Two dominant interpretations of Kant's notion of adherent beauty, the conjunctive view and the incorporation view, provide an account of how to form informed aesthetic assessments concerning artworks. According to both accounts, judgments of perfection play a crucial role in making informed, although impure, judgments of taste. These accounts only examine aesthetic responses to objects that meet or fail to meet the expectations we have regarding what they ought to be. I demonstrate that Kant's works of genius (...) do not fall within either of these categories. The distinguishing features of these works, namely, originality and exemplarity, become unrecognizable on these interpretations because originality and exemplarity lie in the work's ability to exceed one's expectations concerning its form and content. They contribute to artistic beauty through alternative transformation methods distinct from that of abstraction, namely, concept expansion and repudiation. These additional accounts of transformation lead to a rather surprising outcome: works of genius turn out to be paradigm cases where one can and indeed ought to form informed pure judgments of taste. (shrink)

Recent work on evaluative discourse and judgements of personal taste in particular has focused on active interpersonal disagreements. I explore the communicative import of judgements of taste: why we issue them, why we sometimes get involved in disputes about taste, and what acceptance or rejection of such judgements consists of. The view developed here – that the core use of such judgements lies in seeking to align our attitudes in view of a shared project – makes it (...) plausible that the use of a sentence of the form ‘a is F’ (where F is a predicate of taste) semantically expresses the simple, semantically articulated proposition that a is F, is subject to an unrelativized truth predicate and not enriched by personal standards or perspectives. Our model shows that personal standards or perspectives are, contrary to a widely shared assumption in the debate, not the entities or objects that require coordination. What is shared among interlocutors are projects that require the coordination of the participant’s strategic choices. The semantically articulated proposition functions as a focal point, proposed by the speaker, for coordinating their choices. (shrink)

When contrasting something with its opposite, such as positive numbers with negative numbers, repulsion with attraction, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, Kant some-times says the latter are not merely cases of negation or privation of the former, but that they have their own, independent grounds. But do negative judgments of taste really have a priori grounds? There are two kinds of negative judgments of taste: “This is not beautiful” and “This is ugly.” Can they be (...) a priori judgments? Or are they always impure and without a priori basis? In this essay, I argue that they can be pure a priori judgments. I will give detailed analyses of examples involving part-whole relationships, objects of art, and aesthetic ideas. In addition, detailed discussions of opposing interpretations will be offered. (shrink)

Kant’s argument in § 38 of the *Critique of Judgment* is subject to a dilemma: if the subjective condition of cognition is the sufficient condition of the pleasure of taste, then every object of experience must produce that pleasure; if not, then the universal communicability of cognition does not entail the universal communicability of the pleasure. Kant’s use of an additional premise in § 21 may get him out of this difficulty, but the premises themselves hang in the air (...) and have no independent plausibility. What Kant offers as a proof of our right to make judgments of taste is more charitably construed as an indirect argument for the adequacy of a speculative explanation of a *presumed* right to make judgments of taste. (shrink)

이 글의 목표는, 칸트가????판단력비판????에서 연역하고 있는 취미판단이 아프리오리한 종 합판단으로서 성립하기까지의 과정을 해명하는 것이다. 그러한 목표를 달성하기 위한 기 본적인 방법은 다음을 고려해서 이루어진다. 취미판단이란, 그 누구도 아닌 판단자 자신이 느낀 흡족의 감정으로부터 출발해서 내려질 수 있는 판단이다. 나아가서 취미판단은 그 누 구도 아닌 판단자 자신의 판단력(취미)의 반성작용을 거쳐서만 내려질 수 있는 판단이다. 그러므로 이 글은, 실제로 아름다운 것에 대한 쾌의 감정을 느끼고 그 감정에 대해 반성하 는 당사자의 시점에서, 한 판단자가 취미판단을 내리기까지의 과정을 살펴본다. 이와 같은 방법을 통해, 취미판단이 (...) 아프리오리한 종합판단으로서 성립하게 되기까지의 과정에 대한 칸트의 이해가 드러남으로써, 취미판단을 둘러싼 방대한 문제들에 관한 논의들에, 칸트에 입각한 토대가 제공되기를 희망한다. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that “affect” should be an important notion in political philosophy. We do this, firstly, by tracing the notion of affect through the philosophical system of Immanuel Kant. We find that affect plays a threefold role for Kant, which can be mapped onto Hannah Arendt’s distinction between natural humanity, moral humanity, and political/aesthetic humanity (our rephrasing). Affect clearly plays a role on the level of natural humanity, and it is arguably to be pinpointed from within moral (...) humanity. With regard to political/aesthetic humanity, we argue that in order to understand how pure judgments of taste can vouch for the ‘bridging’ of the gap between natural and moral humanity, an understanding of the role of aesthetic _affection_ is essential. Secondly, we broaden the Kantian scope of affect by discussing how Žižek, in Lacan’s wake, has tried (but failed) to systematically examine the political relevance of pure judgments of taste. To understand how humans are able to come together politically, we need a better understanding of affect as that which allows _pure form_ to effectuate a subjectively but universally shareable proclivity for (dis)pleasure and desire. (shrink)

