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2Normativity and ConceptsIn 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
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17Kant’s ‘Young Poet’ and the Subjectivity of Aesthetic JudgmentIn Violetta L. Waibel, Margit Ruffing & David Wagner (eds.), Natur und Freiheit. Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, De Gruyter. pp. 291-306. 2018.
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279Wittgenstein on Going OnCanadian 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
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31Empiricism and Normative ConstraintIn 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.
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234. Interesseloses Wohlgefallen Und Allgemeinheit Ohne BegriffeIn Otfried Höffe (ed.), Immanuel Kant. "Kritik der Urteilskraft", Akademie Verlag / De Gruyter. pp. 55-72. 2008.
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371In Defence of the One-Act View: Reply to GuyerBritish 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
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396Oughts and Thoughts: Rule-Following and the Normativity of Content, by Anandi Hattiangadi.: Book Reviews (review)Mind 119 (476): 1175-1186. 2010.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
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878I—Hannah Ginsborg: Meaning, Understanding and NormativityAristotelian 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.
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356Was Kant a nonconceptualist?Philosophical Studies 137 (1). 2008.I criticize recent nonconceptualist readings of Kant’s account of perception on the grounds that the strategy of the Deduction requires that understanding be involved in the synthesis of imagination responsible for the intentionality of perceptual experience. I offer an interpretation of the role of understanding in perceptual experience as the consciousness of normativity in the association of one’s representations. This leads to a reading of Kant which is conceptualist, but in a way which acco…Read more
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29Replies to My CriticsBritish Journal of Aesthetics 56 (4): 409-419. 2016.I am grateful to the commentators for their sympathetic and thoughtful attention to my work. The questions and objections they raise go to the heart of my project, and, while it has been rewarding to work through them, it has not been easy to respond to them. For reasons of space, I have not been able to address every point raised, but I have tried to respond to those which I find most challenging.
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319Kant's aesthetics and teleologyStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.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…Read more
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44The Normativity of Nature: Essays on Kant's Critique of JudgmentOxford University Press. 2014.Hannah Ginsborg presents fourteen essays which establish Kant's Critique of Judgment as a central contribution to the understanding of human cognition. The papers bring out the significance of Kant's philosophical notion of judgment, and use it to address interpretive issues in Kant's aesthetics, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of biology.
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7Kant on understanding organisms as natural purposesIn Eric Watkins (ed.), Kant and the Sciences, Oxford University Press. pp. 231--58. 2001.
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273Aesthetic judgment and perceptual normativityInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 49 (5). 2006.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,…Read more
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851Reasons for BeliefPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (2). 2006.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…Read more
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31SynopsisBritish 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.
Berkeley, California, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |