The Kantian Aesthetic - Paul Crowther

Paul Crowther has written extensively on aesthetics, and on Kant's aesthetics in particular. In the present book he enlists Kant's support for some key claims about aesthetic value. He sees himself as developing Kantian ideas and amending them where necessary, respecting what Kant says without getting entangled with the details of scholarly interpretation. He is impatient with the ‘interminablism’ of the disputes about what Kant actually meant in this or that passage. Such impatience is understandable. But one may feel that Crowther does not always seek the most sympathetic ways of understanding Kant, and can be too quick to replace Kant's views with something different. At other times, though, he takes up the cudgels of scholarly debate himself, replying to critics of his own published interpretations. He agrees with Kant that aesthetic judgements can in a sense be right or wrong; that the intuitive apprehension of unity in diversity is central to aesthetic appreciation; and that the appreciation both of nature and of art involves the free play of the imagination, the aim of fine art being to express what Kant calls ‘aesthetic ideas’ – an aesthetic idea being a representation of the imagination which occasions much reflection but which can never be captured in a concept. Exactly what the imagination is and how it works is harder to say, however. What Kant himself says is often unclear, and while Crowther's attempts to elucidate it are certainly interesting, they are not always as precise as one might wish

Aesthetics · Apprehension · Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy) · Politics · Reflexive pronoun · Representation (politics) · Value (mathematics) · Computer Science · Law · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science