An abbreviated version of my paper "Can Kants Deduction of Judgments of Taste Be Saved?" Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 84.1 (2002): 20-45.

RESUMEN El trabajo se propone, en primer lugar, analizar el desacuerdo sin falta como elemento central en los juicios de gusto, y examinar tres posiciones: contextualismo deíctico, no deíctico y relativismo. En segundo lugar, mostrar cómo el contextualismo deíctico y el relativismo dan cuenta de dicho fenómeno, pero solo el segundo puede hacerlo y acomodarse a un fenómeno central en esos desacuerdos: la retractación. ABSTRACT The objective of the article is, first of all, to analyze faultless disagreement as a central (...) element in judgments of taste and to examine three positions: deictic contextualism, non-deictic contextualism, and relativism. Secondly, it shows how deictic contextualism and relativism account for that phenomenon and argues that only the latter can do so and at the same time accommodate a central feature of those disagreements: recantation. (shrink)

Though the notion of common-sense plays an important role in Kant’s aesthetic theory, it is not immediately clear what Kant means by this term. This essay works to clarify the role that common-sense plays in the logic of Kant’s argument. My interpretive hypothesis is that a careful examination of the way common-sense functions in Kant’s account of judgments of taste can help explain what this notion means. I argue that common-sense names the capacity to discern the relation between (...) the cognitive faculties by means of a feeling, and I conclude that this understanding of common-sense lays the groundwork for an account of the unity of judgments of taste. I conclude that attending to Kant’s notion of common-sense is especially important because it highlights the anthropological significance of Kant’s account of beauty. (shrink)

The present paper begins by attempting to show what predicate “beautiful” means when used in synthetic a priori judgements of taste regarding the objets of nature, and lays out how Kant justifies the claims conveyed by those judgments. It then examines the meaning and the claims of the judgments of taste regarding beauty in objets of art, and finishes by focusing attention on judgments of the beauty of musical compositions.

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant develops a rigorous formulation of aesthetic judgments, in which he makes a sharp distinction between judgments of taste and judgments of the agreeable if only to dismiss judgments of the agreeable as worthy objects of study. Kant is primarily concerned with judgments of taste, the main example of which is judging something to be beautiful. He asserts that such judgments are subjective, universal, necessary, (...) disinterested, and do not presuppose a purpose. The other type of aesthetic judgment are judgments of the agreeable, “which are the kind of judgment expressed by saying simply that one likes something or finds it pleasing.” These are judgments of what, in Kant’s words, please “the senses in sensation” as opposed to pleasing ourcognition in reflection. (shrink)

Kant's use of the leading thread of his table of logical forms of judgment to analyze judgments of taste yields more results than Allison's account allows. It reveals in judgments of taste the combination of two judgments: a descriptive judgment about the object, and a normative judgment about the judging subjects. Core arguments of Kant's critique of taste receive new light from this analysis.

Contextualists and assessment relativists neglect the expressive dimension of assertoric discourse that seems to give rise to faultless disagreement. Discourse that generates the intuition makes public an attitudinal conflict, and the affective -expressive dimension of the contributing utterances accounts for it. The FD-phenomenon is an effect of a public dispute generated by a sequence of expressing opposite attitudes towards a salient object or state of affairs, where the protagonists are making an attempt to persuade the other side into joining the (...) other’s camp. (shrink)

Kant holds that when we judge a thing beautiful, we do so from no other basis than our pleasure in the contemplation of the object, 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. I distinguish among three kinds of explanation that Kant offers. One is a theoretical account of the mental state from which judgments of (...) class='Hi'>taste supposedly arise--what Kant describes as a harmonious free play of the cognitive faculties. Another kind of explanation, made on the basis of the first, is an attempted "deduction" or proof of our right to make judgments of taste. I argue that Kant's theory of harmonious free play has little in the way of either content or plausibility, rendering his attempt to derive the universal validity of judgments of taste from it otiose. The main interest of his critical effort, I find, lies in the descriptive and analytical part of his 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 curious 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. (shrink)

