Journal of the History of Philosophy

504 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:3 JULY 199 4 aims at all, or else his interests and aims were solelyor pr/mar//y political. But there is no need to accept this dichotomy or to reject what seems to be the only clearly warranted conclusion of Beiser's book: viz., that political aims indeed played an important and overlooked role in German philosophy during the 179os. That is a far cry indeed from conceding, with Beiser, that "the ideas [discussed by the philosophers of the 179os] were not harmless abstractions floating in Plato's world of forms, but potent weapons engaged in political struggle" or concluding, as he does, that "writers such as Kant, Fichte, Schiller, Herder, and Schlegel were so far from political indifference that they saw the whole purpose of their authorship as political" (8.). Frederick Beiser has again produced a genuinely throught-provoking and valuable work. It is both a brilliant defense of a bold and controversial thesis concerning the political or "cryptopolitical" character of virtually all German philosophy of the 179os and a storehouse of information, much of it otherwise unavailable, concerning the details and context of German philosophy during one its most seminal periods. Even those who are not completely convinced by Beiser's audacious thesis will admire the panache with which he presents it, and anyone interested in the history of modern German thought will benefit enormously from the copious information assembled in 'this book, which in this regard is a model of thorough and meticulous scholarship. In addition this a beautifully produced book, marred only by the publisher's unfortunate decision to print the author's notes as endnotes rather than as footnotes and by the inexplicable absence of a bibliography. DANIEL BREAZEALE UniversityofKentucky John H. Zammito. The GenesisofKant's "CritiqueofJudgment." Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, a99~. Pp. ix + 479. NP. This book reconstructs a history of the philosophical text, presumably because that history determines the text's meaning and use. In keeping with this guiding conviction, Zammito's book is a detailed study, containing extensive quotations, eighty pages of notes, and fifty pages of bibliography and index. The book seems to me to get a number of things right. The author correctly identifies a cognitive turn that he proposes led Kant to explore the nature of reflective judgments and to incorporate his critique of taste within a critique ofjudgment. He is right also that Kant construes art as a part of culture, which he sees in terms of the construction of a morally satisfactory order. Some of us have argued for the latter association for some time; some may still resist it but it is unlikely to go away. The book also contains an interesting account of Kant's criticism of Spinozism. Despite these strengths, and perhaps because its purpose is to explain the origins of the structure of the CritiqueofJudg-meat,the book fragments the text, leaving some of its philosophical issues unresolved when we would expect a study of the origins of a philosophical text to resolve them. In identifying cognitive and ethical turns, for example , the author relates the latter tO the nature and promise of art while his account BOOK REVIEWS 505 suggests that Kant's discussion of taste principally concerns the nature of the subject's experience of beauty. This raises the issue of the interrelation between these distinctions , and explaining how the two turns shaped the text does not clarify their interconnection . In this context, further, the book explains the nature of art by reference to a shared expressive and symbolic structure of products of genius and the sublime. But, given Kant's argument that the sublime does not need a deduction such as taste claims, too close an association between genius and the sublime will cost art its validity. And regardless of how detailed an account of symbolism and sublimity their association yields, it does not show how art and nature are expressive as Kant maintains. A comparable problem occurs with the phenomenology of subjective consciousness and its concomitant conception of experience that the author uses to present the development of Kant's thought from his earlier works up to the...