Abstract

In Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology, Fiona Hughes argues that aesthetic judgment is exemplary of the subjective activity of judgment, the harmony of imagination and understanding, necessary for any cognition in general . Unlike ordinary empirical judgment, aesthetic judgment phenomenologically reveals to us the synthesizing activity of the power of judgment that remains concealed by the cognitive aim of ordinary empirical judgments . According to Hughes, aesthetic judgment is exemplary for cognition because, in aesthetic experience, the fit between mind and world, or how a subject has a point of access to an external world of objects, is not merely inferred but experienced . From here follows Hughes’ provocative claim that Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment in the third Critique completes the general transcendental project of establishing the possibility of a priori synthetic judgments . Thus, in contrast to the dominant “impositionalist” interpretation of Kant’s critical project, according to which our knowledge ultimately amounts to the content of our own mind, Hughes places aesthetic judgment at the center of Kant’s