Ted Kinnaman

From Kant’s point of view, the puzzle about judgments of taste is that they claim to normativity—in Kant’s terms, to intersubjective validity or communicability—but nevertheless have only a subjective basis or “determining ground (Bestimmungsgrund).” The task of §9 of the Critique of Judgment in particular is to delineate an account of aesthetic response that accommodates Kant’s solution to this puzzle. If the aesthetic pleasure “precedes” the judgment—in other words, if the judgment is about the pleasure—then the judgment of taste would be merely private, like other judgments about things that cause us pleasure. So the judgment must precede the pleasure. But “nothing… can be universally communicated except cognition, and representation so far as it belongs to cognition. (V:217) Therefore, the determining ground of the judgment of taste must be “the mental state encountered in the relation of the mental powers of representation to each other insofar as they relate a given cognition to cognition in general.” (V:217) A bit later, he calls this state of mind a “feeling of the free play of the powers of representation in a given representation for a given representation for a cognition in general.” The appeal to ‘cognition in general’ can do what Kant needs it to do only if it conveys the normativity of cognition simpliciter but not its conceptual determinacy. I want to propose that we take ‘cognition in general’ to mean ‘integration into a unified system of empirical cognition.’ If I am successful, it will have the consequence that the basis for the normativity of taste— that is, the expectation that others ought to agree with our judgments-- is the same as the basis for the normativity of cognitive judgments.

In this paper I defend two closely related claims. The first claim, to which the first section of the paper is devoted, is that for Kant taste is a sort of cognition, that is, a form of awareness of reality for which questions of justification are appropriate. Nevertheless, In our appreciation of natural beauty we are aware of the suitability of appearances for inclusion in a rational system, albeit in a way that is subject to important limitations in comparison with scientific cognition. In the second section of the paper, I will use this reading of Kant’s theory of taste to throw new light on Kant’s account of genius later in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.”

Kant tells us that just as understanding unifies appearances under concepts, reason seeks to unify empirical concepts into a system. But why do empirical concepts require unification in a system? The text of the Critique of Pure Reason provides the basis for starkly divergent answers to this question. On the one hand, Kant seems to take the Transcendental Analytic to have demonstrated the ability of the understanding to employ both pure and empirical concepts without participation by reason. On the other hand, in a number of places Kant says things that imply that reason’s assumption that empirical concepts can and ought to be unified in a hierarchical system implicates understanding in addition to the categories, perhaps even elevating systematicity to a condition of the possibility of experience on a par with the categories. I argue for the intermediary position that systematization is necessary for the coherence of our empirical concepts, which is for Kant the criterion of empirical truth. The goal of complete coherence among our concepts is part of reason’s task of criticizing itself, and thus for the project of setting metaphysics on the “secure course of a science.” (Bvii)

In this dissertation I argue that Kant intended the Critique of Judgment to offer a transcendental deduction for the ideas of pure reason. The structure of my argument is as follows: In the first two chapters I look at Kant's account of understanding and reason in the Critique of Pure Reason. Here I make two claims: First, I argue that Kant wanted not only to limit but also to defend an important positive role for reason, namely the role of constructing a system organized around ideas. Second, I show that despite the importance of this positive conception of reason in the first Critique, his argument for the legitimacy of the ideas of pure reason is unsatisfactory, leaving him open to the criticism that these ideas are mere empty illusions. In Chapter Three, I look at important criticisms of Kant in the 1780s, and argue that they can be understood as making exactly this point. Finally, in the last two chapters and in the conclusion I argue that the Critique of Judgment as a whole and the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" in particular are best understood as Kant's attempt to address this problem by providing a transcendental deduction of the "principle of the puruposiveness of nature," which is essentially just the proposition that nature is suitable for the formation of the sort of system Kant describes

The central dilemma motivating the Antinomy of Taste in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” centers on two seemingly incompatible but generally accepted propositions: On the one hand, we demand (Kant thinks) that others agree with our judgments of taste, which would be nonsensical if we did not suppose that beauty were in some sense a property of objects; on the other hand, disputes about taste cannot be settled through argument or proof in the manner of theoretical or moral disputes, which suggests that we do not think of beauty as an objective property. Kant’s solution to this antinomy is to claim that judgments of taste indeed make use of a concept, but an indeterminate concept. I argue that judgments of taste are about objects [Gegenstände], and that the indeterminate concept of beauty differs from determinate ones in the manner of evidence that can be given for claims making use of it-- they can be supported only by the appeal to the subjective feeling of the harmony of the faculties.

