Aesthetic Licence: Foucault's Modernism and Kant's Post-modernism

Recently criticism and theory have maintained that Kant's aesthetic theory is central to modernism, and have used Foucault's archaeology to interrogate that modernism. This paper suggests that archaeology ultimately cannot escape Kant's hold because it depends on Kantian theses. The first section will consider how a recent exponent of an 'archaeological' viewpoint characterizes Kant's theory and will set out the critical role Kant ascribes to art. The second section compares Kant and Foucault to argue that despite appearances their projects turn out to be substantially coterminal. My interest in comparing these critics is not only to be provocative but also to show that post-modernist thinking, at least in the guise of Foucault, needs and uses standards that Kant proposes.     

IV—Kant's Argument for Transcendental Idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic

This paper gives an interpretation of Kant's argument for transcendental idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic. I argue against a common way of reading this argument, which sees Kant as arguing that substantive a priori claims about mind-independent reality would be unintelligible because we cannot explain the source of their justification. I argue that Kant's concern with how synthetic a priori propositions are possible is not a concern with the source of their justification, but with how they can have objects. I argue that Kant's notion of intuition needs to be understood as a kind of representation which involves the presence to consciousness of the object it represents, and that this means that a priori intuition cannot present us with a mind-independent feature of reality.     

Unmasking the Truth Beneath the Beauty: Why the Supposed Aesthetic Judgements Made in Science May Not Be Aesthetic at All

In this article I examine the status of putative aesthetic judgements in science and mathematics. I argue that if the judgements at issue are taken to be genuinely aesthetic they can be divided into two types, positing either a disjunction or connection between aesthetic and epistemic criteria in theory/proof assessment. I show that both types of claim face serious difficulties in explaining the purported role of aesthetic judgements in these areas. I claim that the best current explanation of this role, McAllister's ‘aesthetic induction’ model, fails to demonstrate that the judgements at issue are genuinely aesthetic. I argue that, in light of these considerations, there are strong reasons for suspecting that many, and perhaps all, of the supposedly aesthetic claims are not genuinely aesthetic but are in fact ‘masked’ epistemic assessments.     

On Aesthetic Judgement and our Relation to Nature: Kant's Concept of Purposiveness

I offer a critical reconstruction of Kant's thesis that aesthetic judgement is founded on the principle of the purposiveness of nature. This has been taken as equivalent to the claim that aesthetics is directly linked to the systematicity of nature in its empirical laws. I take issue both with Henry Allison, who seeks to marginalize this claim, and with Avner Baz, who highlights it in order to argue that Kant's aesthetics are merely instrumental for his epistemology. My solution is that aesthetic judgement operates as an exemplary presentation of our general ability to schematise an intuition with a concept at the empirical level. I suggest that this counts as an empirical schematism. Although aesthetic judgement is not based on empirical systematicity, it can nevertheless offer indirect support for the latter in so far as it is a particular revelation of purposiveness in general.     

The Free Harmony of the Faculties and the Primacy of Imagination in Kant's Aesthetic Judgment

This essay argues that, contrary to the prevailing view according to which reflection in Kant's aesthetic judgment is interpreted as ‘the logical actus of the understanding’, we should pay closer attention to Kant's own formulation of aesthetic reflection as ‘an action of the power of imagination’. Put differently, I contend in this essay that the rule that governs and orders the manifold in aesthetic judgment is imagination's own achievement, the achievement of the productive synthesis of the ‘fictive power’ (Dichtungsvermögen), entirely independent of the understanding. While this view does not entail that the faculty of the understanding is not necessary in aesthetic reflection, a stronger emphasis on the role of imagination in aesthetic reflection allows us to realize that its schematizing and interpretive activity, while consistent with, goes well beyond the discursive demands of the understanding insofar as it intimates the supersensible ground of freedom that manifests itself as ‘the feeling of life’. Therefore, I show in this essay that the imagination's unique interpretive power has a special role in completing Kant's critical system by facilitating the connection of the sensible to the supersensible, which further helps us appreciate imagination's practical as opposed to merely cognitive significance.     

Super-learning of Causal Judgements

In three experiments, participants learned which of a variety of foods were capable of causing an allergic reaction in a hypothetical patient during training in which a compound of a treatment and a target food cue was paired with the reaction. In Experiment 1 the causal ratings of the target cue were increased if the treatment cue was pretrained as a preventative cause of the reaction. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that the magnitude of this superlearning is unaffected by the order of compound and treatment cue training. The final study also showed that forward super-learning is not induced solely by simple exposure to the treatment cue prior to compound training but, rather, depends upon training the treatment cue as a preventative cause, whereas retrospective super-learning may be due merely to exposure of the treatment cue. These results are problematic for contingency-based accounts of causal induction but accord with modified and extended associative theories.     

Kant's Pragmatism

This article offers a definition of the term ‘pragmatic’, as it is used in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The definition offered does not make any reference to the affinities between Kant's pragmatism and the philosophies of the American or other pragmatists but draws its definiens entirely from the Kantian conceptual framework. It states that the term ‘pragmatic’ denotes imperatives, laws and beliefs of a specific type: an imperative is pragmatic if and only if it is concerned with the choice of means to individual or universal happiness; a law is pragmatic if and only if our willingness to presuppose it results from our obedience to a pragmatic imperative; and a belief is pragmatic if and only if it relates to the objective validity of pragmatic laws. This article also discusses two rival definitions of the term ‘pragmatic’ (as used by Kant) that have been brought forward by Sidney Axinn and Nicholas Rescher.