The Normativity of Nature Essays on Kant's Critique of Judgement

by Ginsborg, Hannah

• ISBN13: 9780199547975
• ISBN10: 0199547971
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-01-27
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Most philosophers have taken the importance of Kant's Critique of Judgement to lie primarily in its contributions to aesthetics and to the philosophy of biology. Hannah Ginsborg, however, sees the Critique of Judgement as representing a central contribution to the understanding of human cognition more generally. The fourteen essays collected here advance a common interpretive project: that of bringing out the philosophical significance of the notion of judgement which figures in the third Critique and showing its importance both to Kant's own theoretical philosophy and to contemporary views of human thought and cognition. To possess the capacity of judgment, on the interpretation presented here, is to respond to the world in a way which involves the recognition of one's responses as normatively appropriate to the objects which cause them. It is through this capacity that we are able not merely to respond discriminatively to objects, as animals do, but to bring them under concepts and so to make claims about them which can be true or false. The Critique of Judgement, on this reading, rejects the traditional dichotomy between the natural and the normative, taking nature itself -- both human nature and nature outside us -- to be comprehensible only in normative terms. The essays in this book develop this reading in its own right, and draw on it to address interpretive debates in Kant's aesthetics, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of biology. They also bring out its relevance to contemporary debates about concept-acquisition, the content of perception, and skepticism about rule-following and meaning.

Author Biography

Hannah Ginsborg was born in London and grew up in Edinburgh. She was an undergraduate at Wadham College Oxford, receiving a B.A. in Philosophy and Modern Languages in 1980, and did graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University, receiving her PhD in 1989. Since 1988 she has been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation was issued as a book by Garland Publishing in 1990, and she has published numerous articles on Kant's theory of knowledge, aesthetics, and philosophy of biology. More recent articles are concerned with issues in the philosophy of mind and the theory of meaning, in particular with questions about rule-following, the normativity of meaning, and the relation between perception and belief.

Table of Contents

Introduction
I. Aesthetics
1. Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste
2. On the Key to Kant's Critique of Taste
3. Lawfulness without a Law: Kant on the Free Play of Imagination and Understanding
4. Aesthetic Judging and the Intentionality of Pleasure
5. The Pleasure of Judgment: Kant and the Possibility of Taste
II. Cognition
6. Reflective Judgment and Taste
7. Thinking the Particular as Contained under the Universal
8. Aesthetic Judgment and Perceptual Normativity
9. The Appearance of Spontaneity: Kant on Judgment and Empirical Self-Knowledge
III. Teleology
10. Kant on Aesthetic and Biological Purposiveness
11. Kant on Understanding Organisms as Natural Purposes
12. Two Kinds of Mechanical Inexplicability in Kant and Aristotle
13. Kant's Biological Teleology and its Philosophical Significance
14. Oughts without Intentions: A Kantian Approach to Biological Functions
Bibliography
Index