Abstract

When I began working on my dissertation on Kant’s aesthetic theory in 1971, I was able to read virtually all of the extant literature on the Critique of Judgment in English, German, andFrench going back to Hermann Cohen’s Kants Begr¨undung der A¨ sthetik of 1889, while also reading most of what I wanted to read of eighteenth-century British and German aesthetics before Kant—not because I had paid my dues to Evelyn Wood, but just because there was not all that much to read.1 I pity the graduate student who sets out to write a dissertation on the third Critique now: since Donald Crawford, Francis Coleman, Jens Kulenkampff, Eva Schaper, and I published books on Kant’s aesthetics between 1974 and 1979 there has been a continuing flood of articles (this journal receives more submissions on Kant’s aesthetics annually than on any other historical topic) and books, a flood that has only accelerated since 2000. Confining myself only to monographs and anthologies on Kant’s aesthetics or the third Critique as a whole (but not those devoted exclusively to teleology) in English, German, and French on my shelves, and no doubt missing some, at least in German and French, I find twenty-eight monographs and anthologies published in the period between 1980 and 1999 and another twenty-seven just since 2000. (Indeed, two more have arrived on my desk since this article was written.)3 Someone setting out to work on the third Critique now has at least as many books from the last decade alone to read as I had in 1971 from the eight preceding decades. The present review will make only a small dent in this pile: I will discuss just five monographs and one introduction to the third Critique, all published in English in 2006 and 2007.