When Kant announces in a letter to Reinhold that he has discovered a new domain of a priori principles, he situates these principles in a ‘faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure ’. And it is indeed in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, named in this letter the Critique of Taste, that we find his elucidation of the relation of the principle of purposiveness to the feeling of pleasure. The kinds of judgements in which our feelings are evaluated in accordance (...) with a principle are what Kant names reflective judgements. And while reflective judgements emerge in the third Critique to include not only judgements of taste, but also judgements of the sublime and teleological judgements of nature, in this paper I will focus on the first, as the question of the relatedness of reflection to pleasure is most pronounced in this context. There is no consensus in Kant scholarship as to what the structure of reflective judgements is, as evidenced by the widely disparate views of those such as Guyer, Allison, Pippin, Ginsborg, Lyotard, and others. (shrink)

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the (...) normativity of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)

Kant and the Claims of Taste, published here for the first time in paperback in a revised version, has become, since its initial publication in 1979, the standard commentary on Kant's aesthetic theory. The book offers a detailed account of Kant's views on judgments of taste, aesthetic pleasure, imagination and many other topics. For this new edition, Paul Guyer has provided a new foreword and has added a chapter on Kant's conception of fine art. This re-issue will (...) complement the author's companion volume, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, which places Kant's aesthetics in its historical context and examines the fundamental connection between Kant's aesthetics and his moral theory. (shrink)

Music is an ancient and ubiquitous form of human expression. One important component for which music is sought after is its aesthetic value, whose appreciation has typically been associated with largely learned, culturally determined factors, such as education, exposure, and social pressure. However, neuroscientific evidence shows that the aesthetic response to music is often associated with automatic, physically- and biologically-grounded events, such as shivers, chills, increased heart rate, and motor synchronization, suggesting the existence of an underlying biological platform upon which (...) contextual factors may act. Drawing on philosophical notions and neuroscientific evidence, I argue that, although there is no denying that social and cultural context play a substantial role in shaping the aesthetic response to music, these act upon largely universal, biological mechanisms involved with neural processing. I propose that the simultaneous presence of culturally-influenced and biologically-determined contributions to the aesthetic response to music epitomizes Baumgarten’s equation of sensory perception with taste. Taking the argument one step further, I suggest that the heavily embodied aesthetic response to music bridges the cleavage between the two discrepant meanings—the one referring to sensory perception, the other referring to judgments of taste—traditionally attributed to the word “aesthetics” in the sciences and the humanities. (shrink)

A series of recent experimental studies have cast doubt on the existence of a traditional tension that aestheticians have noted in our aesthetic judgments and practices, viz. the problem of taste. The existence of the problem has been acknowledged since Hume and Kant, though not enough has been done to analyse it in depth. In this paper, we remedy this by proposing six possible conceptualizations of it. Drawing on our analysis of the problem of taste, we argue (...) that the experimental results in question are not a real challenge to its existence. By contrast, they provide empirical evidence in its support. (shrink)

According to Guyer, Kant’s entire aesthetic theory rests on the imputation of intersubjectivity to judgments of taste. Empiricist theories could not establish intersubjectivity; rationalist ones could do so only by construing aesthetic judgment as confused cognitive or moral judgment. But even in the pre-Critical aesthetics, which Guyer teases out of Reflexionen, letters, and student notes, anticipations of a duality in intersubjectivity’s aesthetic function can be found. The first version and the printed version of the Critique of Judgment’s Introduction, (...) in differentiating aesthetic judgment from determinant and teleological judgment, reveal that intersubjectivity must both cause aesthetic pleasure and ground aesthetic judgment. (shrink)

