In 1764, Kant published his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and in 1790 his influential third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The latter contains two parts, the ‘Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment’ and the ‘Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment’. They reveal a new principle, namely the a priori principle of purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit) of our power of judgment, and thereby offer new a priori grounds for beauty and biology within (...) the framework of Kant's transcendental philosophy. They also unite the previous two Critiques, the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. Besides contributing to general and systematic aspects within his transcendental philosophy, Kant's aesthetics also offers new insights into old problems. It deals with feeling versus experience, subjectivity versus objectivity, disinterested pleasure, aesthetic universality, free and adherent beauty, the sensus communis, genius, aesthetic ideas, beauty as the symbol of morality, beauty of nature versus beauty of art, the sublime, and the supersensible. In this article I will limit myself to this critical aesthetics of Kant. But I will also discuss the ugly and the possibility of beauty in mathematics and see whether Kant's theory can successfully explain or deal with them. I will also compare his theory with philosophical ideas from a very different tradition, namely from Confucius, not only as a challenge to Kant's theory, but also because there is a growing interest from the Chinese side in combining ideas from Confucius and Kant, an interest that might well become influential in both East and West during the 21st century. (shrink)

Abstract Kant claims that the basis of a judgment of taste is a merely subjective representation and that the only merely subjective representations are feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Commentators disagree over how to interpret this claim. Some take it to mean that judgments about the beauty of an object depend only on the state of the judging subject. Others argue instead that, for Kant, the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is best understood as a response to its (...) qualities, and that, accordingly, feelings of pleasure or displeasure are no different from other representations, such as colors or smells. While I agree that the judgment of taste is best understood as asserting a claim about an object's qualities, I argue that the distinction Kant makes between feelings of pleasure or displeasure and other representations should not be ignored. I show that one's liking or disliking for an object is merely subjective in the sense that its significance depends on what one has made of oneself through one's aesthetic education. The judgment of taste, then, is merely subjective because one must first become the kind of person whose feelings have the right significance at the right time before one can determine whether an object's qualities make it beautiful. (shrink)

This essay develops a Kantian theory of sport which addresses: (1) Kant’s categories of aesthetic judgment (2) a comparable analysis applied to athletic volition; (3) aesthetic cognition and experience and athletic volition and experience; (4) ‘free’ and ‘attached’ beauty; (5) Kant’s theory of teleological judgment; (6) the moral concept of a ‘kingdom of ends’ and sportsmanship; (7) the beautiful and the sublime in sport-experience; (8) respect and religious emotion in sport-experience; (9) the Kantian system and philosophical anthropology; and (10) sport (...) and self-knowledge. (shrink)

‘Beautiful is what, without a concept, is liked universally.’ Thus ends the second Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful in Kant's Critique of Judgment.What could yield a non-conceptual universality? Kant finds this in the harmonious ‘free play’ of the mental powers, which he characterizes as a mental state that is both non-cognitive and inherently universally valid. In general, any interpretation of Kant's aesthetic theory will depend on the view of its relationship to cognition. This relationship itself should be understood (...) in reference to Kant's notion of the mental state in judging generally, as presented in the Critique of Judgment. (shrink)

This paper is a systematic comparison between two well–known and theologically relevant concepts – the sublime as developed in Kant’s third Critique, and Marion’s saturated phenomenon. Although it discusses the significant and apparent similarities between them, it also criticizes Marion’s identification of the sublime as a possible example of a saturated phenomenon. This is primarily because of the different origins and philosophical presuppositions guiding the elaboration of these two ideas. Kant’s aim is to confine the reception of the phenomenon to (...) the conditions of experience, so that both in the case of judg-ments of beauty and judg-ments of the sublime, the subject achieves pleasure through self-centred appreciation of its rational capacities. Marion’s saturated phenomenon, on the other hand, aims at dispensing with the ‘metaphysical’ horizon of either the object, or the transcendental subject, in favour of passive appropriation of givenness. Although both are meant to describe what happens when the limits of understanding are breached, in the sublime this breach only serves to reinforce the capacity of the rational subject, whereas in the saturated phenomenon it points to the possibility of apprehension of the totally Other as purely given. (shrink)

Kant has traditionally been read as an excessively moralistic critic of lying in his ethics and politics. In response, recent scholars have noted that for Kant we have an ethical duty not to be com...

At the end of §40 of the Critique of Judgement, after a discussion of the sensus communis and its connection with taste, Kant writes:If we could assume that the mere universal communicability as such of our feeling must already carry with it an interest for us , then we could explain how it is that we require from everyone as a duty, as it were , the feeling in a judgment of taste.