The Normativity of Nature by Hannah Ginsborg Book Summary:
Why read Kant's Critique of Judgment? For most readers, the importance of the work lies in its contributions to aesthetics and, to a lesser extent, the philosophy of biology. Hannah Ginsborg, by contrast, sees the Critique of Judgment as a central contribution to the understanding of human cognition generally. The fourteen essays collected here advance a common interpretive project: that of bringing out the philosophical significance of thenotion of judgment which figures in the third Critique and showing its importance both to Kant's own theoretical philosophy and to contemporary views of human thought and cognition. For us to possess the capacity ofjudgment, on the interpretation defended here, is for our natural perceptual and imaginative responses to involve a claim to their own normativity with respect to the objects which cause them. It is in virtue of this capacity that we are able not merely to respond discriminatively to objects, as animals do, but to bring objects under concepts. The essays in this book aim collectively to develop and illuminate this understanding of judgment in its own right, and to use it to address specificinterpretive issues in Kant's aesthetics, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of biology; they are also concerned to bring out the relevance of this conception of judgment to contemporary debatesregarding concept-acquisition, the content of perception, and skepticism about rules and meaning.