Abstract

This paper focuses on responding to Jeanine Grenberg’s claim that my discussion of Kant’s feeling of respect leaves no meaningful room for investigating feeling first-personally. I first make clear that I do think that feelings can be investigated first-personally, both in that they can be prospective reasons for action and in that – at least in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment – there are feelings that we should have. I then show that at the time of writing the “Incentives” chapter of the second Critique, Kant had not yet determined an a priori basis for aesthetic normativity. On this basis, I argue that the “Incentives” chapter provides a sort of consolation prize for not having an transcendental account of feeling. In that sense, it’s a properly transcendental analysis of feeling in which Kant examines feeling from within and a priori to show that there are good reasons to have certain feelings. I end by acknowledging the extent to which, on this reading, I agree with Grenberg that Kant is doing a transcendentally significant form of phenomenology here, while I also highlight some remaining areas of disagreement.