Kant’s account of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment has been extremely influential, prompting extensive discussion of the psychology, affect, moral significance, and relevance to artistic representation of the sublime on his provocative view. I focus instead on Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime in connection to his theoretical critical project, namely his attempt to characterize human cognitive powers and to limit human pretensions to knowledge of the supersensible. I argue, first, that his account of the psychology of the (...) sublime is designed to explain not just its affective character, but also to address challenges concerning the coherence of an experience of something as transcending one’s cognitive abilities. Thereby, I argue moreover, Kant provides an alternative, demystifying account of mystical experiences, in which humans might take themselves to intuit that which is beyond human understanding or reason, and thus to claim that they have special cognitive access to the supersensible, transcending the limits Kant claims to establish for human cognition. Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime is not merely so reductive of mystical experience, however; it also, I suggest, describes the aesthetic of Kantian critique itself. (shrink)

Kant famously insists that free will is a condition of morality. The difficulty of providing a demonstration of freedom has left him vulnerable to devastating criticism: critics charge that Kant's post-Groundwork justification of morality amounts to a dogmatic assertion of morality's authority. My paper rebuts this objection, showing that Kant offers a cogent demonstration of freedom. My central claim is that the demonstration must be understood in practical rather than theoretical terms. A practical demonstration of x works by bringing x (...) into existence, and what the demonstration of freedom brings into existence is a moral will, a will regulated by the moral law and capable of acting in accordance with it. Since to act morally is to act freely, bringing a moral will into existence actualizes our capacity for freedom and demonstrates that we possess it. To confirm the viability of such a demonstration, Kant must establish that agents can regulate their wills by practical principles, and that practical judgments are efficacious of themselves (i.e., that non-Humean motivational internalism is true). Kant, I argue, is successful on both counts. (shrink)

Feeling, for any animal, is a faculty of comparing objects or representations with regard to whether they promote its vital powers or hinder them. But whereas these comparisons presuppose a species-concept in non-rational animals, nature has not equipped the human being with a universal principle or life-form that would determine what agrees or disagrees with it. As humans, we must determine our mode of life for ourselves. Contrary to other interpretations, I argue that this places the human capacity for pleasure (...) and displeasure outside of nature and in a realm of spirit. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider various ways in which aesthetic value bears on, if not serves as evidence for, the truth of independent statements in set theory.... the aesthetic issue, which in practice will also for me be the decisive factor—John von Neumann, letter to Carnap, 1931For me, it is the aesthetics which may very well be the final arbiter—P. J. Cohen, 2002.

I argue for a new reading of Kant's claim that respect is the moral incentive; this reading accommodates the central insights of the affectivist and intellectualist readings of respect, while avoiding shortcomings of each. I show that within Kant's ethical system, the feeling of respect should be understood as paradigmatic of a kind of pleasure, pleasure in the moral. The motivational power of respect arises from its nature as pleasurable feeling, but the feeling does not directly motivate individual dutiful actions. (...) Rather, the feeling is motivational in the sense that, after an agent has acted in a morally good way, the pleasure that results from that action contributes to the cultivation of virtue in the agent and, consequently, morally good actions in the future. Understanding the feeling of respect to be moral pleasure not only gives us insight into how finite rational beings develop virtue, but also a new way of understanding respect as an incentive. (shrink)

Many of us are all too familiar with the experience of taking pleasure in things we feel we ought not, and of finding it frustratingly hard to bring our pleasures into line with our moral judgements. As a value dualist, Kant draws a sharp contrast between the two sources of practical motivation: pleasure in the agreeable and respect for the moral law. His ethics might thus seem to be an unpromising source for help in thinking about how we can bring (...) our agreeable pleasures into line with our moral values. But I argue that a careful reading of Kant’s texts reveals a helpfully realistic view about the extent to which we can modify our agreeable pleasures. On my interpretation, Kant shows us how to hold together two seemingly incompatible ideas: on the one hand, that pleasure in the agreeable is resistant to rational direction, and on the other hand, that we can cultivate these pleasures with a view to ethical self-transformation. (shrink)

