The thesis of this book is that Kant employs a single conception of reason throughout his analysis of the fundamental principles of natural science, morality and politics, rational religion, and the practice of philosophy itself, and that this conception is that reason is the source of the ultimate goals or ideals for our conduct of both inquiry and action, but never a faculty that yields cognition of objects that exist independently of us, whether sensible or supersensible. In Neiman’s words, “The (...) basis of Kant’s reconception” of reason “is the denial that the rational is, or is centrally concerned with, the cognitive”, and the heart of his thesis of the unity of reason is his view that “the regulative principles of reason... shape our actions in science, morality, religion and philosophy itself”. Neiman’s work is refreshingly ambitious in its attempt to demonstrate that these generalities hold for all four of the areas she lists, but the general claims themselves will not come as a surprise to contemporary students of Kant. So for the work to succeed, it would have to break new ground in either the detailed analysis of the regulative functions of reason or in our understanding of reason’s general function in unifying the several branches of philosophy as Kant understands it. In my view, the book does neither. Neiman offers some interesting insights about Kant’s treatment of science, morality, and religion, but does not offer a rigorous analysis of the structure of Kant’s thought in any of these areas that goes beyond what many others have already provided. More importantly, she misses the opportunity to make a major advance in our understanding of the general structure of Kant’s thought. For what she describes is really similarities in our use of reason in the various areas of our inquiry and conduct; she does not show how Kant uses his conception of reason to unify the apparently disparate realms of theory and practice, or, in his terms, of nature and freedom. This task dominates the Critique of Judgment, where, far from merely recapitulating his previous accounts of the regulative use of reason in both science and morality, Kant argues as he never did before that we must be able to see the realms of nature and freedom not merely as compatible but as unified, yet also makes explicit the regulative status of reason and of this vision of unity precisely by stating his theory of the unity of reason as the culmination of a theory of reflective judgment. Neiman largely ignores Kant’s own most mature account of the unity of reason. (shrink)

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. (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)

This paper considers Kant’s understanding of organisms by undertaking a developmental approach to the issue. It presents three different arguments Kant posits in the third Critique regarding the kind of explanation organisms require, and then considers how Kant ultimately seems to find these arguments wanting in the Opus postumum. Due to Kant’s sustained reflections on how to incorporate teleological explanations of organisms into his natural philosophy toward the end of his career, it is argued that it is ultimately our awareness (...) of the freedom of our own purposiveness that leads us to understand organisms in terms of purposes, which causes a fundamental split between the teleological and mechanical views of nature. In this way, Kant can establish an important link between his theoretical and practical philosophy. (shrink)

