20.04.02 · philosophy / aesthetics

Kant's Critique of Judgment: the beautiful, the sublime, and disinterested pleasure

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Anchor (Master): Kant 1790 primary text; Allison 2001; Guyer 1979; Zammito 1992

Intuition Beginner

You stand before a painting and say, "This is beautiful." A friend disagrees. You argue — about colour, balance, the way the light falls — and you expect the reasons to carry weight. Yet unlike a sum in arithmetic, you cannot prove the painting beautiful. Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) asks precisely how this kind of judgment is possible: a claim that demands agreement from everyone, yet rests on no rule and no concept that could force the conclusion.

Kant's answer begins with a small but decisive distinction. When you call the painting beautiful, you take pleasure in the looking itself — not because the canvas is worth money, not because you want to own it, not because it is morally improving. The pleasure is disinterested: free from appetite, from usefulness, from desire. From this single feature Kant derives something striking. A pleasure unclouded by private interest feels as if any clear-eyed viewer ought to share it. Taste, on this account, demands universal assent even though it cannot command it by proof.

The same book maps a second experience. Under a vast night sky you feel small, almost overwhelmed — yet lifted. Kant calls this the sublime: a pleasure that passes through a moment of displeasure, where imagination fails to grasp the whole and reason asserts its own superior reach. This unit reconstructs Kant's four moments of taste, the mathematical and dynamical sublime, and the legacy handed to Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Adorno.

Visual Beginner

The four moments are not independent criteria but a single chain: disinterestedness strips away what is private, which licenses the claim to universality, which purposiveness-without-purpose explains, which the sensus communis underwrites as necessity.

Category	Moment	What the judgment of taste asserts
Quality	Disinterested	Pleasure independent of appetite, use, or moral worth
Quantity	Universal	Every judge ought to agree — without a concept
Relation	Purposive	Form appears designed for our faculties, without a purpose
Modality	Necessary	Satisfaction required of all, via the sensus communis

The table makes the internal logic visible: each moment draws its content from the one before it.

Worked example Beginner

Kant separates three ways of approving something by examining what each approval rests on. Consider three concrete objects.

A slice of cake you enjoy eating.
A wildflower blooming by a path.
A well-made hammer that drives nails cleanly.

The cake — the agreeable. You enjoy the cake because of the sensation of sweetness on your tongue. Someone who dislikes sweet things has no reason to agree with you. The judgment "this cake is pleasant" reports a private sensation. Kant calls this the agreeable.

The wildflower — the beautiful. You stop, look, and take pleasure simply in how it appears — not wanting to pick it, sell it, or eat it. The pleasure is disinterested. You speak as if anyone who looked properly ought to feel it too, even though you cannot list features that force agreement. This is the beautiful: a free pleasure that claims universal assent.

The hammer — the good. You approve the hammer because it serves its purpose well, or because using it honestly is the right thing to do. The approval rests on a concept — what a hammer is for, or what is morally good. Kant calls this the good.

What this tells us: only the middle case is a pure judgment of taste. The agreeable is private; the good is concept-bound; the beautiful alone combines subjective pleasure with a claim to universality.

Check your understanding Beginner

Exercise (easy, multiple choice).

In Kant's three-way distinction, which object grounds a disinterested pleasure?

A. The slice of cake, because of its sweetness. B. The wildflower, because you take pleasure in the mere looking. C. The hammer, because it serves its purpose well. D. None of them — disinterested pleasure applies only to moral action.

Hint

Disinterested pleasure is independent of appetite, of usefulness, and of moral evaluation. Which object pleases through sheer appearance alone?

Answer

Option B. The wildflower pleases through the mere representation of its appearance, with no interest in possessing, consuming, or morally approving it. The cake pleases through a private bodily sensation (the agreeable); the hammer pleases through conformity to a concept of purpose or duty (the good). Only the wildflower realises the free, disinterested pleasure that defines the judgment of taste.

Exercise (easy, multiple choice).

