Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T07:07:40.110Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Attention and the Free Play of the Faculties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2021

Jessica J. Williams
Jessica J. Williams*
Affiliation:
University of South Florida
*
Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding is at the heart of Kant’s account of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, but interpreters have long struggled to determine what Kant means when he claims the faculties are in a state of free play. In this article, I develop an interpretation of the free play of the faculties in terms of the freedom of attention. By appealing to the different way that we attend to objects in aesthetic experience, we can explain how the faculties are free, even when the subject already possesses a concept of the object and is bound to the determinate form of the object in perception.

Keywords

Kantattentionimaginationaesthetic experienceCritique of the Power of Judgementharmony of the facultiesfree playreflection
Type
Article
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 43 - 59
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Kantian Review

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allison, Henry (2001) Kant’s Theory of Taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511612671CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, Noël (2014) ‘The Creative Audience’. In Elliot, S. P. and Kaufman, S. B. (eds), The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 62–81.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199836963.003.0004CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chignell, Andrew (2007) ‘Kant on the Normativity of Taste: The Role of Aesthetic Ideas’. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 85(3), 415–33.10.1080/00048400701571677CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Alix (2018) ‘Kant on Beauty and Cognition: The Aesthetic Dimension of Cognition’. In Bueno, O., Darby, G., French, S., and Rickles, D. (eds), Thinking about Science and Reflecting on Art: Bringing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Science Together (London: Routledge), 140–54.Google Scholar
Cohen, Ted (2002) ‘Three Problems in Kant’s Aesthetics’. British Journal of Aesthetics, 42, 1–12.10.1093/bjaesthetics/42.1.1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crawford, Donald (1974) Kant’s Aesthetic Theory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Ginsborg, Hannah (1997) ‘Lawfulness without a Law: Kant on the Free Play of Imagination and Understanding’. Philosophical Topics, 25, 37–81.10.5840/philtopics199725119CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ginsborg, Hannah (2006) ‘Thinking the Particular as Contained under the Universal’. In R. Kukla (ed.), Aesthetics and Cognition and Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 35–60.Google Scholar
Gorodeisky, Keren (2011) ‘A Tale of Two Faculties’. British Journal of Aesthetics, 51(4), 415–36.10.1093/aesthj/ayr031CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guyer, Paul (1997) Kant and the Claims of Taste, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Guyer, Paul (2006) ‘The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited’. In Kukla, R. (ed.), Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 162–93.Google Scholar
Henrich, Dieter (1992) Aesthetic Judgement and the Moral Image of the World: Studies in Kant. Studies in Kant and German Idealism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel (1900ff.) Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (and successors). Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Makkreel, Rudolf (1900) Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutic Import of the Critique of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Meerbote, Ralf (1980) ‘Reflection on Beauty’. In Ted, Cohen and Paul, Guyer (eds), Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 55–86.Google Scholar
Merritt, Melissa and Valaris, Markos (2017) ‘Attention and Synthesis in Kant’s Conception of Experience’. Philosophical Quarterly, 67, 571–92.Google Scholar
Ostaric, Lara (2017) ‘The Free Harmony of the Faculties and the Primacy of Imagination in Kant’s Aesthetic Judgement’. European Journal of Philosophy, 25(4), 1376–1410.10.1111/ejop.12219CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reiter, Aviv and Geiger, Ido (2018) ‘Natural Beauty, Fine Art, and the Relation between Them’. Kant-Studien, 109(1), 72–100.10.1515/kant-2018-0002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rogerson, Kenneth (2008) The Problem of Free Harmony in Kant’s Aesthetics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Rueger, Alexander (2008) ‘The Free Play of the Faculties and the Status of Natural Beauty in Kant’s Theory of Taste’. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 290(3), 298–322.Google Scholar
Rueger, Alexander (2018) ‘Pleasure and Purpose in Kant’s Theory of Taste’. Kant-Studien, 109(1), 101–23.10.1515/kant-2018-0003CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rueger, Alexander and Evren, Şahan (2005) ‘The Role of Symbolic Presentation in Kant’s Theory of Taste’. British Journal of Aesthetics, 45(3), 229–47.10.1093/aesthj/ayi035CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rush, Fred (2001) ‘The Harmony of the Faculties’. Kant-Studien, 92(1), 38–61.10.1515/kant.92.1.38CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seel, Gerhard (1988) ‘Über den Grund der Lust an schönen Gegenständen: Kritische Fragen an die Ästhetik Kants’. In H. Oberer and G. Seel (eds), Kant: Analysen—Probleme—Kritik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann), 317–56.Google Scholar
Sethi, Janum (2019) ‘Two Feelings in the Beautiful: Kant on the Structure of Judgments of Beauty’. Philosopher’s Imprint, 19, 1–17.Google Scholar
Vogelmann, Rafael (2018) ‘Can we Make Sense of Free Harmony?’. Studi Kantiani, 16(1), 53–74.Google Scholar
Williams, Jessica J. (2020) ‘“The Shape of a Four-Footed Animal in General”: Kant on Empirical Schemata and the System of Nature’. HOPOS: The Journal for the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, 10(1), 1–23.Google Scholar
Williams, Jessica J. (2021) ‘Kant on Aesthetic Attention’. British Journal of Aesthetics. <https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayaa057>.CrossRef.>Google Scholar
Zinkin, Melissa (2006) ‘Intensive Magnitudes and the Normativity of Taste’. In Kukla, R. (ed.), Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 138–61.Google Scholar
Zinkin, Melissa (2012) ‘Kant and the Pleasure of “Mere Reflection”’. Inquiry, 55(5), 433–53.10.1080/0020174X.2012.716194CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zuckert, Rachel (2006) ‘The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant’s Aesthetic Formalism’. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 44(4), 599–622.10.1353/hph.2006.0075CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zuckert, Rachel (2007a) Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511487323CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zuckert, Rachel (2007b) ‘Kant’s Rationalist Aesthetics’. Kant-Studien, 98(4), 443–63.10.1515/KANT.2007.028CrossRefGoogle Scholar