George Dickie's The Century of Taste is a readable and informative guide to the family of eighteenth-century aesthetic theories that sought to explain our judgments of taste. Dickie treats the five theories he discusses out of chronological order so that he can give pride of place to his favorite view, that of David Hume. Dickie's grand narrative claims Hume "all but perfected" the theory of taste, while the associationists, on the one hand, and Kant, on the (...) other, led it down a pair of blind alleys. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Critique of Taste: The Feeling of Life by Katalin MakkaiYoon ChoiKatalin Makkai. Kant’s Critique of Taste: The Feeling of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. viii + 209. Hardback, $99.99. Paperback, $29.99.This monograph offers a bold and original interpretation of Kant’s theory of reflective judgment, focusing on judgments of taste (hereafter “aesthetic judgments”) and the special problem that Kant takes such (...) judgments to raise. In Makkai’s preferred terms, the problem is that aesthetic judgments are normative—they demand universal agreement—but also subjective (14). How are such judgments possible? Though the problem may seem clear enough, Makkai suggests that a closer look is in order; indeed, her “main focus is on working out a proper understanding of the problem” (15). Makkai undertakes this task over the course of five relatively short chapters, introducing several interpretive theses that come together to transform the problem of aesthetic judgment in illuminating, sometimes surprising, ways. [End Page 509]Chapter 1 introduces Kant’s theory of judgment, arguing that it is primarily about what Kant calls the “power of judgment” (44). This is the power exercised in the activity of “adopting a stance,” an activity that is not only identificatory but also evaluative, that reveals something about the judging subject as well as the object judged (63). Though aesthetic judgment is one way in which the power of judgment is exercised, there is something special about it, as Kant himself flags (KU AA 5:193, quoted on 37). For aesthetic judgment “models” an “essential aspect” of the power of judgment in a way that no other kind of judgment does (38). One of Makkai’s interpretive aims is to make sense of this claim; she accordingly returns to it in her conclusion.Chapter 2, however, turns to aesthetic judgment, focusing on the Second Moment of the Analytic (KU AA 5:211–19). In this section, Kant introduces the much-discussed claim that aesthetic judgment involves the “free play” of imagination and understanding (KU AA 5:217). According to Makkai, it is significant that Kant introduces the idea of “universal communicability” along with the idea of “free play” (KU AA 5:217). Communicability, in Makkai’s view, is underwritten by the activity of “making [one’s thoughts and feelings] communicable,” an activity that is involved not just in communicating one’s thoughts and feelings, but in knowing what one is thinking and feeling in the first place, and indeed in making aesthetic judgment possible, as Makkai goes on to argue (81). For when I have an “aesthetic encounter,” I come across a beautiful object, and though I “cognize it,... there is ‘something else’ there in my experience of it that I find I want to articulate” (90). In the activity of trying to “make communicable” what this “something else” is, the imagination and understanding are brought into free play, a state “characterized,” according to Makkai, by the “exercising” of my “capacity for rendering (something) communicable” (89; emphasis in original). The profound pleasure that accompanies this state, Makkai adds, arises from being “animated” by the beautiful object to this heightened activity in which my faculties are in “attunement” with each other and with the object; it is the feeling of being “brought to life” that Makkai refers to in her title (100–101).It is a central part of this view that to experience an object as beautiful is to respond to the way the object really is. As Makkai puts it, “a condition of the possibility of performing a judgment of taste is a prior fact of the object being beautiful” (125). But in what sense, then, is aesthetic judgment subjective? Makkai addresses this question in chapter 3, arguing that whereas cognitive judgment asserts, aesthetic judgment “acknowledges” (136). And to acknowledge a beautiful object, it is not enough to identify a beautiful object correctly. It is necessary to experience the object as beautiful: to encounter it and take pleasure in it (136). Aesthetic judgment thus has an “essentially first-personal character” (127). As Makkai puts it later, in such a judgment, I represent “my experience of the object, my pleasure in it”—that is... (shrink)

