Nicholas Dunn

Despite being indebted to Kant’s aesthetics and what she saw as its hidden political philosophy, Hannah Arendt was quite critical of his ethics. When her objections to Kant’s moral philosophy are discussed, the focus is usually on her claim that it is centred on the self and lacks concern for others and the world. But Arendt also claims that Kant does not think there is room for judgement in the moral sphere – and appears to share this view herself. In this paper, I focus on this aspect of her critique, which has been neglected by commentators. Given Arendt’s turn to Kant’s third Critique and her insights into its conception of judgement, I argue that she ought not to have excluded judgement from the realm of morality. Further evidence for this is suggested by her remarks on the trial of Eichmann, where she seems to want to allow a place for judgement in moral reasoning. I conclude by showing that not only did Arendt wrestle with the question of the relationship between morality and judgement, but that her innovative reading of Kant’s theory of reflective judgement should have led her to afford it a prominent role in the practical domain.

It is common for those who live in democratic societies to talk about the importance of speaking to others. But what about the desirability of speaking to others? At first glance, the question appears false, since the answer seems obvious: Of course speaking to others is desirable! Engaging with others who disagree with us is part and parcel of the democratic way of life. And yet, we need not look too far to find the public sphere mired in intense polarization, divisiveness, and a general breakdown of civil discourse. In practice, we appear to set aside what we say we believe and proceed as though we know that dialogue is pointless.What should we make of this gap between, on the one hand, our accedence to the idea... Read More.

Kant’s distinction between the determining and reflecting power of judgment in the third Critique is not well understood in the literature. A mainstream view unifies these by making determination the telos of all acts of judgment (Longuenesse [1998]. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press). On this view, all reflection is primarily in the business of producing empirical concepts for cognition, and thus has what I call a determinative ideal. I argue that this view fails to take seriously the independence and autonomy of the ‘power of judgment’ [Urteilskraft] as a higher cognitive faculty in its own right with its own a priori principle. Instead of seeing merely reflecting judgments as failed or incomplete acts of judgment, I argue that these are in fact paradigmatic of the activity of the power of judgment. More precisely, the reflecting power of judgment just is the power of judgment. Accordingly, reflecting judgment takes precedence over determining judgment; while the former operates according to a law that it gives itself, the latter requires another higher cognitive faculty to provide its principle. On my view, reflecting judgment should be understood as the capacity for purposive subsumption—most clearly seen in the activity of mere reflection.

Despite being indebted to Kant’s aesthetics and what she saw as its hidden political philosophy, Hannah Arendt was quite critical of his ethics. When her objections to Kant’s moral philosophy are discussed, the focus is usually on her claim that it is centered on the self and lacks concern for others and the world. But Arendt also claims that he does not think there is room for judgment in the moral sphere—and appears to share this view herself. In this essay, I focus on this aspect of her critique, which has been neglected by commentators. Given Arendt’s turn to Kant’s third Critique and her insights into its conception of judgment, I argue that she ought not to have excluded judgment from the realm of morality. Further evidence for this is suggested by her remarks on the trial of Eichmann, where she seems to want to allow a place for judgment in moral reasoning. I conclude by showing that not only did Arendt wrestle with the question of the relationship between morality and judgment, but that her innovative reading of Kant’s theory of reflective judgment should have led her to afford it a prominent role in the practical domain.

While there is an extensive literature on Kant’s conception of practical reason, there is comparatively little on his conception of practical judgment. In addition, commentators have yet to take up the question of what the distinction between practical reason and practical judgment amounts to, for Kant. My aim in this paper is to provide an answer by bringing the type/token distinction to bear on Kant’s theory of moral agency. I argue that practical reason is concerned with determining the moral status of act-types, while practical judgment is concerned with picking out some act-token that instantiates the former. What this reveals, I claim, is that pure reason cannot be practical without the help of judgment.

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to consider the issue of how we conceive of others when engaging in the activity of perspective taking. Are we supposed to think from the standpoint of abstract and generalized others? Or should we strive to engage with concrete, particular others? The article suggests that what matters is that we encounter the other in their particularity rather than their generality—and that this distinction cuts across the more frequently invoked, modal distinction between possibility and actuality. In other words, what is relevant is not whether the other exists or not, but whether we encounter them in all their individuality and uniqueness.

In this thesis I provide an account of the faculty of the mind that Kant calls ‘the power of judgment’ [Urteilskraft]. While there is an abundance of literature on various aspects of Kant’s theory of judgment in the Critical philosophy, there has been no sustained treatment of the nature of the faculty that is the subject of the third Critique (1790). I argue that the power of judgment is a fundamentally reflective, affective, and orientational capacity that occupies a central place within Kant’s account of the human mind. To this end, I trace the development of Kant’s thinking on judgment—from the pre-Critical to the Critical period, as well as from the first to the third Critique—to show how it continues to gain prominence within Kant’s taxonomy of the mind.

