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Aesthetic Autonomies: A Discussion of Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2011

Christopher Janaway
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London

Extract

There are two familiar strategic approaches to Kant's Critique of Judgement which commentators have not always found easy to combine. One would regard the work as fitting snugly into Kant's enterprise as the keystone that absorbs the forces of his theoretical and practical philosophies, uniting them and itself into a single sound structure. That Kant saw it this way is obvious from his Introduction to the Critique. But the other approach has sometimes seemed more fruitful: start with the Analytic of the Beautiful and take it not as the completion but as the beginning of something, a treatise which, in offering possibly the fullest and most rigorous account of the autonomy of aesthetic judgement, plays a foundational role in the discipline now known as aesthetics. On this approach questions concerning morality and the unity of Kant's philosophy can be set aside for attention later, if ever.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Kantian Review 1997

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References

Notes

2 Guyer, Paul, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

3 Crawford, Donald W., Kant's Aesthetic Theory (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).Google Scholar

4 Elliott, R. K., ‘The unity of Kant's “critique of judgement”‘, British Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1968), 244–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Kemal, Salim, Kant and Fine Art: An Essay on Kant and the Philosophy of Fine Art and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).Google Scholar

6 Rogerson, Kenneth F., Kant's Aesthetics: The Roles of Form and Expression (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986).Google Scholar

7 Savile, Anthony, Aesthetic Reconstructions: The Seminal Writings of Lessing, Kant, and Schiller, Aristotelian Society Series, 8 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).Google Scholar