There have been more articles on Kant's aesthetics in the history of the Journal than on the next four leading figures in the history of aesthetics combined. I argue that this is because Kant's aesthetic theory consists of multiple levels of theory that makes it accessible to and important for multiple approaches to the subject itself. Continuing issues for both Kant interpretation and for aesthetics in general arise at each of these levels, including the plausibility of the claim to universal (...) validity in judgments of taste, the nature of the free play of the imagination in aesthetic experience, the character of aesthetic pleasure, the proper objects of aesthetic judgment, and the moral significance of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Kant’s anthropological lectures introduce scepticism about our psychological capacity to experience happiness conceived as gratification or contentment. Aesthetic experience is in a position to inform an alternative conception of happiness that not only is more adequate to the idea of happiness than either gratification or contentment but also may more easily conform to the moral law’s constraints than gratification. As an ‘ideal feeling’, pleasure in beauty serves as a model for how best to enjoy even sensual pleasures and otherwise ‘private’ (...) sensations. In the end, the thirdCritiquesuggests that this alternative conception is more ‘appropriate’ to humankind (§60, 5: 355). (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)

Putting together Kant's theory of emotion is complicated by two facts: (1) Kant has no term which is an obvious equivalent of "emotion" as used in contemporary English; (2) theorists disagree about what emotions are. These obstacles notwithstanding, my dissertation aims to provide the foundation for a reconstruction of Kant's theory of emotion that is both historically accurate and responsive to contemporary philosophical concerns. In contrast to available approaches which rest on contested assumptions about emotions, I start from the generally (...) accepted and reasonable premise that what we call "emotions" refers in Kant to a set of mental states, some of which he associates with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure ("feelings"), others with the faculty of desire ("desires"). I then proceed to examine the nature of these two kinds of mental states and their proper treatment. I argue that Kantian feelings are representations of objects' relation to the subject, that have a felt quality, and dispose their subject to certain behaviors. While feelings can only motivate action by causing desires and have no temporal direction, desires - except for certain wishes - are future-directed, which allows them to motivate actions immediately (but they need not bring action about). Equipped with this account of feelings and desires, I proceed to examine the kind of treatment Kant prescribes for them, and argue that feelings (except affects) should be cultivated, that is, acquired and improved so that they could be used to pursue rational ends, while inclinations, i.e., habitual sensuous desires, should generally be disciplined, that is, constrained by rules. The resultant picture is compelling because it rests on minimal assumptions about emotions and successfully incorporates the phenomenological, evaluative, and dispositional functions traditionally associated with emotions. (shrink)

Kant’s Critique of Judgment is a storehouse full of provocative concepts and structures, which is why, since at least the 1970’s, many contemporary Kant scholars and philosophers of other sorts have attempted to mine and explicate this text to varying degrees of success. Among these concepts and structures, there are a few that continue to evade complete elucidation. One of the most well tread, albeit still contested, grounds that appears in the third Critique is “purposiveness without purpose.” Picking up from (...) some recent interpretations of Kantian aesthetics, I contend that it is possible to discover at least three forms of purposiveness without purpose in aesthetic judgments. A second concept, the sensus communis, I will contend, is as important as the three sites of purposiveness without purpose. In fact, I will show how the sensus communis, in its ternary form, can be mapped onto the three sites of purposiveness without purpose; the two concepts cannot be separated. Finally, this mapping will allow for an attempt at what I could refer to as an “inconstruction” of the Deduction of Aesthetic Judgments that will engage many of the long-standing questions surrounding this text. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to defend a consistent interpretation of §9 of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. In this section, Kant describes the relation between pleasure in the beautiful and the judgment of taste. I present my case in three parts. In the first section, I provide some background to Kant’s aesthetic theory and introduce the interpretative issue that is central to this paper. In part two, I defend the “sensation-precedes-pleasure” interpretation of §9 that explicates Kant’s claim (...) that the judging of the object precedes the pleasure proper in a judgment of taste. In the third part, I show how the interpretation I proffer can be employed in justifying Kant’s further claim that pleasure in the judgment of taste is experienced as an ennobled and elevated pleasure. (shrink)