Abstract

This article deals with the question of the reception and “history of effects” of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. More precisely, in the present contribution I take into examination some original and influential “appropriations” of Kant’s third Critique in the context of 20 th -century and contemporary hermeneutics, providing both a reconstruction and a critical interpretation of the readings of Kant’s work provided by Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and nowadays Günter Figal. In the first section I basically offer an overview of Kant’s conception of the power of judgment as an introduction to the topics investigated into detail in the following sections of this article. Then, I focus on the different interpretations of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment offered by the abovementioned hermeneutical philosophers, showing that, in a quite surprising and theoretically stimulating way, in the development of a phenomenological-hermeneutical aesthetics and/or philosophy of art from Heidegger to Gadamer up to Figal, we can observe a progressive shift from a sort of “disinterest” in Kant’s conception of aesthetics in favour of Hegel’s philosophy of art, to an explicit critique of the supposed subjectivization of aesthetics by Kant and its problematic consequences, up to a full-blown rehabilitation and retrieval of the significance of Kant’s treatment of beauty in the third Critique as still essential for any serious philosophical aesthetics.