Theories of Judgment

The exercise of judgment is an aspect of human endeavor from our most mundane acts to our most momentous decisions. In this book Wayne Martin develops a historical survey of theoretical approaches to judgment, focusing on treatments of judgment in psychology, logic, phenomenology, and painting. He traces attempts to develop theories of judgment in British Empiricism, the logical tradition stemming from Kant, nineteenth-century psychologism, recent experimental neuropsychology, and the phenomenological tradition associated with Brentano, Husserl and Heidegger. His reconstruction of vibrant but largely forgotten nineteenth-century debates links Kantian approaches to judgment with twentieth-century phenomenological accounts. He also shows that the psychological, logical and phenomenological dimensions of judgment are not only equally important, but fundamentally interlinked, in any complete understanding of judgment. His book will interest a wide range of readers in history of philosophy, philosophy of mind, and psychology.

• This study ranges widely over nineteenth and twentieth century theories of judgment • In this book Wayne Martin illuminates some vibrant but largely forgotten nineteenth century debates • Martin draws on both analytic and continental philosophy

Introduction: the faces of judgment; 1. The psychology of judging: three experimental approaches; 2. Judgment as synthesis, judgement as thesis: existential judgement and Kantian logics; 3. The judgment stroke and the truth predicate: Frege and the logical representation of judgment; 4. Heidegger and the phenomeno-logic of judgment; 5. Judgmental comportment in Cranach’s Judgment of Paris.