The sublime, for Kant, is best described as:

A. An uninterrupted, simple pleasure in a well-proportioned object. B. A pleasure that passes through displeasure: imagination fails before vastness or power, and reason asserts a higher, supersensible capacity. C. The agreeable sensation produced by sweetness or warmth. D. A judgment grounded in a concept of moral duty.

Hint

The sublime is contrasted with the beautiful through its two-stage structure — a failure of one faculty followed by the assertion of another.

Answer

Option B. The sublime is structurally two-staged: imagination is overextended before magnitude (the mathematical sublime) or before power (the dynamical sublime), producing displeasure, which turns into pleasure when reason asserts its supersensible vocation. The beautiful, by contrast, involves harmonious free play without this disruption.

Formal definition Intermediate+

Kant's analytic of the beautiful (§§1–22) reconstructs the judgment " $x$ is beautiful" through four moments, each indexed to a category of the understanding ^{[Kant 1790]}. Read jointly, the moments specify what kind of claim a judgment of taste is.

Definition (judgment of taste). A judgment of taste is a claim that an object $x$ is beautiful, asserting universal communicability while resting on no determinate concept of $x$ . Its necessary structure is given by four moments:

Quality (§§1–5). The judgment is disinterested: the pleasure is taken in the mere representation of $x$ , independent of appetite (the agreeable), of utility, and of moral worth (the good).
Quantity (§§6–9). The beautiful is presented as universally pleasing without a concept. Because the ground is not a private interest, the speaker claims that every properly disposed judge ought to agree.
Relation (§§10–17). Beauty is the form of purposiveness without purpose (Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck): $x$ appears purposive for our faculties though no determinate end is posited.
Modality (§§18–22). The satisfaction in beauty is necessary, a necessity grounded in a presupposed sensus communis — a shared capacity for communicable feeling.

Free and adherent beauty (§16). Free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) is judged without any concept of what the object ought to be — Kant's stock examples are flowers, crustacean ornament, designs à la grecque, and music without text. Adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens) is judged under a concept of the object's purpose: the beauty of a building, a horse, a human figure. Only free beauty yields a pure judgment of taste; adherent beauty mixes taste with a judgment of perfection.

Sensus communis (§§20–22). The common sense is not empirical consensus but a regulative principle: the assumption that the free play of imagination and understanding is communicable to any finite rational being similarly constituted. It underwrites the modality moment's claim of necessity and the deduction of taste in §38.

Counterexamples to common slips

"Disinterested means unemotional or indifferent." Disinterestedness excludes appetite, possession, and utility — not feeling. The judgment of taste is defined by a distinctive feeling of pleasure; what is suspended is interest in the object's existence, not affective response to its appearance. A viewer moved to tears by a painting is not thereby interested in Kant's technical sense.
"Universal validity means most people agree." Kant's claim is normative, not statistical. The judgment demands assent from every judge; it does not predict a majority preference. Universal validity is a presumption the judgment makes — the very thing the deduction must justify — not an observed frequency. Confusing the two collapses the modality moment into an empirical average.
"Free beauty is the only genuine beauty." Free beauty is the only pure case for analysis, but Kant treats adherent beauty as genuine: a church, a human being, a horse can be beautiful under their respective concepts of purpose. Collapsing the free/adherent distinction erases the difference between pure and applied taste and obscures why the analytic abstracts to the free case at all.

Key argument with reconstruction Intermediate+

The structural linchpin of the Critique of Judgment is the inference from the first moment to the second: from the disinterestedness of the pleasure to its claim of universal validity. This is the move every major commentator — Allison, Guyer, Zammito — centres, because the rest of the analytic hangs on it ^{[Allison 2001]}.

Claim. If a pleasure in an object is disinterested, then the judgment expressing it legitimately demands the assent of every judge, even though no determinate concept grounds the demand.

Reconstruction.