I explore the question of whether Kant's theory in the _Critique of Judgment_ can account for judgments of taste regarding the ugly. While there has been much debate regarding this issue in recent decades, many scholars consider the harmonious free play of the faculties to be central to this question. Harmony between the imagination and understanding is stressed in a series of articles regarding pure judgments of taste of the ugly beginning in the mid-1990s and extending (...) into the 2000s. I investigate the status of harmony in relation to judgments of taste and assess whether harmony among these faculties is necessary to free play. In order to do so, I compare three cases and consider how they relate to cognitive activity: judgments of taste of the beautiful, sublime experience, and judgments of taste regarding works of genius. I argue that pure judgements of taste of the ugly are indeed possible by analyzing the cognitive activity produced in the aforementioned cases. These instances show that in Kant's system, cognitive harmony may not be necessary to free play. Rather, disharmony can also be produced by our aesthetic experience with the sublime, works of genius, and the ugly. I argue that in spite of the contrapurposiveness and disharmony that experience with the ugly spurs, it nonetheless can serve to further cognitive activity and quicken the mind, cultivate taste, and develop community, thus revealing a higher, and perhaps unexpected, purposiveness. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that the traditional Kantian division between two different types of judgments, judgments of personal preference and judgments of taste, does not apply to some contexts in which metalinguistic negotiations take place. To begin, I first highlight some significant similarities between predicates of personal taste and aesthetic predicates. I sustain that aesthetic predicates are gradable and multidimensional, and that they often produce metalinguistic negotiations, characteristics that have motivated an individual treatment for (...) predicates of personal taste. Secondly, contrary to Kant’s claim, I maintain that there are cases where judgments of personal preference are intersubjectively valid; in some contexts of metalinguistic negotiation, judgments of personal preference direct universality to a similar extent as judgments of taste. Some examples of real-life conversations will be presented to illustrate this point. (shrink)

In assessing the veridicality of utterances, we normally seem to assess the satisfaction of conditions that the speaker had been concerned to get right in making the utterance. However, the debate about assessor-relativism about epistemic modals, predicates of taste, gradable adjectives and conditionals has been largely driven by cases in which seemingly felicitous assessments of utterances are insensitive to aspects of the context of utterance that were highly relevant to the speaker’s choice of words. In this paper, we offer (...) an explanation of why certain locutions invite insensitive assessments, focusing primarily on ’tasty’ and ’might’. We spell out some reasons why felicitous insensitive assessments are puzzling and argue briefly that recent attempts to accommodate such assessments (including attempts by John MacFarlane, Kai von Fintel and Anthony Gillies) all fail to provide more than hints at a solution to the puzzle. In the main part of the paper, we develop an account of felicitous insensitive assessments by identifying a number of pragmatic factors that influence the felicity of assessments. Before closing, we argue that the role of these factors extend beyond cases considered in the debate about assessor-relativism and fit comfortably with standard contextualist analyses of the relevant locutions. (shrink)

The Significance of Taste: Kant, Aesthetic and Reflective Judgment ROBERT B. PIPPIN 1? THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION of the "Analytic of the Beautiful" in the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" is easy enough to identify. On what basis, if any, could one claim some sort of universal a priori validity for judgments of the form, "This is beautiful"? In Kant's well-known analysis of this question, the issue is reformulated as: By what right could one claim that another person ought to (...) feel pleasure in the presence of certain objects? Let us call this the "basic question."' There is controversy enough about what Kant means by this basic question and how a deduction of the validity of such judgments is supposed to work. However, shortly after Kant began serious work on a "Critique of Taste" in ~787, the whole issue became even more complicated when the proposed work became a full-blown Critique of Judgment. The question of aesthetic judg- ment was presented within the new, larger topic of reflective judgment, was presumably thereby linked to the problem of teleological judgments, and so to the great general theme of the whole of the third Critique: the purposiveness I am grateful, for comments and criticisms, to Henry Allison, Volker Gerhardt, Rudolf Makkreel, Miles Rind, and to two anonymous referees for this journal. ' Kant's own formulation: "How is a judgment possible in which the subject, merely on the basis of his own feeling of pleasure in an object,.. (shrink)

Kant suggests that the chief advantage of his theory of taste over Hume’s is its a priori rather than empirical foundation. But his claim to have provided such a foundation for judgments of taste is questionable, and, in the end, both authors ground judgments of taste in a canon of proven or classical objects of taste rather than in determinate principles of taste. However, Kant does go beyond Hume in sketching a theory of (...) aesthetic production, as well as reception in the form of his theory of artistic genius, according to which works of genius can be exemplars for the originality of subsequent artists as well as stimuli for the free play of imagination and understanding in their audiences. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Kant has a far more communitarian theory of aesthetic life than is usually acknowledged. I focus on two aspects of Kant’s theory that might otherwise be taken to support an individualist reading, namely, Kant’s emphasis on aesthetic autonomy and his characterization of judgments of taste as involving demands for agreement. I argue that the full expression of autonomy in fact requires being a member of an aesthetic community and that within such a (...) community, judgments of taste are issued as invitations to others to engage their faculties towards the goal of shared aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

