Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group Talk (Johannes Haag, Potsdam)

The Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group is delighted to welcome as its guest speaker Johannes Haag, a professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Potsdam. His systematic interests in theoretical philosophy concern the philosophy of language, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and in particular the theory of intentionality. Historically, he works mainly on issues in early modern philosophy, the philosophy of Enlightenment, the philosophy of Kant and German Idealism. In addition to Kant and Descartes, he is especially interested in Spinoza, Berkeley, and Fichte.

In addition to his talk on December 5, Dr. Haag will also lead an all-day workshop on December 6, titled “The Ground of the Unity of the Supersensible as a Key to Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of Aesthetic Judgment.” The morning session will be devoted to “the connection of the legislations of understanding and reason through the power of judgment”; the afternoon session will concern “taste as the ‘idea of a faculty that is yet to be acquired and is artificial’ – the structure of the transcendental deduction of pure aesthetic judgments (§§ 30-59).” Please contact Nick Stang to participate in the workshop.

Talk Title

Autonomous Judgment: On the Unity of Kant’s Critique of Judgment

Talk Abstract

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant introduces a new transcendental principle for the power of judgement: a principle of the formal subjective purposiveness of nature, i.e. a purposiveness of nature in its formal structure for our powers of cognition. This principle was not yet available to Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, and in his correspondence, he framed this finding as a genuine discovery. I will argue that this principle can explain the unity of the Critique of Judgment – a unity that
has often been questioned by Kant’s readers. In particular, I will try to show that the power of judgment subjects itself to „the same principle“ (CPJ, FI XI, 20:244) in its logical, aesthetic, and teleological autonomy, thereby bridging the seeming disparity of the subjects discussed in the introductions, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and the Critique of Teleological Judgment. In this way, the various concepts of a technique of nature in all three cases result from the autonomous application of one and the same transcendental principle. And in all cases this technique will turn out to be, properly speaking, not a technique of nature at all, but a „technique of the power of judgment“ (CPJ, FI VII, 20:219).

The Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group is a a subgroup of the History of Philosophy Research Group, which focuses on European philosophy in Kant and post-Kantian traditions.