P1. A judgment of taste rests on a feeling of pleasure in the subject, not on a concept of the object (the Quality moment).

P2. The pleasure is disinterested: it is independent of the object's existence, of appetite, of utility, and of moral evaluation.

P3. Every element that would make the pleasure private — craving, ownership, usefulness, personal advantage — has been removed by P2.

P4. With every private ground removed, no reason remains for the pleasure to be restricted to this subject rather than to any other similarly constituted judge.

P5. A pleasure for which no private restriction can be given is thereby communicable to all.

C. Therefore the judgment " $x$ is beautiful" carries a legitimate claim to universal assent (the Quantity moment), even though no determinate concept enforces agreement.

Where the argument bends. The controversial step is P4–P5. The move from "no private ground restricts this pleasure" to "every judge ought to share it" is not deductive; it needs the further premise that human cognitive faculties are so constituted that the same free play recurs in any properly functioning subject. That premise is substantive and empirical in flavour — it is what the sensus communis is later invoked to underwrite, and it is what Guyer presses hardest ^{[Guyer 1979]}. The argument is best read not as a proof but as a transcendental explication of what we must presuppose whenever we genuinely judge something beautiful rather than merely report liking it.

Bridge. This argument builds toward 20.04.01, where it reappears as the antinomy of taste, and appears again in 20.13.01 as a model of reflective judgment operating without a governing rule. The foundational reason Kant can move from a private feeling to a public demand is that disinterestedness removes exactly what would make the judgment merely personal; this is exactly why the assent is demanded yet never enforced by proof. The central insight generalises to every normative domain in which validity is claimed without a decision procedure: the warrant must lie in shared cognitive structure, not in the object.

Exercises Intermediate+

Exercise 1 (easy, multiple choice).

Which moment of the judgment of taste does §16 (free vs adherent beauty) primarily sharpen?

A. The Quality moment, because it concerns appetite. B. The Relation moment, because it concerns whether a concept of purpose is presupposed. C. The Modality moment, because it concerns necessity. D. None — §16 is part of the analytic of the sublime.

Hint

Free beauty is judged with no concept of what the object ought to be; adherent beauty is judged under such a concept. Which moment analyses the role of a concept of purpose?

Answer

Option B. The free/adherent distinction refines the Relation moment: purposiveness without purpose is the pure (free) case, while purposiveness under a concept of end is the adherent case. §16 therefore qualifies the third moment by specifying when a concept of purpose enters and thereby renders the judgment impure.

Exercise 2 (easy, multiple choice).

Kant distinguishes the judgment of taste from a judgment of the good. The decisive difference is that:

A. The good produces pleasure; the beautiful does not. B. A judgment of the good rests on a concept of purpose or moral worth; a pure judgment of taste does not. C. The good is disinterested; the beautiful is interested. D. The good is universal; the beautiful is private.

Hint

Both the good and the beautiful involve pleasure and both can claim universality. What differs is whether a concept underwrites the judgment.

Answer

Option B. The good is approved under a concept — either a concept of utility (what the thing is for) or of moral worth (what is right). The beautiful, in its pure form, pleases without any such concept. This is why Kant places the beautiful between the agreeable (private sensation) and the good (concept-bound approval): it shares the good's universality without sharing its dependence on a concept.

Exercise 3 (medium, argument reconstruction).

Reconstruct Kant's argument that the mathematical sublime requires a two-stage affective structure (displeasure followed by pleasure). Lay out the premises and the conclusion.

Hint

Begin from the fact that the sublime is a feeling indexed to a relation between faculties, not a property of objects. Ask what would happen if imagination sustained the representation without strain, and what would happen if reason did not then assert its supersensible capacity.

Answer

P1. The sublime is a feeling of a relation between imagination and reason, not an object-property (§23).

P2. If imagination sustained the representation without strain — harmonious free play — the experience would be one of beauty, not sublimity; so strain in imagination is necessary for the sublime.