Despite apparent similarities between them, in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant makes several attempts to distinguish his idealism from Berkeley’s. I argue that Kant’s arguments in three of the four places where he explicitly distances himself from Berkeley are insufficient to their task because they attack only Berkeley’s empiricism rather than his immaterialism. Although a close reading of the Refutation of Idealism lies beyond the scope of this paper, my reading of Kant’s critique of Berkeley will produce an interesting result concerning the reading of this difficult passage: If Kant is to offer a convincing defense of the charge that Berkeley reduces the world to sheer illusion while his does not, then the Refutation of Idealism must be aimed at proving, on a transcendental idealist basis, the existence of things in themselves.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical EssaysTed KinnamanPaul Guyer, editor. Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Pp. xxiii + 253. Cloth, $75.95. Paper, $27.95.The volume under review is a collection of essays on a wide range of topics concerning Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment. All the papers included here have been published previously, although many of them in places where they might not be easily accessible to English-speaking philosophers. While some of the articles will be familiar to Kant scholars, this collection should be useful to specialists and valuable to students first delving into the third Critique.One essay in the volume, Guyer's own piece on "Kant's Principles of Reflecting Judgment," will be of particular interest to Kant scholars. Guyer's thesis here is that the account of reflecting judgment Kant offers in the Critique of the Power of Judgment is both continuous with the account of regulative principles of reason in the Critique of Pure Reason and the basis of the unity of the third Critique as a whole. He supports this by demonstrating how each of the sorts of judgment discussed in the work can be seen as an application of the broader account of reflecting judgment in general. Guyer identifies five such applications, and shows that each of them has three features central to regulative principles: they set a goal of constructing a system within a certain specific range of cognitions; they require the suitability of objects for attainment of the goal in question, and thus are transcendental [End Page 499] and not merely logical principles; and they supply heuristic advice for the investigation of nature. Thus every form of judgment can with justice be considered as an instance of the general activity of reflecting, that is, finding a universal for a given particular.Several of the essays included here concern the most prominent issues relating to the Analytic of the Beautiful. Nick Zangwill's piece deals with the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment, while Christopher Janaway's "Kant's Aesthetics and the Empty Cognitive Stock" debunks what he sees as misguided readings of the role of concepts in judgments of taste. In "The Idealism of Purposiveness," an excerpt from his 1993 book Kantian Aesthetics Pursued (Edinburgh, 1993), Anthony Savile criticizes what he calls the "established reading" of Kant's claim that beautiful objects exhibit "purposiveness without purpose." On this reading, to say that a thing is purposive without purpose is to say that it appears to be designed, but to no particular purpose. Savile argues instead that we should take purposiveness without purpose to indicate that an object is suitable for a function, but not as a result of conscious design. Articles by Eva Schaper (from her well-known book on Kant's aesthetics) and Malcolm Budd discuss the distinction between free and dependent beauty and the account of the sublime, respectively.Some of the other selections in the volume are interesting for their focus on somewhat neglected aspects of the third Critique. One such aspect is the role of the imagination in Kant's account of aesthetic appreciation, and by extension in cognition more generally. In "Imaginative Freedom and the German Enlightenment," Jane Kneller argues that appreciation of the role of imaginative freedom in Kant's account of aesthetic judgment helps to connect Kant to the Enlightenment rationalist tradition that saw the value of art in its ability to educate and improve those who appreciate it. This education cannot, of course, be of the most straightforward nature, since Kant emphatically argues that to judge a thing beautiful is altogether different from judging it morally good. Instead, Kneller argues, our awareness of our own imaginative freedom provides us with evidence of our ability to realize the "highest good" on earth, evidence otherwise denied us in Kant's philosophy. Also addressing the theme of imagination is Donald Crawford's "Kant's Theory of Creative Imagination," in which he points out striking parallels between Kant's account of the imagination's role in mathematics and in the creation of fine art.Another aspect of Kant...

