Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason

by Béatrice Longuenesse, Charles T. Wolfe (Translator)

Kant claims to have established his table of categories or "pure concepts of the understanding" according to the "guiding thread" provided by logical forms of judgment. By drawing extensively on Kant's logical writings, Béatrice Longuenesse analyzes this controversial claim, and then follows the thread through its continuation in the transcendental deduction of the categories, the transcendental schemata, and the principles of pure understanding. The result is a systematic, persuasive new interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason .


Longuenesse shows that although Kant adopts his inventory of the forms of judgment from logic textbooks of his time, he is nevertheless original in selecting just those forms he holds to be indispensable to our ability to relate representations to objects. Kant gives formal representation to this relation between conceptual thought and its objects by introducing the term "x" into his analysis of logical forms to stand for the object that is "thought under" the concepts that are combined in judgment. This "x" plays no role in Kant's forms of logical inference, but instead plays a role in clarifying the relation between logical forms (forms of concept subordination) and combinations ("syntheses") of perceptual data, necessary for empirical cognition.


Considering Kant's logical forms of judgment thus helps illuminate crucial aspects of the Transcendental Analytic as a whole, while revealing the systematic unity between Kant's theory of judgment in the first Critique and his analysis of "merely reflective" (aesthetic and teleological) judgments in the third Critique.

Genres: Philosophy

440 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 1998

About the author

Béatrice Longuenesse is Silver Professor of Philosophy. She studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris, France), the University of Paris-Sorbonne (where she received her Doctorat the troisième cycle (PhD) in 1981 and her Doctorat d’Etat in 1992), and Princeton University. She taught at Paris-Sorbonne, the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), the University of Besançon and the University of Clermont-Ferrand before joining the philosophy department at Princeton University in 1993. She left Princeton for NYU in 2004. In 2006-07 she was a fellow at the Institute for Adavanced Study in Berlin. In 2012-13 she was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, holding the Berlin Prize on a Siemens grant in the fall 2012 and the Berlin prize on a John P. Birkelund grant in the spring 2013. Her books include Kant and the Capacity to Judge (1998), a revised and expanded version of Kant et le Pouvoir de Juger (1993), Kant on the Human Standpoint (2005) and Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics (2007), a revised and expanded version of Hegel et la Critique de la Métaphysique (1981). She is the co-editor, with Daniel Garber, of Kant and the Early Moderns (2008) and the editor of Le Moi/the Self/le Soi (a special issue of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 2010-4). She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2011.

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longuenesse gives a very detailed and thorough examination of the centrality of judgement to Kant's account of discursive cognition.

[saml · Rating 3 out of 5]

difficult, impressive. i'm not sure that an interpretation of kant that makes sense of more of his philosophy renders the interpretation more, rather than, say, less, workable. but it is certainly more interesting

[Joey Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is *the* flagship book for contemporary Kant scholarship

[Nikolai Forrestwald]

Quite possibly one of the most profound and complex books ever written on Kant. But this complexity comes at a price (as Kant expert Markus Willaschek already noted in his review). The work is extremely difficult and complex, even for Kant literature, and it can quickly happen that you are no longer able to fully follow Longuenesse's train of thought. But the effort is worth it. Not only is the "ability to judge", i.e. the understanding, analyzed in great detail here, as the name of the book suggests, but the relationship between judging and concept formation, perception and reasoning is also explained in great detail. What is new and interesting about Longuenesse's approach is not only to place the ability to judge at the center of the entire critique of pure reason, but also to characterize other human mental achievements, such as concept formation, through their relationship to the ability to judge . A difficult and complex but extremely rewarding work.




Höchstwahrscheinlich eines der tiefgründigsten und komplexesten Bücher die je über Kant geschrieben wurden. Doch diese komplexität hat (wie auch der Kant-Experte Markus Willaschek in seiner Rezension bereits bemerkte) seinen Preis. Das Werk ist selbst für Kant-Literatur außerordentlich schwierig und komplex geschrieben und es kann schnell einmal passieren, dass man Longuenesses Gedankengängen nicht mehr ganz zu folgen vermag. Doch die Mühe lohnt sich. Nicht nur wird hier, dem Namen des Buches entsprechend, die "Fähigkeit zu Urteilen", also der Verstand, in großer detailliert analysiert, sondern auch der Bezug des Urteilens zur Begriffsbildung, zur Anschauung und zum schließen sehr genau expliziert. Neu und Interessant an Longuenesses Ansatz ist es, nicht allein die Fähigkeit des Urteilens in den Mittelpunkt der ganzen Kritik der reinen Vernunft zu setzen, sondern selbst die anderen Geistesleistungen des Menschen, wie Beispielsweise die Begriffsbildung, durch ihren Bezug auf die Fähigkeit zu Urteilen zu charakterisieren. Ein schwieriges und komplexes aber äußerst belohnendes Werk.

[Boris · Rating 3 out of 5]

She thinks that we can have a priori knowledge about empirical objects because our faculty of imagination makes an effort to synthesize our experiences so that we can always apply the categories to them. I am not convinced.