P3. If reason did not then assert its capacity to think what imagination cannot exhibit, the strain would yield only displeasure, contrary to the sublime's being a pleasure through displeasure (§§27, 29).

C. Therefore every experience of the mathematical sublime involves a prior stage of imaginative failure and a consequent stage of rational self-assertion; the sublime is structurally two-staged, which is why it cannot reduce to large-scale beauty.

Exercise 4 (medium, distinction).

Explain the difference between the sensus communis and an empirical consensus about what people happen to find beautiful. Why does conflating them collapse the modality moment?

Hint

The modality moment claims that the satisfaction in beauty is necessary. Necessity and observed frequency are different modal categories.

Answer

The sensus communis is a regulative principle — a presupposition that the free play of cognition is communicable to any finite rational subject similarly constituted. It is a condition we are entitled to assume, not a fact we discover by tallying opinions. An empirical consensus, by contrast, is a statistical average of actual agreements and yields at most probability.

Conflating the two collapses the modality moment because the moment claims that the satisfaction in beauty is necessary. Necessity cannot be grounded in observed frequency: an average, however large, remains contingent. If the universal assent of taste rested on a poll, the judgment's necessity would dissolve into a high likelihood, contradicting the very modality the moment asserts. This is why Kant insists the sensus communis is presupposed rather than proved.

Exercise 5 (medium, application).

A collector admires a sculpture chiefly because its resale value has tripled. On Kant's analysis, is her judgment a pure judgment of taste? Identify which moment is violated and why.

Hint

Ask whether the pleasure is taken in the mere representation of the object or in the object's existence as a means to financial gain.

Answer

Her judgment is not a pure judgment of taste. The pleasure is mediated by financial interest in the object's existence and market value, so the Quality moment (disinterestedness) is violated: the collector's delight is conditioned by what the sculpture is worth, not by how it appears. Because disinterestedness is the first moment on which the others logically depend, its failure removes the ground for the Quantity moment's universal claim as well — there is no reason a differently situated buyer (or a non-collector) ought to share her pleasure. Kant would classify her response as interest-bound approval, closer to the good (the useful) than to the beautiful.

Exercise 6 (hard, critical evaluation).

Guyer and other commentators press the step P4–P5 in the argument from disinterestedness to universal assent. State the strongest version of this objection and assess whether the appeal to the sensus communis in §§20–22 and the deduction in §38 successfully answers it.

Hint

The objection targets the move from "no private ground restricts this pleasure" to "every judge ought to share it." Ask whether the sensus communis establishes shared response or merely presupposes it, and whether a presupposition can bear the normative weight Kant needs.

Answer

The strongest objection runs as follows. The inference in P4–P5 requires that shared faculty-structure guarantees shared free-play response under similar conditions. But training, culture, and individual cognitive history plainly shape how imagination and understanding engage an object, so shared architecture does not entail shared response. The premise is substantive and empirically vulnerable; it is not licensed by disinterestedness alone.

The §38 deduction answers this only partially. It argues that the universal communicability of the cognitive state in free play is presupposed in all cognition (since cognition requires the very faculties whose play is here harmonised), so the presupposition is not arbitrary. But this shows at most that we are entitled to presuppose communicability; it does not show that the presupposition is true, nor that actual judges will converge. Allison reads this as sufficient for a transcendental right; Guyer reads it as leaving a gap between the right to demand assent and any expectation of obtaining it. The dispute turns on whether a legitimation of the claim suffices, or whether Kant owes an account of the fact of widespread agreement.

Exercise 7 (hard, comparative analysis).

Schopenhauer accepts Kant's notion of disinterested aesthetic contemplation but reinterprets it as will-less perception, and Adorno inherits Kant's thesis of aesthetic autonomy while attacking the free-play reconciliation. Compare what each successor preserves and what each rejects of the four-moment framework.

Hint

Identify which moment each theorist keeps (disinterestedness is the obvious candidate) and where each departs: Schopenhauer on the metaphysical object of contemplation, Adorno on the harmony between faculties and society.