In this paper I will be making a connection between Kant’s Critique of Judgment and John McDowell’s Mind and World. This connection is an apt one because McDowell’s work is concerned with the same issue that is at the center of the third Critique, namely the question of a “fit” between our concepts and the world of our experience. In the first section of the paper, I situate McDowell’s view in relation to Kant. Their key point of difference, I think, is that McDowell wants to reject Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena. In the second section, I argue that in the Critique of Judgment Kant takes up the same problem with which McDowell is concerned in Mind and World, but without adopting his solution to this problem. In the third and final section, I speculate on Kant’s reasons for insisting on holding on to the distinction between phenomena and noumena.

Kant says that the Critique of Judgment offers a “transcendental deduction” for the principle of the purposiveness of nature, or PPN. This is the proposition that empirical laws must be viewed as “having been given by an understanding (even though not ours)” so that they can be unified in a system. I argue that if we take the PPN to concern the application to appearances of ideas of pure reason, we can understand why its transcendental deduction is so important to Kant’s philosophical project, and why he is correct in thinking that it does not mark a retraction of his central philosophical views.

The precise nature of the relation between cognition and aesthetic judgment is clearly central to an understanding of Kant’s theory of taste in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.” The Critique of Judgment itself is necessary, Kant says, because judgment constitutes a cognitive power in its own right, and its critique is therefore necessarily a part of the overall critique of pure reason. More particularly, however, the connection between cognition and aesthetic judgment plays a crucial role in Kant’s deduction of judgments of taste: That deduction is intended to vindicate the claim to intersubjective validity implicit in the judgment of taste. This claim can only be justified, Kant thinks, if the judgment of taste has as its “determining ground” some form or aspect of cognition, for “[n]othing... can be communicated universally except cognition, as well as presentation insofar as it pertains to cognition.” The “purposiveness without purpose” exhibited by the beautiful object must therefore be purposiveness for “cognition in gener¬al.”[Erkenntnis überhaupt, V:217] But this use of cognition to establish the intersubjective validity of judgments of taste is also the source of the most serious problem with Kant’s theory. Kant clearly holds the view that to judge an object to be beautiful is to judge that it is in some sense suited for cognition. The theory of knowledge presented in the Critique of Pure Reason, however, concludes that all objects of experience are cognizable in the sense of being susceptible of subsumption under pure concepts of the understanding. If to say that an object is beautiful is to say that it is cognizable, and all objects are cognizable, then Kant’s theory has the consequence that all objects are beautiful. Furthermore, this connection between beauty and cognition threatens to make beauty a determinate concept, like the concepts of ‘cause’ or ‘chair.’ The result is that dealing with what I will call the problem of ugliness has become, in the words of one commentator, the “pre-eminent task” of interpretation of the third Critique. I will argue that this problem is best solved if we recognize a connection between Kant’s need in both the first and third Critiques for a defense of reason, and his claim, at the end of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” that “beauty is the symbol of the morally good.”[V:353] The latter claim is the culmination of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” the argument of which is intended by Kant to show that every rational being must view at least some objects in nature as being suited for inclusion in a philosophical system organized around ideas of pure reason. In this system moral reason and theoretical understanding are related in a harmonious whole, with moral reason taking the leading role. The cognizability which is claimed for the object in the judgment of taste does not consist in the object’s being susceptible of subsumption under a concept. Rather, to say that an object is suited for “cognition in general” is to attribute to it the more specific property of being subsumable under a concept which can in turn be included in a unified philosophical system. At the same time, the relation between beauty and morality is only “indirect,” which is why beauty is the symbol but not the schema of the morally good. A key aspect of this reading will be the claim that from an epistemological standpoint the relation between natural beauty and the idea of the morally good is just the same as that between appearances and ideas of pure reason if the systematization of cognition is to be possible– the existence of beauty in nature serves to “establish the reality” of these ideas. Adopting this reading of the argument of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” not only allows us to avoid saddling Kant with the view that all objects are beautiful, but also makes clear the hitherto less than clear relation between the published Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, in which Kant is primarily concerned with the concept of a philosophical system, and the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” which centers on the seemingly unrelated notion of beauty as “purposiveness without purpose.”

