Abstract

This work is the result of a dissertation and it often reads like one. Repetitions and programmatic statements become tedious as Kohler argues the familiar thesis that Kant's faithful insights into aesthetic experience are severely undermined by an alien conceptual structure. Yet the painstaking analyses of certain passages basic to Kant's project are invaluable. There is probably not a single major issue in Kant's aesthetic theory of the beautiful and judgments of taste that does not receive a sensitive and responsible hearing. In the end Kohler tempers traditional criticism that Kant "subjectivized" aesthetic judgments with the recognition that Kant made a decisive turn towards an adequate comprehension of aesthetic experience. That turn is "the most fundamental, methodological idea of the Kantian aesthetic," viz., the idea that the question of the essence of the beautiful becomes an inquiry into the structure of that experience in which the beautiful is constituted.