Few of Kant’s distinctions have generated as much puzzlement and criticism as the one he draws in the Prolegomena between judgments of experience, which he describes as objectively and universally valid, and judgments of perception, which he says are merely subjectively valid. Yet the distinction between objective and subjective validity is central to Kant’s account of experience and plays a key role in his Transcendental Deduction of the categories. In this paper, I reject a standard interpretation of the distinction, according (...) to which judgments of perception are merely subjectively valid because they are made without sufficient investigation. In its place, I argue that for Kant, judgments of perception are merely subjectively valid because they merely report sequences of perceptions had by a subject without claiming that what is represented by the perceptions is connected in the objects the perceptions are of. Whereas the interpretation I criticize undercuts Kant’s strategy in the Deduction, I argue, my interpretation illuminates it. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a solution to a notorious puzzle that lies at the heart of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The puzzle arises because Kant asserts two apparently conflicting claims: (1) F→J: A judgment of beauty is aesthetic, i.e., grounded in feeling. (2) J→F: A judgment of beauty could not be based on and must ground the feeling of pleasure in the beautiful. I argue that (1) and (2) are consistent. Kant’s text indicates that he distinguishes two feelings: the (...) feeling of the harmony of the cognitive faculties that is the ground of judgments of beauty (F1 → J), and the feeling of pleasure that is its consequence (J → F2). I develop and defend a view of Kant’s account of the structure of judgments of beauty that incorporates this crucial distinction. Next, I argue that my view resolves another long-standing problem for Kant’s “Deduction” of judgments of beauty: it allows him to claim that the harmony of the faculties is a condition of judgment in general without implying, absurdly, that all judgments are pleasurable. (shrink)

A common reading of Kant’s notion of synthesis takes it to be carried out by the imagination in a manner guided by the concepts of the understanding. I point to a significant problem for this reading: it is the reproductive imagination that carries out the syntheses of apprehension and reproduction, and Kant claims repeatedly that the reproductive imagination is governed solely by its own laws of association. In light of this, I argue for a different division of the labor of (...) synthesis between the imagination and the understanding. On my view, while the reproductive imagination puts representations together in accordance with laws of association, the understanding recognizes these combinations of representations as necessary in virtue of corresponding to a connection in the objects represented. I conclude by suggesting that a virtue of my account is that it can make sense of Kant’s claim that the relational categories are merely regulative for intuitions. (shrink)