In both the Treatise on Human Nature and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understand-ing David Hume defends the thesis that we are responsible for actions only insofar as those ac-tions reflect our character. In this paper I argue that this “character thesis” is untenable, and is incompatible with the naturalism that underlies his overall philosophy. His argument for the character thesis depends crucially on his account of the causation of human actio¬n. This is in contrast to Alisdair MacIntyre, who defends a similar thesis in On Virtue on the basis of his view about the intelligibility of human actions. But if we examine the connection between Hume’s character ethic and his account of causation, we find that it conflicts with his claim that one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ This is no more than MacIntyre says is neces-sary for any virtue ethic. So what if we simply drop the ‘no ought from is’ thesis? This thesis is crucial to Hume’s naturalism, which is itself appealing to moral philosophers because it promises to avoi¬d picturing human thought as a sort of supernatural occurrence. As a result, we can conclude that if, in attempting to save H’s virtue ethic, we must give up his naturalism, we must also give up one the main reasons for being attracted to H’s worldview. We may also have to give up the very basis for Hume’s account of causation, and thus for his virtue ethic. Finally, there is a potential problem in that Hume’s causation thesis may not be as different from MacIntyre’s intelligibility thesis as they at first appear, and thus the incoherence of Hume’s view threatens MacIntyre’s virtue ethic as well.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 559-580 [Access article in PDF] Problems in Kant's Vindication of Pure Reason Ted Kinnaman One of the most important questions in interpreting the Critique of Pure Reason concerns the proper way of characterizing Kant's view of the faculty of reason. Clearly, one of Kant's intentions is to show that reason is incapable of cognition of objects such as God or the soul, because such cognition would require going beyond possible experience. At the same time, he also wants to defend reason, to "institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions" (Axi-xii). Denied the possibility of attaining theoretical knowledge, reason instead finds its fulfillment in its practical employment, striving to bring the world into conformity with the moral law. This, however, can make it appear that the task of guiding action is one that reason must merely settle for, having unfortunately been denied its true goal, knowledge of the supersensible. It is thus difficult to see how Kant can claim to have vindicated reason.Recently, a number of scholars have suggested that a proper understanding of Kant's account of reason can correct this purely negative view of Kant's theory. In particular, Richard Velkley and Susan Neiman have argued separately that Kant's emphasis on the goal-directed nature of reason's task helps to justify Kant's belief that the first Critique defends as well as limits reason. 1 Because this reading truly does justice to Kant's insistence on the unity of theoretical and practical reason, it goes a long way toward bringing out Kant's overall project in the Critique of Pure Reason. But I will argue that Velkley's and Neiman's defense of Kant's conception of reason, while persuasive as a reading of Kant's intentions in the first Critique and a clear improvement over a simply negative view of reason, is ultimately unsuccessful philosophically. I will show that Kant's defense of reason in the Critique of Pure Reason is vulnerable [End Page 559] to two strong objections, of which Kant himself was made aware of in the years after the publication of the Critique: We have no grounds, on the basis of the argument of the first Critique, to think that the goals reason sets for us can be achieved; nor does Kant's theory provide a basis for defending his conception of reason against other plausible and coherent sources of warranted assertion, such as religion or culture. Indeed, Kant's appreciation of the seriousness of the deficiency of his defense of reason in the Critique of Pure Reason helps to explain the importance of the concept of the purposiveness of nature in the later Critique of Judgment. First I explain in detail why it appears that Kant's analysis of reason produces only a negative result—that reason cannot attain knowledge of its objects. Second, I will look at how the readings of Velkley and Neiman attempt to defend Kant's account of reason's positive use. I will then argue that without some argument for the suitability of appearances to systematization according to ideas of pure reason, we can be assured neither of the possibility of reaching the goals reason sets for us nor of the superiority of Kant's views over competing views on morality and religion. In particular, I will look briefly at the writings of Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder, with the intention of showing that they offer at least prima facie plausible alternatives to Kant's view of reason. 1. The central problem concerning Kant's conception of reason in the Critique of Pure Reason results from the conjunction of two of his most important philosophical claims. First, it clearly is crucial to Kant's philosophical outlook that "we cannot cognize any object that is thought except through intuitions that correspond to those concepts" (B165). But, second, Kant says that unlike the understanding reason does not relate directly to intuition, and...