Answer

Schopenhauer preserves the Quality moment: aesthetic contemplation is disinterested, the intellect released from the demands of the will. But he rejects the Kantian framing of the object as mere purposive form. For Schopenhauer the disinterested subject grasps not formal purposiveness but the Platonic Idea — the eternal archetype of the thing — so the Relation moment is transformed: purposiveness-without-purpose gives way to the direct apprehension of an idea, and the pleasure is the peace of the extinguished will rather than the free play of faculties.

Adorno preserves the autonomy thesis implicit in the four moments — that aesthetic validity is irreducible to appetite, utility, or concept — and he preserves the demand for a validity beyond private preference. But he rejects the reconciliation the free-play model promises. For Adorno, authentic art's truth-content is negative: it registers the suffering and contradiction that conceptual thought cannot resolve, rather than harmonising imagination and understanding in pleasurable play. The free play is, for Adorno, an ideological smoothing-over of real antagonism. Where Kant finds a bridge between subjectivity and normativity in shared cognition, Adorno locates the artwork's truth precisely in its refusal to be reconciled.

Both successors thus keep the Kantian demand — validity beyond private pleasure — while dismantling the resolution Kant built to meet it.

Advanced results Master

The four moments, the two sublimes, and the deduction compose a single architectonic in which each element articulates one consequence of disinterested pleasure. The advanced results below develop the load-bearing claims of the Critique of Judgment and trace their afterlife.

Result 1 — Free and adherent beauty (§16). The §16 distinction sorts beautiful objects by whether a concept of what they ought to be enters the judgment. Free beauty is judged with no concept of purpose in play; it is the pure case from which the analytic abstracts. Adherent beauty is judged under a concept of the thing's end, so the judgment mixes pure taste with a judgment of perfection. The thesis is structural: the purity of a judgment of taste varies inversely with the determinacy of the concept presupposed, which is why the analytic must isolate the free case to obtain its definitions.

Result 2 — The mathematical sublime (§§25–27). In the mathematical sublime, imagination fails to synthesise a magnitude great enough to measure an object — the starry heavens, a mountain range, the ocean. Imagination strives toward the absolute totality of a progression, a task proper to reason, and breaks down under it. The displeasure of this breakdown turns into pleasure when reason asserts its supersensible capacity to think the infinite as an idea, even where imagination cannot exhibit it. The resulting feeling is respect for a faculty in us that surpasses sensibility.

Result 3 — The dynamical sublime (§§28–29). The dynamical sublime arises before nature considered as a power we could resist only with difficulty: storm clouds, volcanoes, overhanging cliffs. In safety, the spectator finds this might fearsome but not fearful for herself; the judgment discloses a capacity to regard ourselves as independent of nature's dominion. The feeling here is not respect for reason's mathematical vocation but for our moral vocation — the practical reason whose autonomy nature cannot touch. The two sublimes trace the two directions of reason's supersensible destination.

Result 4 — The deduction of taste and the sensus communis (§§20–22, 38). A deduction — a legitimation of a claim's right — is required because the judgment of taste claims universality without a concept. Kant's compressed §38 solution runs: the universal communicability of the mental state in free play is presupposed in cognition in general, so it can be imputed to everyone without proof. The sensus communis is the regulative principle licensing this imputation. Zammito reads the deduction as the hinge that made the third Critique possible; Guyer questions whether it earns the right it claims ^{[Zammito 1992]}.

Result 5 — Genius and aesthetic ideas (§§46–49). Fine art is the art of genius: genius is the talent through which nature gives the rule to art. The genius produces original works that cannot be derived from a determinate procedure and that serve as a standard for successors. The vehicle is the aesthetic idea — a representation of the imagination that occasions much thought but to which no determinate concept is adequate. Aesthetic ideas invert the rational idea: where the rational idea is a concept with no adequate intuition, the aesthetic idea is an intuition with no adequate concept.