"The importance and significance of Kant's aesthetics have been widely debated. This work presents an original interpretation of Kant's account which is based on rethinking the nature of Critical Philosophy. Gary Banham presents the argument that the Critique of Judgment needs to be read as a whole. Aesthetics is investigated in relation to all three critiques with the recovery of a larger sense of the 'aesthetic' resulting. This broader notion of aesthetics is connected to the recovery of the critique of (...) teleology in an original presentation of Kant's critical enterprise as constituted by the attempt to think the meaning of ends."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 4 Seiten: 589-600.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Rhetoric of Romantic ProphecySara GuyerThe Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Ian BalfourStanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Pp. 368. $70.00, cloth; $29.95, paperback.Not insignificantly, Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot are the first two names to appear in Ian Balfour's excellent study The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Benjamin and Blanchot are authors of two of the most influential essays on romanticism, essays that, it just so happens, Ian Balfour is (...) responsible for introducing to an English-reading audience. 1 Thus, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy is not only a long awaited, prize-winning book by a major theorist of romanticism, it is also a book written by the first English translator of Benjamin's and Blanchot's essays. Both Blanchot's "The Athenaeum" and Benjamin's "On the Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism" expose the incompletion of the romantic project and unsettle the relation between the past and the present. They also provide a context for understanding the kind of book that Ian Balfour has written. Like its eminent predecessors, this book focuses on local phenomena, yet its force far exceeds the field that it so thoughtfully treats. In it, Balfour shows how a turn to the past (to a set of historical texts) has the effect of unsettling the present, and he argues that an apparent turn to the future (prophecy) has as its issue the present.The book's introduction, entitled "The Call of Prophecy and the Future (After Benjamin)," alerts us to the fact that Benjamin and Blanchot, who have written extensively on language, also have written compellingly on the prophetic. While the prophetic today most often seems to signify religion's naive or violent claims on the future (and by implication on the present), in Benjamin's and Blanchot's work—and in Balfour's work—"the prophetic" (by which Balfour means not a genre, but a "mode") poses problems of referentiality and interpretation. Benjamin's treatment of messianism and allegory in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" offers Balfour a clear framework for undertaking this examination. And, in style and approach, Benjamin is the thinker with whom Balfour has the closest kinship. Like Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Balfour's The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy is a historical study that is not historicist, that is, it does not aim to account for a historical phenomenon, but is a philosophical and rhetorical investigation into language.However, it is Blanchot's brief essay "Prophetic Speech"—a review of André Neher's L'essence du prophétisme—that informs Balfour's thinking about the prophetic. Indeed, Balfour's book can be read as a meditation on the rhetorical implications of Blanchot's suggestion that: [End Page 257]Prophetic speech announces an impossible future, or makes the future it announces, because it announces it, something impossible, a future one would not know how to live and that must upset all the sure givens of existence. When speech becomes prophetic it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence. 2With this passage, Blanchot not only recasts the conventional account of prophecy (and, implicitly, the symbolic reading upon which prophecy relies), but also shows that if prophecy turns the future into a referent—and hence becomes history—the present is lost. Balfour's transfer of Blanchot's account of the prophetic to romanticism is broadly explained by the debates within romanticism (and contemporary criticism of romanticism) about referentiality and the primacy of symbol over allegory, debates that today are most well-known to non-romanticists through Paul de Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporality."Balfour offers a lucid account of his project—and its relation to history and historicist criticism—when he explains:If there is a historical force to the analysis here, it lies not in the attempt to show how representative these texts were of some larger, pervasive phenomenon—although they sometimes are—but rather to mark what was possible to be thought and done at a given moment. More than that, the analysis implicitly and sometimes explicitly confronts... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 539-545 [Access article in PDF] Lewis White Beck on Reasons and Causes Paul Guyer Essays by Lewis White Beck: Five Decades as a Philosopher. Edited by Predag Cicovacki. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1998. Pp. xxxii, 244. This volume reissues twelve previously uncollected pieces by the late Lewis White Beck (1913-1997) and also includes a reminiscence by a former colleague, (...) an introduction by the editor, and a bibliography of Beck's work. Beck was of course the most distinguished American Kant scholar of his time, who made enduring contributions to scholarship with his translations of Kant's writings in moral philosophy, originally published in Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy (Chicago, 1949); his trenchant articles on the analytic-synthetic distinction from the early 1950s, collected in his Studies in the Philosophy of Kant (Indianapolis, 1965); his unsurpassed A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago, 1960); his monumental Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass., 1969); his various articles on Kant's treatment of causation, collected in Essays on Kant and Hume (New Haven, 1978); and in his independent philosophical work, The Actor and the Spectator (New Haven, 1975). The present volume, edited by a student from Beck's last years at the University of Rochester, where he spent most of his career, includes articles on a variety of subjects published between 1939 and 1984, and it might seem to be little more than an act of piety toward a now departed but still revered teacher. But a core group of these articles are intimately connected with Beck's central scholarly and philosophical concerns and are well worth republication and renewed study.The articles included in the volume are three early pieces on several central issues in the philosophical debates of the time, "The Synoptic Method" (1939), "The Formal Properties of Ethical Wholes" (1941), and "The Principle of Parsimony in Empirical Science" (1943); an early piece on aesthetics, "Judgments [End Page 539] of Meaning in Art" (1944); two pieces on the tensions between causal explanations and rational evaluations of human behavior, "Psychology and the Norms of Knowledge" (1954) and "Conscious and Unconscious Motives" (1966); Beck's 1971 Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, a skeptical discussion of "Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life"; an overview of philosophies of time, "World Enough, and Time" (1979); a piece on styles of philosophical writing called "Philosophy As Literature" (1980); and then three pieces on Kant, published after the second of Beck's two earlier anthologies of his articles on Kant: "Kant on the Uniformity of Nature" (1981), "Five Concepts of Freedom in Kant" (1987), and "What Have We Learned from Kant?" (1984). With the last paper, the editor departs from the strictly chronological order he has previously employed, presumably in order to end the volume on a suitably general and retrospective note.I will focus my comments on the two systematic papers on psychological explanation and rational evaluation as well as on the first two Kant papers, all of which touch upon the issues that were central to Beck in his philosophically most important works, the 1960 Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and the 1975 The Actor and the Spectator, and which point toward what was Beck's leading idea in both his philosophical and interpretative work: it concerns the idea that the causal explanation of human behavior as a subset of natural events and the rational explanation and justification of human actions are two entirely separate perspectives on the same subject-matter that can be rendered compatible only by the thought that each, causal explanation of behavior on the one hand and rational assessment of actions on the other, is only a regulative ideal for our conduct of inquiry and thus that neither represents a metaphysically privileged point of view. This was an approach that Beck claimed to have been foreshadowed in Kant's resolution of the "Antinomy of Teleological Judgment" in his last great critique, the Critique of the Power... (shrink)

