My research has two different but related aims. The first includes original scholarship on Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment in which I identify the origins of misreadings of Kant's aesthetic formalism in the writing of certain early twentieth century philosophers and art theorists who influenced writing on Kant's aesthetics up until the present. I provide textual evidence to support an alternative reading which demonstrates that the popular concepts of disinterest and universality, where aesthetic reflective judgments are concerned, which are the standard foil of cognitive aesthetic theories, are in fact based on …
My research has two different but related aims. The first includes original scholarship on Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment in which I identify the origins of misreadings of Kant's aesthetic formalism in the writing of certain early twentieth century philosophers and art theorists who influenced writing on Kant's aesthetics up until the present. I provide textual evidence to support an alternative reading which demonstrates that the popular concepts of disinterest and universality, where aesthetic reflective judgments are concerned, which are the standard foil of cognitive aesthetic theories, are in fact based on only part of Kant's Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment. They rely solely on a reading of the Analytic of the Beautiful where Kant sets out what an aesthetic judgment is, and they ignore the crucial Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments, where Kant sets out how such judgments are possible. The former is written with the latter in view. Without taking both into consideration, a distorted interpretation of Kant's formalism is the result. Such a distortion has been treated as the standard view of Kant's formalism in Philosophy of Art for the last century.
The second aim of my research is more applied. I focus my research on imagination, moral perception and the acculturation of pleasure to culturally specific objects. This research assumes that such capacities develop in universal ways but pays particular attention to the way that such universals manifest in culturally specific ways within different contexts. The problem that arises and drives this arm of my research is whether we are able to cross cultural barriers where value judgments are concerned, even if these capacities are grounded in such universals. Aesthetic reflective judgment is treated as a type of judgment that epitomizes the structure of value judgments more broadly.