Result 6 — The legacy: Schiller, Schopenhauer, Adorno. Schiller's Aesthetic Education (1795) internalises free play as the play-drive mediating sense and form, making the aesthetic state the condition of moral freedom. Schopenhauer (1818) recasts disinterested contemplation as the will-less, painless subjectivity in which the intellect grasps the Platonic Idea. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) inherits Kant's autonomy of art while rejecting the reconciliation of the free-play model: authentic art's truth-content is negative, a non-conceptual protest against conceptual totality. Each successor preserves the demand Kant located in taste while dismantling his resolution of it.

Synthesis. The four moments, the two sublimes, and the deduction of taste form a single architectonic, and the foundational reason is that each articulates one consequence of disinterested pleasure. Putting these together, the mathematical and dynamical sublimes are dual to the two directions of free play: the first overextends imagination before sheer magnitude, the second before sheer power, and in both this is exactly the failure through which reason announces its supersensible vocation. The central insight — that a claim to universality can be made without a determinate concept — is the pivot where the bridge is laid from Kant's subjective starting point to his normative conclusion, and it generalises through Schiller's play-drive, Schopenhauer's will-less contemplation, and Adorno's negative truth-content, each inheriting Kant's demand while rejecting his reconciliation.

Full proof set Master

The propositions below formalise the load-bearing transitions of the analytic. Each is reconstructed as an argument whose premises are drawn from the Kantian text and whose conclusion is then evaluated against the commentary tradition.

Proposition 1 (purity of taste). A judgment of taste is pure only if it presupposes no concept of the object's purpose.

Proof. Suppose a judgment of $x$ as beautiful presupposes a determinate concept $C$ of what $x$ ought to be. Then the pleasure in $x$ is conditioned by $x$ 's conformity to $C$ , and so by $x$ 's perceived perfection relative to an end. But pleasure conditioned by a concept of perfection is a judgment of the good, not of the beautiful (§15); and where $C$ fixes what counts as correct, the universality of the judgment is grounded in $C$ rather than in free feeling, contradicting the Quantity moment (§9). Therefore a judgment with such a concept is impure — adherent rather than free. The flower, judged with no concept of its botanical purpose, is the limiting case of purity. $□$

Proposition 2 (two-stage structure of the sublime). Every experience Kant counts as sublime involves a prior stage of imaginative failure and a consequent stage of rational self-assertion.

Proof. The sublime is not an object-property but a feeling indexed to a relation between faculties (§23). If imagination sustained the representation without strain, the experience would be one of beauty rather than sublimity — mere harmony rather than the disrupted pleasure that defines the sublime; so strain in imagination is necessary. If reason did not then assert its supersensible vocation, the strain would yield only displeasure, contrary to the definition of the sublime as a pleasure through displeasure (§§27, 29). Therefore both stages are required; the sublime is structurally two-staged, and this is exactly why it cannot reduce to large-scale beauty. $□$

Proposition 3 (regulative status of the sensus communis). The sensus communis cannot be an empirical generalisation without collapsing the modality moment.

Proof. The modality moment claims that the satisfaction in beauty is necessary (§22). Necessity cannot be grounded in observed frequency, which yields at most probability. Were the sensus communis an empirical average of actual agreements, the judgment's necessity would reduce to a contingency, contradicting its modal claim. Therefore the sensus communis must function as a regulative principle — a presupposition we are entitled to make insofar as the communicability of cognition is presupposed in all judging (§38), not a fact we discover by observation. $□$