This new translation is an extremely welcome addition to the continuing Cambridge Edition of Kant’s works. English-speaking readers of the third Critique have long been hampered by the lack of an adequate translation of this important and difficult work. James Creed Meredith’s much-reprinted translation has charm and elegance, but it is often too loose to be useful for scholarly purposes. Moreover it does not include the first version of Kant’s introduction, the so-called “First Introduction,” which is now recognized as indispensable (...) for an understanding of the work. Werner Pluhar’s more recent translation, which does include the First Introduction, is highly accurate when it confines itself to rendering Kant’s German. However, it is often more of a reconstruction than a translation, containing so many interpretative interpolations that it is often difficult to separate out Kant’s original text from the translator’s contributions. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews have provided a translation that compares to or exceeds Pluhar’s in its literal approach to the German, but that confines all interpretative material to footnotes and endnotes, so that the text itself, with all its unclarities and ambiguities, lies open to view. In addition, Guyer, as editor of the volume, has provided a great deal of valuable supplementary material. This includes an introduction with an outline of the work and details of the history of its composition and publication, and a wealth of endnotes offering clarifications of the text, background information, and, most strikingly, many references to related passages in Kant’s voluminous writings, particularly in connection with Kant’s earlier writings related to aesthetics. The edition also records differences among the first three editions of the work, and—of particular interest—erasures from and additions to Kant’s manuscript of the First Introduction. Although the introduction and endnotes reflect interpretative views that are sometimes disputable, this supplementary material makes the present edition into a valuable resource even for those able to read the text in German. (shrink)

In ‘Humean Critics: Real or Ideal?’ : 20-28), Stephanie Ross argues that four of Hume's five criteria for qualified critics in “Of the Standard of Taste’, namely practise, comparison, freedom from prejudice, and good sense, should be understood as conditions for improving the basic constituent of taste, namely delicacy of perception, in real critics whose judgments can be canonical or guiding for the rest of us, but that delicacy of perception needs to be supplemented by what she calls imaginative fluency (...) and emotional responsiveness to provide a fuller conception of the basic constituents of taste. I support Ross's approach by showing that Hume's immediate successors in Scottish aesthetics Alexander Gerard and James Beattie understood his conception of the qualifications of good critics and supplemented his conception of the basic constituents of taste in precisely the same way that Ross does. (shrink)

Two foremost spokesmen for the German Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant, continued the defence of the separation of church and state that was at the heart of the Enlightenment in general and advocated by such great predecessors as Roger Williams and John Locke and contemporaries such as James Madison. The difference between Mendelssohn and Kant on which I focus here is that while Mendelssohn argues against his critics that Judaism is the appropriate religion for a specific people without being (...) appropriate for all, thus implying more generally that different religions are appropriate for groups with different histories, Kant argues first that Judaism is not a genuine religion at all, second that Christianity provides the most suitable symbols or aesthetic representations of the core truths of the religion of reason, and finally that in any case all historical religion will ultimately fade away in favour of the pure religion of reason. Kant’s assumptions are tendentious and his conclusion implausible; Mendelssohn’s view that religion and differences of religion are here to stay provides a far stronger basis for genuine toleration and a strict separation of church and state. (shrink)

This book offers a radically new account of the development and structure of the central arguments of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: the defense of the objective validity of such categories as substance, causation, and independent existence. Paul Guyer makes far more extensive use than any other commentator of historical materials from the years leading up to the publication of the Critique and surrounding its revision, and he shows that the work which has come down to us is the (...) result of some striking and only partially resolved theoretical tensions. Kant had originally intended to demonstrate the validity of the categories by exploiting what he called 'analogies of appearance' between the structure of self-knowledge and our knowledge of objects. The idea of a separate 'transcendental deduction', independent from the analysis of the necessary conditions of empirical judgements, arose only shortly before publication of the Critique in 1781, and distorted much of Kant's original inspiration. Part of what led Kant to present this deduction separately was his invention of a new pattern of argument - very different from the 'transcendental arguments' attributed by recent interpreters to Kant - depending on initial claims to necessary truth. (shrink)

