Kant: Reflective vs Determining Judgment

Kant’s distinction between the determining and reflecting power of judgment in the third Critique is not well understood in the literature. A mainstream view unifies these by making determination the telos of all acts of judgment (Longuenesse 1998). On this view, all reflection is primarily in the business of producing empirical concepts for cognition, and thus has what I call a determinative ideal. I argue that this view fails to take seriously the independence and autonomy of the ‘power of judgment’ (...) [Urteilskraft] as a higher cognitive faculty in its own right with its own a priori principle. Instead of seeing merely reflecting judgments as failed or incomplete acts of judgment, I argue that these are in fact paradigmatic of the activity of the power of judgment. More precisely, the reflecting power of judgment just is the power of judgment. Accordingly, reflecting judgment takes precedence over determining judgment; while the former operates according to a law that it gives itself, the latter requires another higher cognitive faculty to provide its principle. On my view, reflecting judgment should be understood as the capacity for purposive subsumption—most clearly seen in the activity of mere reflection. (shrink)

In this essay I examine Kant's analogy with life from §65 of the Critique of the power of Judgment. I argue that this analogy is central for understanding his notion of a natural end, for his account of the formative power of organisms in the third Critique, and for situating Kant's account of this power in relation to the Lebenskräfte of the vitalists.

This article advances a new analysis of stupidity as a distinctive form of cognitive failing. Section 1 outlines some problems in explicating this notion and suggests some desiderata. Section 2 sketches an existing model of stupidity, found in Kant and Flaubert, which serves as a foil for my own view. In section 3, I introduce my theory: I analyse stupidity as form of conceptual self-hampering, characterised by a specific aetiology and with a range of deleterious effects. In section 4, I (...) show how this proposal meets the desiderata and I clarify how it diverges from existing accounts. My position is close to a 'public health approach', in contrast to the virtue/vice framework employed by Engel or Mulligan. (shrink)

This article researches the historical and systematic background of Kant’s reflecting power of judgment theory based on a historical study of the concept of wit [ingenium, Witz]. Although the Notes from Lessons on Anthropology even expound the meaning of this concept in the context of Baumgarten’s empirical psychology, this material helps us interpret the concept of wit as one of the most important precedents of the reflecting power of judgment theory presented in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. The (...) exposition of wit furthermore highlights the systematic and historic connection between the third Critique and the theory of the hypothetical use of reason found in the Appendix of the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason. (shrink)

: The aim of this article is to explore the origin of the difficulty of founding the reflecting power of judgment as Kant outlines it in the Preface of the third Critique. Although a foundation for this faculty was only established in 1790, we must interpret it as a critical solution to an old problem, which Kant had already recognized around 1770. Through his comprehension of the meaning of healthy understanding and native wit he already confirms the impossibility of determining (...) the correctness of our judging activity from the use of rules. This approach of the problem must be understood in the context of the controversy about the concept ‘logica naturalis’ in the Leibniz-Wolffian aesthetics and logic. In close conjunction with this tradition, Kant already tries to offer an elucidation of the question of judging through the aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper argues that the cognitive status and cognitive value of thoughts should be clarified through a description of the mechanics of the theoretical power of judgment. Three pairs of concepts essentially constitute its tools: 1. determinative and reflective judgments; 2. constitutive and regulative principles; and 3. transcendental and empirical applications. Against the general approach to dealing with these concepts, i.e., against the tendency to consider them as synonymous or as forming a parallel structure, this article sharpens the distinctions between (...) these three pairs of concepts. For that reason the methodological hypothesis according to which there is no inner relation between these respective pairs of concepts will be put to the test. The hypothesis says that these concepts should be prima facie combinable: e. g., one should be able to say what a judgment that is simultaneously transcendental, regulative and determining would be like, or why such a combination is impossible. Combining the three concept-pairs creates eight possibilities that are presented systematically in the table at the end of the article. The discussion shows the precise status of each kind of law of nature and their relationships to empirical experience are described in greater detail. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to discuss primarily the epistemological theory of reflection as seen by Heinrich Rickert, the main representative of Neo-Kantianism Baden School. The most important arguments put forward by Rickert against taking the cognition as a reflection of the reality are being analysed. Rickert’s standpoint turns out to be moderate. He argues against the transcendental theory of reflection, but does not reject the idea of reflection as a model of cognition and takes the immanent theory of (...) reflection as relatively justified. The paper contains also a discussion of the standpoint of another representative of Baden School, Emil Lask, who has rejected the theory of reflection in favour of the after-image theory. (shrink)

In both Introductions to the Critique of Judgment Kant seems to identify the a priori principle at the basis of aesthetic judgments with the principle that guides reflective judgment in its cognitive inquiry of nature, i.e. the purposiveness of nature or systematicity. For instance Kant writes.

The Critique of the Power of Judgment (a more accurate rendition of what has hitherto been translated as the Critique of Judgment) is the third of Kant's great critiques following the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. This entirely new translation of Kant's masterpiece follows the principles and high standards of all other volumes in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. This volume includes: for the first time the indispensable first draft of Kant's (...) introduction to the work; the only English edition notes to the many differences between the first (1790) and second (1793) editions of the work; and relevant passages in Kant's anthropology lectures where he elaborated on his aesthetic views. All in all this new edition offers the serious student of Kant a dramatically richer, more complete and more accurate translation. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to propose and justify the thesis that Kant's theory of judgment, which plays a vital role in the Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment, is fundamentally theoretical in nature, and that this theory insures the unity of the critical philosophy. Most of the contemporary writers who have dealt with the question of the unity of Kant's philosophy on the basis of his theory of judgement have emphasized the priority (...) of either practical, aesthetic, or even political judgment. Such interpretations, however, seem at odds with the fact that Kant's theory of judgment is rooted in the non-practical, theoretical discipline of formal logic, a discipline that underlies the structure of all three Critiques. The "theoretical" understanding of judgment is first developed in the Critique of Pure Reason wherein Kant distinguishes between general and transcendental logic. This distinction governs the distinction between two ways of employing the same logical form of judgment, viz., indeterminately and determinately. The determinate-indeterminate distinction with respect to judging is elaborated in both the first and the second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason as well as in the Prolegomena and the Preface to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science . ;In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals , Kant distinguishes between "general practical philosophy" and "the metaphysics of morals." In fact, general practical philosophy "differs from a metaphysics of morals in the same way that general logic is distinguished from transcendental philosophy." Thus, the distinction between general practical philosophy and the metaphysics of morals in Kant's practical philosophy represents the distinction between indeterminate and determinate functions of judging practically, i.e., of willing. ;In the Critique of Judgment , the determinate-indeterminate distinction is expressed by means of the distinction between determinative and reflective power of judgment . Kant shows that while the determinative Urteilskraft gives rise to scientific and moral judgments, the reflective Urteilskraft makes possible both aesthetic and teleological judgments by leaving something undetermined, viz., the cognizability of an object and the intentionality of the purposiveness of nature, respectively. (shrink)