Connections Master

Aesthetics overview 20.04.01. This unit builds toward the sibling overview, where the four-moment argument reappears as the antinomy of taste. Where 20.04.01 surveys the whole field — Plato to Danto — this unit supplies the dedicated Kantian depth: the internal logic of the moments, the two sublimes, and the deduction of taste that the overview can only gesture at.
Epistemology 20.01.01. Kant's distinction between determinate and reflective judgment, on which the whole analytic of taste depends, presupposes the epistemological architecture of the first Critique. The judgment of taste is the paradigm of reflective judgment — seeking a universal for a given particular — and the epistemology unit supplies the framework that makes that paradigm intelligible.
Metaphysics 20.11.01. The sublime discloses what Kant calls our supersensible vocation: a capacity of reason that outruns sensibility. This thesis depends on the metaphysical distinction between the sensible and the supersensible, and on the doctrine of reason's ideas, treated systematically in the metaphysics unit.
Philosophy of mind 20.13.01. The free play of imagination and understanding is a thesis about the structure of conscious cognition. The phenomenology of absorbed aesthetic attention, and the disjunction between harmonious free play (the beautiful) and disrupted pleasure (the sublime), connect directly to the philosophy of mind's analysis of experience and the faculties.

Historical & philosophical context Master

Kant published the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft) in 1790 as the third Critique, intended to mediate between the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), which governs nature under the understanding, and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), which governs freedom under reason ^{[Kant 1790]}. Reflective judgment — which seeks a universal for a given particular rather than subsuming the particular under a given universal — was the missing middle term, and the judgment of taste became its paradigm case. Zammito's Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment (1992) traces how the project grew from a planned "Critique of Taste" into a full critical treatise across 1787–1790 ^{[Zammito 1992]}. Allison's Kant's Theory of Taste (2001) gives the standard modern defence of the four-moment argument ^{[Allison 2001]}, while Guyer's Kant and the Claims of Taste (1979) frames the central disagreements over universality and the deduction ^{[Guyer 1979]}.

The reception reshaped the field. Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) converted Kant's free play into a theory of human development; Schopenhauer (1818) made disinterested aesthetic contemplation the central release from the will; Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics (1835) reabsorbed taste into the historical self-development of spirit. In the twentieth century Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) returned to Kant's autonomy thesis while attacking its reconciliation, and analytic aesthetics reopened the four moments as live problems in the philosophy of evaluative language.

Bibliography Master

Kant, I. — Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790). Trans. W. S. Pluhar (Hackett, 1987); trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford, 1928).
Allison, H. E. — Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Guyer, P. — Kant and the Claims of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1979; 2nd ed. 1997).
Zammito, J. H. — The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Schiller, F. — On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters (1795). Trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford University Press, 1967).
Schopenhauer, A. — The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, §§34–52 (1818/1844). Trans. E. F. J. Payne (Dover, 1969).
Adorno, T. W. — Aesthetic Theory (1970). Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Burke, E. — A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).
Guyer, P. (ed.) — The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Judgment (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Prerequisites

20.04.01

Tier anchors

beginner: Scruton, Beauty (2009) Ch. 2–3; introductory accounts of Kant's aesthetics
intermediate: Kant, Critique of Judgment §§1–22, 25–29; Allison, Kant's Theory of Taste
master: Kant 1790 primary text; Allison 2001; Guyer 1979; Zammito 1992

References

Kant, I. — Critique of Judgment (1790) · §§1–22 (four moments); §16 (free/adherent beauty); §§25–29 (the sublime); §§38 (deduction); §§46–49 (genius)
Allison, H. E. — Kant's Theory of Taste (2001) · Ch. 2–4 (the four moments); Ch. 9 (the sublime)
Guyer, P. — Kant and the Claims of Taste (1979) · Part I (the problem of universality); Part III (the deduction)
Zammito, J. H. — The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment (1992) · Ch. 6–7 (the genesis of the third Critique)
Schiller — On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) · Letters 9–15 (the play-drive)
Schopenhauer — The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I (1818) · §§34–52 (aesthetic contemplation; the sublime)
Adorno, T. W. — Aesthetic Theory (1970) · Sections on autonomy, aura, and truth-content
Burke, E. — A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) · Part I, §7 (the sublime); Part III, §27 (beauty)

Estimated time

beginner: 20m
intermediate: 45m
master: 70m