This Seminar will be followed by a second part, focused on the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment. We will look at the function and structure of aesthetic judgment and purposiveness, before spending one Seminar each on the meaning and function of the Seminar and the sublime within Kant’s critical philosophy.

This two-part Seminar will introduce the Critique of the Power of Judgment within the context of Kant’s overall project before focusing on the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment, the book’s first part. As we will see, this principle is called purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit). Still, by introducing a difference between determining and reflecting judgment, a difference that had not yet been in place in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that it is nevertheless possible to reflectively judge (beurteilen) them according to an altogether different principle. It might not be possible to cognize these unruly things, specified as living and beautiful things. In this Seminar, we will look at Kant’s claim that there is a specific sense in which one can “make sense” of such unruly things. But how is it possible to encounter such unruly things in experience and thus as part of nature, while it is at the same time impossible to a priori account for their possibility?

Upon encountering one of these unruly things, we are puzzled. Despite Kant’s earlier claim to have enumerated, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), all of the universal and necessary principles of the objectivity of objects, the later Critique of the Power of Judgment deals with several “unruly things.” This is necessary since there are, Kant claims, several things that resist the supposedly universal and necessary conditions of objects of experience put forward in the Critique of Pure Reason. Time: 09:00-11:30 ETĭESCRIPTION: For this Seminar, we will read Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), also known as the third Critique. Instructor: Franziska Aigner Program: Critical Philosophy Credit(s): 1 Date: August 5th, 12th, 19th, 26th.

Kant 1781