In this updated edition of his outstanding introduction to Kant, Paul Guyer uses Kant’s central conception of autonomy as the key to his thought. Beginning with a helpful overview of Kant’s life and times, Guyer introduces Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology, carefully explaining his arguments about the nature of space, time and experience in his most influential but difficult work, _The Critique of Pure Reason_. He offers an explanation and critique of Kant’s famous theory of transcendental idealism and shows (...) how much of Kant’s philosophy is independent of this controversial doctrine. He then examines Kant’s moral philosophy, his celebrated ‘categorical imperative’ and his theories of duty, freedom of will and political rights. This section of the work has been substantially revised to clarify the relation between Kant’s conceptions of "internal" and "external" freedom. In his treatments of Kant’s aesthetics and teleology, Guyer focuses on their relation to human freedom and happiness. Finally, he considers Kant’s view that the development of human autonomy is the only goal that we can conceive for both natural and human history. Including a chronology, glossary, chapter summaries and up-to-date further reading, _Kant, second edition _is an ideal introduction to this demanding yet pivotal figure in the history of philosophy, and essential reading for all students of philosophy. (shrink)

The essays in this volume, including two published here for the first time, explore various aspects ofKant's conception of the system of nature, the system of ...

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)

This volume collects Kant's most important ethical and anthropological writings from the 1760s, before he developed his critical philosophy. The materials presented here range from the Observations, one of Kant's most elegantly written and immediately popular texts, to the accompanying Remarks which Kant wrote in his personal copy of the Observations and which are translated here in their entirety for the first time. This edition also includes little-known essays as well as personal notes and fragments that reveal the emergence of (...) Kant's complex philosophical ideas. Those familiar with Kant's later works will discover a Kant interested in the 'beauty' as well as the 'dignity' of humanity, in human diversity as well as the universality of morals, and in practical concerns rather than abstract philosophizing. Readers will be able to see Kant's development from the Observations through the Remarks towards the moral philosophy that eventually made him famous. (shrink)

Kant is often portrayed as the author of a rigid system of ethics in which adherence to a formal and universal principle of morality - the famous categorical imperative - is an end itself, and any concern for human goals and happiness a strictly secondary and subordinate matter. Such a theory seems to suit perfectly rational beings but not human beings. The twelve essays in this collection by one of the world's preeminent Kant scholars argue for a radically different account (...) of Kant's ethics. They explore an interpretation of the moral philosophy according to which freedom is the fundamental end of human action, but an end that can only be preserved and promoted by adherence to moral law. By radically revising the traditional interpretation of Kant's moral and political philosophy and by showing how Kant's coherent liberalism can guide us in current debates, Paul Guyer will find an audience across moral and political philosophy, intellectual history, and political science. (shrink)

In this book, the first to describe and assess Hume's influence throughout Kant's philosophy, Guyer shows where Kant agrees or disagrees with Hume, and where Kant does or doesn't appear to resolve Hume's doubts.

An introductory guide to the seminal work of Kant and his modern moral philosophy.

This collection of essays by one of the preeminent Kant scholars of our time transforms our understanding of both Kant's aesthetics and his ethics. Guyer shows that at the very core of Kant's aesthetic theory, disinterestedness of taste becomes an experience of freedom and thus an essential accompaniment to morality itself. At the same time he reveals how Kant's moral theory includes a distinctive place for the cultivation of both general moral sentiments and particular attachments on the basis of (...) the most rigorous principle of duty. Kant's thought is placed in a rich historical context including such figures as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Kames, as well as Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Schiller, and Hegel. Other topics treated are the sublime, natural versus artistic beauty, genius and art history, and duty and inclination. These essays extend and enrich the account of Kant's aesthetics in the author's earlier book, Kant and the Claims of Taste. (shrink)