Taste, according to Hans, governs our lives. It determines the choices we make in life, the judgments we pass on other people and their actions, the patterns and rhythms of our existence. For such a large claim, one would expect a rigorous account of what taste is and a convincing explanation of the ontological, aesthetic, and moral roles that Hans attributes to it. Unfortunately, the reader will be disappointed. To be sure, Hans tells us that he wants (...) to “resist defining the word” but promises to make the word “richer over the course of the book”, as he thought he did with the word “play” in his first book. However, the reader is likely to feel that, over the course of this book, the word “taste” either has been rendered too rich to be digestible or remains too bland to justify Hans’s own “great claims for taste”. The introduction gives a number of apparently inconsistent characterizations of taste that the patient reader hopes will somehow be made consistent by the end of the book, such as “taste is an inborn capacity”, “Taste is shaped by experience, by cultural milieu, by the historical circumstances”, and “taste is a function of biological mechanisms”. Taste is also said to be a capacity, a faculty, a mechanism, and a device. By the end of the introduction, we already have a rich brew which ironically threatens to produce a bland concept, the concept of “taste [as] everything”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 (2002) 406-408 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment Henry E. Allison. Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 424. Cloth, $69.95. Paper, $24.95. In his new book, Henry Allison provides a study of the (...) two introductions and the first half of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment to stand alongside his previous books on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (1983) and Kant's Theory of Freedom (1990). Those books showed Allison's commitment to the unity and coherence of Kant's thought, and it is the aim of the present book to demonstrate the connections between the two halves of Kant's third Critique, that is, Kant's aesthetics and his teleology, as well as to demonstrate the connections between Kant's aesthetic theory and both his theoretical and his practical philosophy. In order to defend the unity of the third Critique, Allison defends Kant's characterization of the judgment of taste as a species of reflective judgment, and argues that our judgments of beauty depend upon the principle of the purposiveness of nature that is also the basis for judgments about the systematicity of natural laws. To display the connections between Kant's aesthetics and his theoretical philosophy, [End Page 406] Allison uses the first Critique's distinction between the quid facti and the quid juris to explicate the relation between Kant's "analytic of the beautiful" and his "deduction of pure aesthetic judgment"; he then defends the success of Kant's strategy for the deduction of judgments of taste by grounding them in the general conditions of the possibility of cognition. Finally, in order to explain Kant's connection between aesthetics and morality, Allison interprets Kant's theory of the "intellectual interest" in the beautiful as evidence of nature's amenability to our achievement of the ends of morality, an assurance that we need not be motivated in the first place to act as morality requires, but rather to prevent our motivation to be moral from being undermined by our own predisposition to radical evil. He then defends Kant's thesis that all beauty, and thus natural as well as artistic beauty, can be seen as an expression of aesthetic ideas, and specifically of the morally requisite idea of nature's amenability to the achievement of our moral objectives.There is much in this approach with which I can agree, and some with which I cannot. I agree that there is much in Kant's general conception of reflective judgment that illuminates his conception of judgments of beauty, yet I do not think that the principle of taste is analogous to the principle of the purposiveness of nature, because it does not play a role in making particular judgments of taste analogous to the role the latter principle plays in the conduct of scientific inquiry. My own interpretation of Kant's model for making particular judgments of taste is not fundamentally different from that which Allison offers under the rubric of the quid facti, although we disagree about which of the four "moments" of the "Analytic of the Beautiful" are part of the meaning of a judgment of beauty and which function more as grounds for making judgments with such a meaning. But I am not persuaded by Allison's defense of Kant's deduction of pure judgments of taste, that is, his answer to the quid juris, from the objections that I and others have raised to it. Finally, although there are large areas of agreement between our interpretations of Kant's theory of intellectual interest in the beautiful, the claim that aesthetic experience is evidence of nature's amenability to the realization of the ends that we adopt in the name of morality is only part of the story that Kant develops in the Critique of Aesthetic... (shrink)

