Thinking With Kant's Critique of Judgment

This paper aims to analyze the each and every point of Kant concepts i-e:sublime,beauty,Modality,4moments etc.

The Eighteenth Century, 2010

This essay examines how and why something so undefined as to be called the "power of judgment" [Urteilskraft] originates as a way of thinking about the capacity of the intellect in general during a time of fundamental philosophical inquiry named by Immanuel Kant "the Age of Critique" ("Zeitalter der Kritik") (Critique of Pure Reason, first ed., 1781), and that we, unlike Kant, have come to call "the Enlightenment," thereby delimiting the activity that, in his essay on the same ("Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?," 1784), Kant described instead as essential and ongoing: the "right" and "inclination" of humanity at any time to enact its self-constituting "freedom" "to think." 1 Since to think about the twin activities of "enlightenment" and "judgment" is, in Kant's view, to think about what the intellect itself can do rather than to judge a specific object or experience of the mind, any examination of the genesis of judgment in Kant's own thinking must acknowledge frankly that it can rely on no given empirical or contextual use of the term to determine what the mental "power" called "judgment" in Kant's Critique is. We do know that the "power of judgment" is the subject of Kant's Third Critique (Critique of the Power of Judgment, first ed., 1790; second ed., 1793) and that it alone, acting as "meditating link" ("Mittelglied") in Kant's architectonic system, connects the otherwise incommunicable "realms" ("Gebiete") of cognitive or theoretical and noncognitive or moral reason. 2 One can never recall often enough that, by submitting cognition of the world, on the one hand, and action in the world, on the other, to what he called "critique," Kant reversed the conventional definitions of these as, respectively, pure and practical. Pure reason, once submitted to the a priori formal limits of representational knowledge hypothesized in the First Critique,

Kantian Review, 2009

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2015

Human beings orient themselves in the world via judgments; factual, moral, prudential, aesthetic, and all kinds of mixed judgments. Particularly for normative orientation in complex and contested contexts of action, it can be challenging to form judgments. This paper explores what one can reasonably expect from a theory of the power of judgment from a Kantian approach to ethics. We reconstruct practical (prudential and moral) judgments on basis of the self-reflexive capacities of human beings, and argue that for the subject to see himself as committed to prudential goods it is necessarily implied that he understands himself as committed to moral judgment. However, to understand the normativity of understanding oneself as a being with practical commitments at all, the aesthetic judgment is introduced: the power of judgment in its pure form of selfreflexivity. We claim that aesthetic reflection and judgment is conditional on the possibility for human beings to enter the space of reasons, and therewith for practical self-understanding as such. The paper concludes with a preliminary sketch of different conceptual possibilities in fleshing out the role of the power of judgment in its aesthetic employment in developing mixed judgments.

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 2021

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.

Kant-Studien, 2024

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.

1998

Kant holds that when we judge a thing beautiful, we do so on no other basis than our pleasure in the contemplation of it, while at the same time, we presume to judge with validity for everyone. To explain how this is possible is the task of what he calls the critique of taste. Such a task has three main parts. The first is to describe and analyze the essential characteristics of judgments of this kind. The second is to identify the state of mind from which such judgments take rise, this being, according to Kant, a state of harmonious free play between the cognitive faculties. The third part is the “deduction,” or proof of our right to make judgments of taste. I argue that Kant is unsuccessful in the second and third parts of this task. The main interest of his critical effort, I find, lies in his descriptive and analytical account of judgments of taste, specifically in his attempt to comprehend both their subjective character and their claim to universal validity. The first of these he understands as consisting in the judgment’s being based in feeling; the universality claim he understands as a normative requirement. I argue that no interpretation can be faithful to these basic tenets of Kant’s analysis without also accepting his conclusion that the act of judging in some sense “precedes” the very feeling of pleasure on which it is said to be based. I attempt to make sense of this conclusion in terms of the peculiar kind of consciousness of pleasure involved in such a judgment.