According to Kant’s lectures on logic, the formation of empirical concepts consists in the logical acts of comparison, reflection, and abstraction. This paper defends the tenability of Kant’s account by solving two prominent difficulties identified by commentators. Firstly, I justify Kant’s chronological presentation of the three acts by clarifying two meanings of ‘comparison’ in his writings: while comparison-1 refers to apprehension in relation to apperception and precedes reflection, comparison-2 refers to a twofold operation comprising both comparison-1 and reflection, such that (...) its completion presupposes reflection. Secondly, to unravel an alleged ‘circularity’ in Kant’s account, I propose multiple interactions between comparison-1, which can be entirely arbitrary, and reflection, which examines the compared representations according to the imagination’s free agreement with the understanding, namely, a lawfulness without law. By means of such interactions, we experiment back and forth and lawfully generate an empirical concept without relying on conceptual guidance. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant presents the Principle of Anticipations of Perception as follows: ‘In all appearances the real, which is an object of the sensation, has intensive magnitude, i.e., a degree.’ This paper defends the tenability and coherence of Kant’s argument by solving three prominent difficulties identified by commentators. Firstly, on my interpretation, the schema of the category of ‘limitation’ presents an infinite sphere of possible realities, which provides the transcendental basis for the Principle. Secondly, I take (...) Kant’s otherwise problematic examples of intensive magnitudes to show how we determine a degree according to an ordinal sequence that is constituted by cardinal quantities. Thirdly, I distinguish in Kant’s writings the categorical continuity concerning the a priori principle and the empirical continuity concerning a posteriori sensations. While the former is necessary, the latter is merely possible; but we must nevertheless assume the latter as a cognitive aim. (shrink)

This paper argues that the structural obscurity in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment reflects his tacit employment of three correlated but distinct notions: necessity considered as the universal validity of the judgment of taste; necessity considered as a feature of the judgment itself; and necessity considered as a feature of the mental free harmony that obtains in judging certain forms with taste. These distinctions have not been sufficiently recognized by commentators so far. Clarification of these three notions can (...) shed new light on the structure of the first part of Kant’s third Critique as well as on debates over the plausibility of his claims regarding taste. (shrink)

Dans la troisièmeCritique, Kant prétend que la beauté est le symbole de la moralité et que la réflexion sur cette relation est un devoir. Cet article présente l’argument de Kant comme un double argument. Premièrement, l’expérience de la beauté renforce notre sentiment moral. Deuxièmement, à travers le jugement sur le beau, nous supposons que la nature poursuit des fins indéterminées, sur la base de quoi l’on pourrait concevoir que la nature coopère à nos fins pratiques. Ainsi, dans l’intérêt de la (...) culture morale et de la motivation morale, il est nécessaire de traiter la beauté comme le symbole spécial de la moralité. (shrink)

In Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant claims organisms are to be judged as ‘natural ends’, which are products of nature but inexplicable by mechanical laws of nature. The conception of natural ends necessarily leads to the idea of nature in its whole as a system of ends. This paper proposes an interpretation of Kant’s biological teleology that can be compatible with modern science. Mechanical laws in the third Critique are understood as empirical causal laws that determine all phenomena. (...) A living organism is mechanically inexplicable, not because it falls outside of mechanical laws, but because the reciprocal productions of its parts are unifiable under its whole, as if designed by an intelligent agency according to the concept of the whole. Once we judge teleologically the mechanical laws determining the organic productions, we must judge teleologically all productions determined by these laws and therefore conceive nature in its whole as a system of ends, to which natural mechanism is subordinated. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of mathematical beauty from a Kantian perspective. According to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, satisfaction in beauty is subjective and non-conceptual, yet a proof can be beautiful even though it relies on concepts. I propose that, much like art creation, the formulation and study of a complex demonstration involves multiple and progressive interactions between the freely original imagination and taste. Such a proof is artistic insofar as it is guided by beauty, namely, the (...) mere feeling about the imagination’s free lawfulness. The beauty in a proof’s process and the perfection in its completion together facilitate a transition from subjective to objective purposiveness, a transition that Kant himself does not address in the third Critique. (shrink)

In Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant claims organisms are to be judged as ‘natural ends’, which are products of nature but inexplicable by mechanical laws of nature. The conception of natural ends necessarily leads to the idea of nature in its whole as a system of ends. This paper proposes an interpretation of Kant’s biological teleology that can be compatible with modern science. Mechanical laws in the third Critique are understood as empirical causal laws that determine all phenomena. (...) A living organism is mechanically inexplicable, not because it falls outside of mechanical laws, but because the reciprocal productions of its parts are unifiable under its whole, as if designed by an intelligent agency according to the concept of the whole. Once we judge teleologically the mechanical laws determining the organic productions, we must judge teleologically all productions determined by these laws and therefore conceive nature in its whole as a system of ends, to which natural mechanism is subordinated. (shrink)

According to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement, in the end all estimation of magnitude is sensible, or ‘aesthetic’, and the absolutely great in aesthetic estimation is called ‘the mathematical sublime’. This article identifies the relevant sensible element with an inner sensation of a temporal tension: in aesthetic comprehension, the imagination encounters an inevitable tension between the successive reproduction of a magnitude’s individual parts and the simultaneous unification of these parts. The sensation of this tension varies in degree and (...) facilitates aesthetic estimation in general. But in the special case where it comes to involve a sense of exceeding our imagination’s limit, we judge a magnitude to be mathematically sublime. Pace Kant, I argue that this limit is private and contingent rather than transcendental, such that the judgement of the mathematical sublime is neither universal a priori nor necessary. (shrink)