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Kant's Critique of Judgment accounts for the sharing of a common world, experienced affectively, by a diverse human plurality. In order to appreciate Kant's project, Judging Appearances retrieves the connection between appearance and judgment in the Critique of Judgment. Kleist emphasizes the important but neglected idea of a sensus communis, which provides the indeterminate criterion for judgments regarding appearance. Judging Appearances examines the themes of appearance and judgment against the background of Kant's debt to Leibniz and Shaftesbury. Drawing upon treatments by Husserl, Sartre, Ricoeur and Arendt, Kleist delineates the proto-phenomenological method through which Kant uncovers the idea of a sensus communis. Kleist shows that taste is a discipline of opening oneself to appearance, requiring a subject who dwells in a common world of appearances among a diverse human plurality. This volume will prove valuable for anyone interested in a fresh approach to themes at the heart of Kant's aesthetics.
List of contents
I / Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach.- The Problem of Harmony and Ground.- Objections to a Phenomenological Study of Kantian Aesthetics.- Precedents for the Phenomenological Interpretation.- Rationale for a Phenomenological Approach.- II / Phenomenological Reconstruction.- First Moment: Kant's Analysis of Disinterestedness.- Second Moment: Universality without Concept.- Third Moment: Purposiveness without Purpose.- Fourth Moment: Exemplary Necessity.- III / The Indeterminacy of Grounds (Kant and Leibniz).- Kant's Appropriation of Leibniz before the Critique of Judgment.- The Problem of Appearance and Ground in Leibnizian Aesthetics.- Indeterminacy and Appearance in the Critique of Judgment.- Appendix: Excerpts from the Latin Version of the Monadologie.- IV / Being Mindful of Appearance: Receptivity, Neutralization, Discursivity.- Sensibility.- The Faculties of Representation.- Imagination.- Imagination and Neutralization.- The Discursivity of Human Understanding as "Thinking" [Denken]: Kant's Rejection of Intellectual Intuition/Intuitive Understanding.- The Discursivity of Reason in Thinking, Contemplation and Desire.- V / Conclusion.- Kant and Humanism.- Maxims of Common Human Understanding.
Summary
Kant's Critique of Judgment accounts for the sharing of a common world, experienced affectively, by a diverse human plurality. Kleist shows that taste is a discipline of opening oneself to appearance, requiring a subject who dwells in a common world of appearances among a diverse human plurality.
