Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar (Tuesday - Week 2, HT26)

Abstract: Kant’s doctrine of purposiveness without purpose is meant to secure the normativity of aesthetic judgment while blocking dogmatic teleology. Yet purposiveness is itself a normative notion: to call a form purposive is already to invoke a standard of success. Kant attempts to avoid this consequence by relocating purposiveness from nature to the free harmony of the faculties. I argue that this displacement fails, since harmony itself functions as a success condition and thus presupposes an end. Engaging recent interpretations by Hannah Ginsborg and Alexandra Newton, I show that both accounts are one-sided: the former renders normativity vacuous by locating it solely in the subject, while the latter spiritualizes aesthetic judgment by evacuating nature of normative significance. Against both, I argue that aesthetic judgment is reflexively normative: in judging something beautiful, the object is appropriate to our faculties, and our faculties are thereby adequate to the object. This structure is best illuminated by Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic ideas, which I reinterpret as felt presentations of the internal norms of rational life. On this basis, I offer an immanent reconstruction of purposiveness without purpose that preserves Kant’s priority of aesthetic over teleological judgment without invoking external ends or design.

Registration: If you are attending the seminar and are not a student or member of staff at the University, please register your attendance using this form - Schwarzman Centre Visitor Registration Form

Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar Convenors: Jack Wearing, Joseph Schear, Kate Kirkpatrick and Mark Wrathall.