Kant on Freedom, Nature, and Judgment: The Territory of the Third Critique

by Kristi Sweet

Kant's Critique of Judgment seems not to be an obviously unified work. Unlike other attempts to comprehend it as a unity, which treat it as serving either practical or theoretical interests, Kristi Sweet's book posits it as examining a genuinely independent sphere of human life. In her in-depth account of Kant's Critical philosophical system, Sweet argues that the Critique addresses the for what may I hope? The answer is given in Kant's account of 'territory,' a region of experience that both underlies and mediates between freedom and nature. Territory forms the context in which purposiveness without a purpose, the Ideal of Beauty, the sensus communis, genius and aesthetic ideas, and Kant's conception of life and proof of God are best interpreted. Encounters in this sphere are shown to refer us to a larger, more cosmic sense of a whole to which both freedom and nature belong.

232 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 9, 2023

Reviews

[Jana Giles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars for effort. However, there is not much new here. Additionally, Sweet tacitly borrows Lyotard's territorial metaphor for judgment without attribution (see his The Differend, and Enthusiasm); she swaps his maritime metaphor of an archipelago, and judgment as a ship captain ssiling between, for a physical land territory with judgment mediating between city states (á la Germany before unification). I'm troubled by this borrowing, which strikes me as, to be blunt, essentially plagiaristic. Of course, she doesn't share Lyotard's postmodernism but wants to recpuerate Kant's "hope" for a teleologically rational world designed by an intelligent God (despite this being arguably another of Kant's own "transcendental illusions"). So citing Lyotard too much would implicate her argument. To this I would add that she clearly downplays the "contrapurposiveness" of the sublime to advance her argument.

[BerndBummser · Rating 2 out of 5]

bloviating