It is somewhat striking that two interrelated elements of Hume's account of causation have received so little attention in the secondary literature on the subject. The first is the distinction of causation into the natural and the philosophical relations: Although many have tried to give accounts of why Hume presents two definitions of causality, it is often not clear in these accounts that the one definition is of causality as a natural relation and the other is of causality as a (...) philosophical relation, where to make the contrast between these two kinds of relations we need to give a naturalistic account of natural relations and a normative account of philosophical relations. (That Hume intends this to be the contrast will be defended in more detail below.) The second element is that, in many cases of our inferences from cause to effect, "we must follow our taste and sentiment" (A Treatise of Human Nature [T], 103), where the appeal to taste here, as in morality and aesthetics, is not to be understood as up to the individual. Rather, Hume makes it clear both in Book 3 of the Treatise and in "Of the Standard of Taste" that there are standards to which our individual judgments (in morality, aesthetics, or causality) must conform. My purpose in this paper is to attempt to provide an interpretation of Hume's account of causality that brings these two elements explicitly into the foreground. This interpretation is, to a greater extent than usual, a reconstruction of Hume's account of our causal inferences, drawing, as I have indicated above, from a range of texts not normally associated with Hume's discussion of causality. As such, this interpretation should be considered as exploratory in nature, perhaps focussing too single-mindedly on these two elements in an attempt to make out as strong a case as possible for their relevance in understanding Hume's account of causal inference. (shrink)

Against interpretations of Kant that would assimilate the universality claim in judgments of taste either to moral demands or to theoretical assertions, I argue that it is for Kant a normative requirement shared with ordinary empirical judgments. This raises the question of why the universal agreement required by a judgment of taste should consist in the sharing of a feeling, rather than simply in the sharing of a thought. Kant’s answer is that in a judgment of (...) taste, a feeling assumes the role of predicate. Such a solution presents a problem as serious as the one it purports to solve. (shrink)

This chapter explores the approaches taken by eighteenth-century British writers to the relationship between aesthetic judgments of beauty, sublimity, and the picturesque, and the faculty of taste that makes them possible. Writers in the tradition emphasize the fit between qualities in objects so judged and a capacity to be affected by them. This common theme unites the various contributions, but they can be divided in terms of the faculty on which different writers place emphasis. A first group isolates (...) an internal sense ; a second emphasizes the imagination, and a third appeals to principles of association. Each group is discussed in turn and details of the respective positions explored. (shrink)

The paper deals with pure judgments of taste in Kant's aesthetics regarding the meaning they achieve due to the presence of the other subject. In his Critique of Judgment Kant defines the subject as a physical individual endowed with feelings, related not only to objects, but rather expanding this relation on the community of others. Therefore, the aesthetic relation to an object, which is the precondition of the pure judgment of taste, involves implicitly a recquirement on the (...) subject to renounce his narrow egoistic limitations. This is why the aesthetic relation corresponds to a whole series of ethical definitions. (shrink)

Abstract Kant claims that the basis of a judgment of taste is a merely subjective representation and that the only merely subjective representations are feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Commentators disagree over how to interpret this claim. Some take it to mean that judgments about the beauty of an object depend only on the state of the judging subject. Others argue instead that, for Kant, the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is best understood as a response (...) to its qualities, and that, accordingly, feelings of pleasure or displeasure are no different from other representations, such as colors or smells. While I agree that the judgment of taste is best understood as asserting a claim about an object's qualities, I argue that the distinction Kant makes between feelings of pleasure or displeasure and other representations should not be ignored. I show that one's liking or disliking for an object is merely subjective in the sense that its significance depends on what one has made of oneself through one's aesthetic education. The judgment of taste, then, is merely subjective because one must first become the kind of person whose feelings have the right significance at the right time before one can determine whether an object's qualities make it beautiful. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste.” ed. by Babette BabichTina BaceskiBabette Babich, ed. Reading David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste.” Berlin: deGruyter, 2020. Pp. VII + 333. ISBN: 978-3-11-058564-3, paper, $24.99.Reading David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste,” a volume of essays edited by Babette Babich, purports to offer the reader a “collective stud[y]” of Hume’s famous essay and its related concerns. (...) Almost all the contributions have previously been published, either as journal articles or book chapters. “Of the Standard of Taste” is helpfully included at the beginning of the volume, though Hume Studies readers will already be familiar with the text. The book is divided into five parts. The editor’s introduction comprises part I. Hume’s essay makes up the entirety of part II. Parts III–V are organized around different general themes, with each part containing from three to five essays. In total the book contains twelve essays.Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” is a “classic” work in aesthetics today, but what entitles it to this appellation? Indeed, why do we judge any work to be of “classical value?” “Taste” plays a central role in evaluations of this sort, particularly the “taste” of modern scholars. But, as Hume knew, the historical sensibilities of judges are liable to change over the years, and so “some things that appear in their day to be sure classics, things that have until then withstood the test of time, can undergo a shift in value for another era” (13). In her Introduction, Babich tells an engaging, if not always easy to follow, story about Hume’s “deathbed readings” to illustrate the point. From final conversations with Adam Smith, we know that Hume was reading Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead. But which of Lucian’s several such dialogues was he reading? When the question was put to Annette Baier (who was at that time herself writing about Hume and “last things”), she confessed to being puzzled by the very [End Page 341] question (6). Baier’s initial puzzlement and subsequent investigations to resolve this confusion revealed just how much her own sensibilities diverged from those of Hume’s day. Babich observes: “[T]he Lucian who was popular in Hume’s own day and even through to the beginning of the twentieth century, has today so diminished in “classical” value that he is sufficiently esoteric that Hume scholars like Baier have trouble tracking him down” (13). My own initial confusions reading the Introduction are likely attributable, in part, to the fact that I, too, was unfamiliar with Lucian. Ironically, this fact is, itself, further evidence of Babich’s point: yesterday’s literary gems have dimmed in value today because modern scholars are not conversant with their works. I have already ordered my copy of Lucian.The book’s rationale is explained as follows: “The entire concern of this volume is all about the critical basis for such claims [which works have “classical” value]. How can we determine a standard for estimating tomorrow’s likely classic, whether in the literary domain or other areas where taste plays a role” (14)? There is more at stake with respect to Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste,” however, than merely predicting “literary futures.” The question concerning a standard of taste has important consequences for improving judgments in a much wider arena: art more broadly (painting, architecture, sculpture, etc.), but perhaps also science and even economics, to mention but a few. Only one of the essays collected here takes up the topic of “classical value” and “literary futures” per se: the editor’s own. The reader is left to make out what they can from the various contributions. But the essays can all advance the discussion insofar as each one attempts to shed light on an important related concern, e.g., the nature of taste, the nature of a standard, influences on taste, and so on. In what follows, I will offer a brief account of some of the essays in parts III–V, so the reader can get an overall flavor (taste) of the volume.Part III... (shrink)

