Kant on Beauty and Biology

Kant’s Critique of Judgment has often been interpreted by scholars as comprising separate treatments of three uneasily connected topics: beauty, biology, and empirical knowledge. Rachel Zuckert’s book is the first to interpret the Critique as a unified argument concerning all three domains. She argues that on Kant’s view, human beings demonstrate a distinctive cognitive ability in appreciating beauty and understanding organic life: an ability to anticipate a whole that we do not completely understand according to preconceived categories. This ability is necessary, moreover, for human beings to gain knowledge of nature in its empirical character as it is, not as we might assume it to be. Her wide-ranging and original study will be valuable for readers in all areas of Kant’s philosophy.

• The first study to propose a unified interpretation of the three topics of Kant’s Critique • Places Kant’s theory in its historical context • Includes a detailed analysis of the Critique

Introduction; 1. The problem: unity of the diverse; 2. Reflective judgment and its principle: preliminary remarks; Part I. Teleological Judgment: 3. The critique of teleological judgment: purposiveness is the \'highest formal unity\'; 4. A merely subjective principle: time and the \'peculiarities of our intellects; Part II. Aesthetic Judgment: Introduction; 5. Beautiful objects: subjectively purposive form; 6. Aesthetic pleasure: the feeling of subjective, projective temporality; 7. The free harmony of the faculties: purposiveness as the principle of aesthetic Beurteilung; 8. The justification of aesthetic judgment: purposiveness as the principle of reflective judging; Conclusion.