"Literature and the Right to Marriage," which bears the same title as the special issue that it introduces, takes up the challenge of the claim that marriage is a universal right. Framing the questions that traverse the five essays in the collection with a close reading of the sections on marriage from Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, the authors argue that if marriage can be considered a right, this right both guarantees access to and is founded upon each (...) partner's vow to abide by his or her vows to the other. Hegel's text is important because it underscores the linguistic dimension of the marriage ceremony; and it thus helps to show that, if the right to marriage were universal, it must be understood as the right to an irreplaceable kind of ritual speech. Moreover, this text is remarkably modern in its emphasis upon love as the condition of rightful marriage. Hegel considered the exchange of marriage vows to be a political event at which love becomes ethical , and ethics becomes political ; and thus also the point at which the model for "ethical love" becomes the verbally solemnized love between a man and a woman rather than the priestly love of the neighbor. Marriage, for Hegel, is always a turning point, both in the lives of the couple and in the history of the state. But this means that the importance of any marriage cannot be measured in terms of a norm; it can only be measured in terms of the amorous situation that precedes the event of marriage. Hegel's analyses are indispensable for grasping the stakes of the essays collected in this special issue and for addressing contemporary questions about which couples have the right to marry and what marriage becomes when those who would marry already have shared long and complex lives together. (shrink)

"Literature and the Right to Marriage," which bears the same title as the special issue that it introduces, takes up the challenge of the claim that marriage is a universal right. Framing the questions that traverse the five essays in the collection with a close reading of the sections on marriage from Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, the authors argue that if marriage can be considered a right, this right both guarantees access to and is founded upon each (...) partner's vow to abide by his or her vows to the other. Hegel's text is important because it underscores the linguistic dimension of the marriage ceremony; and it thus helps to show that, if the right to marriage were universal, it must be understood as the right to an irreplaceable kind of ritual speech. Moreover, this text is remarkably modern in its emphasis upon love as the condition of rightful marriage. Hegel considered the exchange of marriage vows to be a political event at which love becomes ethical (distinct from seduction), and ethics becomes political (distinct from morality and inseparable from civil society and the state); and thus also the point at which the model for "ethical love" becomes the verbally solemnized love between a man and a woman rather than the priestly love of the neighbor. Marriage, for Hegel, is always a turning point, both in the lives of the couple and in the history of the state. But this means that the importance of any marriage cannot be measured in terms of a norm; it can only be measured in terms of the amorous situation that precedes the event of marriage. Hegel's analyses are indispensable for grasping the stakes of the essays collected in this special issue and for addressing contemporary questions about which couples have the right to marry and what marriage becomes when those who would marry already have shared long and complex lives together. (shrink)

This entirely new translation of Critique of Pure Reason is the most accurate and informative English translation ever produced of this epochal philosophical text. Though its simple and direct style will make it suitable for all new readers of Kant, the translation displays an unprecedented philosophical and textual sophistication that will enlighten Kant scholars as well. This translation recreates as far as possible a text with the same interpretative nuances and richness as the original. The extensive editorial apparatus includes informative (...) annotation, detailed glossaries, an index, and a large-scale general introduction in which two of the world's preeminent Kant scholars provide both a succinct summary of the structure and argument of the Critique and a detailed account of its long and complex genesis. (shrink)

In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant makes a distinction between duties of virtue and the obligation to be virtuous. For a number of reasons, it may seem as if the latter does not actually require any actions of us not already required by the former. This essay argues that Kant does succeed in describing obligations that we have to prepare for virtuous conduct that are different from simply fulfilling specific duties of virtue, and that in so doing he describes an (...) important element of the moral life. (shrink)

This collection of essays, the first of its kind in nearly thirty years, introduces the reader to some of the most important studies of the book from the past ...

The fundamental task of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been to determine whether the essential principles of both knowledge and action can be discovered by human beings unaided by an external agency. No one philosopher contributed more to this enterprise than Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason shook the very foundations of the intellectual world. Kant argued that the basic principles of the natural sciences are imposed on reality by human sensibility and understanding, and thus that human beings are (...) also free to impose their own free and rational agency on the world. This volume is the only systematic and comprehensive account of the full range of Kant 's writings available, and the first major overview of his work to be published in more than a dozen years. An internationally recognized team of Kant scholars explore Kant 's conceptual revolution in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, moral and political philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion. The volume also traces the historical origins and consequences of Kant 's work. (shrink)

A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle's defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato's famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact - precisely what (...) Plato criticized - and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. This three-volume set tells how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by both the best-known and lesser-known aestheticians of modern times, focusing on Britain, France and Germany in the eighteenth century; Germany and Britain in the nineteenth; and Germany, Britain and the United States in the twentieth. (shrink)