This collection dedicated to and including David Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste," offers a much needed resource for students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, political reflection, value and judgments, economics, and art. The authors include experts in the philosophy of art, aesthetics, history of philosophy as well as the history of science. Contributors include Babette Babich, Howard Caygill, Timothy M.Costelloe, Andrej Démuth / Slávka Démuthová, Bernard Freydberg, Peter Kivy, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Christopher MacLachlan, Emilio Mazza, Roger Schiner, Roger (...) Scruton, and Dabney Townsend, . (shrink)

Kant claims in the third Critique that one can make about wine the merely subjective judgment that it is agreeable but never the universally valid judgment that it is beautiful. This follows from his views that judgments of beauty can be made only about the formal (spatiotemporal) features of a representation and that aromas and flavors consist of formless sensory matter. However, I argue that Kant's theory permits judgments of beauty about wine because the experience displays a temporal (...) structure: the aromas and flavors evolve over the course of a tasting from the bouquet through the palate to the finish. An analogy with music, which Kant describes as 'a play of sensations in time', illuminates how wine qualifies as an object of pure judgments of taste: the 'structure' of a wine can be compared to harmonic structure, and its development throughout the taste can be compared to the unfolding of melody and harmonic progression. (shrink)

In the recent debate on the nature of Kantian ‘content of cognition’, some scholars argue that Kantian judgments of taste bear a nonconceptual mental content because these judgments lack any conceptual determining functions of some kind. In this article, I challenge the latter standpoint for the very simple reason that judgments of taste are no propositions, but rather formative evaluations. This implies as well the fact that we are initially in possession of no aesthetic representation. (...) Hence, neither propositionally nor non-propositionally is an aesthetic representation eligible to be counted as mental content. Instead, as the representation of the beautiful just contents oneself with itself, it refers to its objects relationally, yet not representationally in the full-fledged sense. Regarding the properties of objects, it remains consequently always ineffectively monotonous. On the occasion of agreement of the relevant cognitive faculties, we may, however, count the representation of the beautiful as phenomenal content. -/- . (shrink)

This Element examines the entirety of Kant's Critique of Taste with particular emphasis on its political and moral aims. Kant's critical treatment of aesthetic judgment is both an extended theoretical response to influential predecessors and contemporaries, including Rousseau and Herder, and a practical intervention in its own right meant to nudge history forward at a time of civilizational crisis. Attention to these themes helps resolve a number of puzzles, both textual and philosophic, including the normative force and meaning of (...) judgments of taste, and the relation between natural and artful beauty. (shrink)