Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- References to Kant's Works
- Introduction
- 1 The Centrality of the Problem of Formalism
- 2 Formalism and the Circle of Representation
- 3 Formal Idealism and the Aesthetic Condition of Experience
- 4 The Deep Structure of Synthesis
- 5 The Completion of the Subjective Deduction in the Deductions of the Critique of Judgement
- 6 A Priori Knowledge as the Anticipation of a Material Given and the Need for a Spatial Schematism
- 7 Empirical Systematicity and its Relation to Aesthetic Judgement
- 8 Aesthetic Judgement's Exemplary Exhibition of Cognition
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Author/subject index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- References to Kant's Works
- Introduction
- 1 The Centrality of the Problem of Formalism
- 2 Formalism and the Circle of Representation
- 3 Formal Idealism and the Aesthetic Condition of Experience
- 4 The Deep Structure of Synthesis
- 5 The Completion of the Subjective Deduction in the Deductions of the Critique of Judgement
- 6 A Priori Knowledge as the Anticipation of a Material Given and the Need for a Spatial Schematism
- 7 Empirical Systematicity and its Relation to Aesthetic Judgement
- 8 Aesthetic Judgement's Exemplary Exhibition of Cognition
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Author/subject index
Summary
In ‘Little Sparta’, a garden in the Pentland hills outside of Edinburgh, two planks stretch across a stream. On each is inscribed: ‘That which joins and that which divides is one and the same.’ The inscription on one faces that on the other. At first sight we see a bridge, but then we see two planks divided from one another; looking again we see the two planks as one structure, realising that each bears the same inscription. The inscription stretching the length of each plank takes time to read and there is no one perspective from which both can be apprehended. Our realisation of the similarity of the two planks is only achieved through a process of recognition, for after an initial impression of unity, they appear as disrupting one another. Our aesthetic response is of unity achieved only through a process linking two distinct components.
Much more could be said about this contemporary artwork by the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, his use of a fragment from Heraclitus and the relation in which the work stands to the philosophical ideas that follow. In general my point is that through an aesthetic presentation – in this case, visual – a train of thought is instigated. What we see makes us think, and what we think makes us look further, in turn making us think more. While a whole philosophical treatise may, and indeed will in what follows, attempt to express a thought, this artwork quickly and effortlessly brings us into the centre of a complex set of associations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Kant's Aesthetic EpistemologyForm and World, pp. 1 - 7Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007