That Kant sees the faculties of imagination and judgment as closely related is not controversial. Yet precisely how they relate to each other, especially across his Critical philosophy, is less clear. In this article, I consider the relationship between what Kant calls the “power of imagination” (Einbildungskraft) and the “power of judgment” (Urteilskraft). I argue for the following claim: insofar as the power of judgment is the faculty of thinking particulars under universals, the power of imagination is the faculty of producing and providing particulars for judgment—either to reflect on or to subsume under universals. Such an account reveals that our capacity for imagination is intimately bound up with our capacity to judge.

Commentators have shown a steady interest in the role of feeling in Kant’s moral and practical philosophy over the last few decades. Much attention has been given to the notion of ‘moral feeling’ in general, as well as to what Kant calls the ‘feeling of respect’ for the moral law. My focus in this essay is on the role of feeling in practical judgment. My claim in what follows is that the act of judging in the practical domain—i.e., determining what one ought to do, or what action one ought to perform, in a specific case—crucially involves feeling. Put more simply: I argue that practical judgment has an essentially affective dimension. The upshot of the account I will give is that it provides us with a richer and more complex account of moral feeling than has previously been appreciated in the literature. While it is recognized that feeling plays a certain role in moral motivation, what I hope to demonstrate here is that feeling is involved much earlier in the exercise of moral agency. Far from entering only at the point at which we are trying to muster the strength of will to carry out what we know we ought to do, feeling is present the moment we begin to deliberate about what it is that we ought to do.

It is well known that Kant connects judgment and feeling in the third Critique. However, the precise relationship between these two faculties remains virtually unexplored, in large part due to the unpopularity of Kant’s faculty psychology. This paper considers why, for Kant, judgment and feeling go together, arguing that he had good philosophical reasons for forging this connection. The discussion begins by situating these faculties within Kant’s mature faculty psychology. While the ‘power of judgment’ [Urteilskraft] is fundamentally reflective, feeling [Gefühl] reveals itself as essentially non-discursive. Their systematic connection emerges through the principle of purposiveness [Zweckmäßigkeit], which the former legislates for the latter. I claim that we must understand this notion in terms of the suitability of the faculties for each other, as displayed in mere reflection. That is, we can only recognize the fitness of two things for each other through feeling, which, in turn, is the only way that we can engage in the activity of merely reflecting judgment. I conclude by gesturing at an even further way in which judgment and feeling are related, based on their mutual role in orienting all of the faculties of the human mind.

My aim in this article is to provide an account of practical judgement, for Kant, that situates it within his theory of judgement as a whole – particularly, with regards to the distinction between the determining and reflecting use of judgement. I argue that practical judgement is a kind of determining judgement, but also one in which reflecting judgement plays a significant role. More specifically, I claim that practical judgement arises from the cooperation of the reflecting power of judgement with the faculty of reason – the former assisting the latter in the application of its principle. I conclude by considering a possible role for feeling in practical judgement.

Kant’s distinction between the determining and reflecting power of judgment in the third Critique is not well understood in the literature. A mainstream view unifies these by making determination the telos of all acts of judgment (Longuenesse 1998). On this view, all reflection is primarily in the business of producing empirical concepts for cognition, and thus has what I call a determinative ideal. I argue that this view fails to take seriously the independence and autonomy of the ‘power of judgment’ [Urteilskraft] as a higher cognitive faculty in its own right with its own a priori principle. Instead of seeing merely reflecting judgments as failed or incomplete acts of judgment, I argue that these are in fact paradigmatic of the activity of the power of judgment. More precisely, the reflecting power of judgment just is the power of judgment. Accordingly, reflecting judgment takes precedence over determining judgment; while the former operates according to a law that it gives itself, the latter requires another higher cognitive faculty to provide its principle. On my view, reflecting judgment should be understood as the capacity for purposive subsumption—most clearly seen in the activity of mere reflection.

This paper asks how Kant’s mature theory of freedom handles an objection pertaining to chance. This question is significant given that Kant raises this criticism against libertarianism in his early writings on freedom before coming to adopt a libertarian view of freedom in the Critical period. After motivating the problem of how Kant can hold that the free actions of human beings lack determining grounds while at the same maintain that these are not the result of ‘blind chance,’ I argue that Kant’s Critical doctrine of transcendental idealism, while creating the conceptual space’ for libertarian freedom, is not intended to provide an answer to the problem of chance with respect to our free agency. I go on to show how the resources for a refutation of chance only come about in the practical philosophy. In the 2nd Critique, Kant famously argues for the reality of freedom on the basis of our consciousness of the moral law as the law of a free will. However, Kant also comes to build into his account of the will a genuine power of choice, which involves the capacity to deviate from the moral law. I conclude by showing that this apparent tension can be resolved by turning to his argument for the impossibility of a diabolical will. This involves a consideration of the distinct kind of grounding relationship that practical laws have to the human will, as well as the way that transcendental idealism makes this possible.