Life and Beauty: Kant’s Critique of Judgment

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Prerequisite: a prior philosophy course Immanuel Kant revolutionized philosophy with his Copernican turn, which limits our knowledge of the world to our subjective experience of it. Kant elaborated this thought in the three volumes of philosophy that comprise his critical system. After investigating questions pertaining to knowledge in the first critique and problems of validating moral judgment in the second critique, Kant shifts in the third critique—our object of study—to elaborate on the forms of judgment that we employ in making sense of beauty in nature, works of art, and the meaning or purpose of life. The first part of the book focuses on aesthetic judgments; in it, Kant asks: What do we mean when we call something—for instance, a sunset or even a painting of a sunset—beautiful? The second part of the book investigates teleological judgments; in it, Kant asks: How do we judge something to be alive? Not only does this book establish many of the central questions of modern aesthetics—such as: How can aesthetic judgments be objective?—but it also addresses the antagonism between freedom and nature, the experience of the sublime, the emergence of artistic genius, the postulation of a sensus communis (common sense), and the relation between beauty and morality. Over the course of the semester, we will observe the vast influence of the Critique of Judgment on both art and the philosophy of art. We will complement our reading of Kant’s text by considering modern thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard, Achille Mbembe, and Hannah Ginsborg. As well, Kant’s ideas will be appraised in consideration of the works of Beethoven, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Jo Baer, Marcel Duchamp, and James Turrell, among many others. Courses offered in related disciplines this year are listed below. Full descriptions of the courses may be found under…