Cambridge University Press
0521834783 - Kant on the Human Standpoint - by Béatrice Longuenesse
Frontmatter/Prelims

KANT ON THE HUMAN STANDPOINT

In this collection of essays Béatrice Longuenesse considers three main aspects of Kant’s philosophy, his epistemology and metaphysics of nature, his moral philosophy, and his aesthetic theory, under one unifying principle: Kant’s conception of our capacity to form judgments. She argues that the elements which make up our cognitive access to the world – what Kant calls the “human standpoint” – have an equally important role to play in our moral evaluations and our aesthetic judgments. Her discussion ranges over Kant’s account of our representations of space and time, his conception of the logical forms of judgments, sufficient reason, causality, community, God, freedom, morality, and beauty in nature and art. Her book will appeal to all who are interested in Kant and his thought.

Béatrice Longuenesse is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. Her numerous publications include Kant and the Capacity to Judge (1998).

MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY

General Editor

ROBERT B. PIPPIN, University of Chicago

Advisory Board

GARY GUTTING, University of Notre Dame

ROLF-PETER HORSTMANN, Humboldt University, Berlin

MARK SACKS, University of Essex

Some Recent Titles

Daniel W. Conway: Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game

John P. McCormick: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism

Frederick A. Olafson: Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics

Günter Zöller: Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy

Warren Breckman: Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory

Social Theory

William Blattner: Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism

Charles Griswold: Adam Smith and the Virtues of the Enlightenment

Gary Gutting: Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity

Allen Wood: Kant’s Ethical Thought

Karl Ameriks: Kant and the Fate of Autonomy

Alfredo Ferrarin: Hegel and Aristotle

Cristina Lafont: Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure

Nicholas Wolsterstorff: Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology

Daniel Dahlstrom: Heidegger’s Concepts of Truth

Michelle Grier: Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion

Henry Allison: Kant’s Theory of Taste

Allen Speight: Hegel, Literature, and the Problem of Agency

J. M. Bernstein: Adorno

Will Dudley: Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy

Taylor Carman: Heidegger’s Analytic

Douglas Moggach: The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer

Rüdiger Bubner: The Innovations of Idealism

Jon Stewart: Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered

Michael Quante: Hegel’s Concept of Action

Wolfgang Detel: Foucault and Classical Antiquity

Robert M. Wallace: Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God

Johanna Oksala: Foucault on Freedom

Wayne M. Martin: Theories of Judgment

KANT ON THE HUMAN
STANDPOINT

BÉATRICE LONGUENESSE

New York University

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© Béatrice Longuenesse 2005

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First published 2005

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ISBN-10 0-521-83478-3 hardback

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Earlier versions of chapters of this book have appeared in the following publications:

“Kant’s categories, and the capacity to judge: responses to Henry Allison and Sally Sedgwick,” Inquiry, vol. 43, no. 1 (2000), pp. 91–111.

“Synthesis, logical forms, and the objects of our ordinary experience: response to Michael Friedman,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 83 (2001), pp. 199–212.

“Synthèse et donation. Réponse à Michel Fichant,” Philosophie, no. 60 (1998), pp. 79–91.

“Kant’s deconstruction of the principle of sufficient reason,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy, IX (2001), pp. 67–87. Also in German, under the title “Kant über den Satz vom Grund,” in Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung. Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, ed. Volker Gerhardt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, and Ralph Schumacher (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001), 1, pp. 66–86.

“Kant’s standpoint on the whole: disjunctive judgment, community, and the Third Analogy of Experience,” in Ralph Schumacher and Oliver Scholz (eds.), Idealismus als Theorie der Repräsentation? (Paderborn: Mentis, 2001), pp. 287–313.

“The transcendental ideal, and the unity of the critical system,” in Hoke Robinson (ed.), Proceedings of the VIIIth International Kant Congress, Memphis 1995 (Memphis: Marquette University Press, 1995), 1–2, pp. 521–39.

“Kant et le jugement moral,” in Michèle Cohen-Halimi (ed.), Kant. La rationalité pratique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), pp. 15–55.

Three chapters are slightly revised versions of essays initially commissioned for the following volumes:

“Kant on a priori concepts: the metaphysical deduction of the categories,” in Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). I am grateful to Paul Guyer for giving me permission to include the essay in this volume.

“Kant on causality: what was he trying to prove?” in Christia Mercer and Eileen O’Neill (eds.), Modern Philosophy, Ideas and Mechanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). I am grateful to Christia Mercer and Eileen O’Neill, and to Oxford University Press, for giving me permission to include the essay in this volume.

“Kant’s leading thread in the Analytic of the Beautiful,” in Rebecca Kukla (ed.), Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). I am grateful to Rebecca Kukla for giving me permission to include the essay in this volume.

My intellectual debts during the years in which I worked first on the essays gathered in this volume, and then on the volume itself, are countless. My gratitude goes first to my colleagues and students in the philosophy department at Princeton. They provided an exciting, challenging, and supportive community. I have learnt from our collective enterprise in more ways than I could ever have dreamt was possible. I am also grateful to my colleagues and students in the philosophy department at New York University for the wonderful welcome they have given me since I arrived in the spring term of 2004, and for the exciting work we are doing together.

It is impossible to name all the individuals from whose intellectual companionship I have benefited. Among those who were directly involved in helping me think about the issues discussed in this book, I must at least mention Henry Allison, Richard Aquila, Jean-Marie Beyssade, Michelle Beyssade, Quassim Cassam, Michelle Cohen-Halimi, Steve Engström, Michel Fichant, Michael Friedman, Hannah Ginsborg, Michelle Grier, Paul Guyer, Rebecca Kukla, David Martin, Jean-Claude Pariente, Martine Pécharman, Sally Sedgwick, Dan Warren, Wayne Waxman, Michael Wolff, Allen Wood.

My thanks to Zahid Zalloua and to Nicole Zimek for the fine job they did translating from the French, respectively, the essays that became ch. 9 and ch. 3 in this volume.

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