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Meaning and Aesthetic Judgment in Kant

2006; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5840/philtopics2006341/22

2154-154X

Eli Friedländer,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

Kant revolutionized our thinking about what it is to have a mind.Some of what seem to me to be among the most important lessons he taught us are often not yet sufficiently appreciated, however.I think this is partly because they are often not themes that Kant himself explicitly emphasized.To appreciate these ideas, one must look primarily at what he does, rather than at what he says about what he is doing.For instance, the revolutionary conceptual transformation Kant focuses on is his "Copernican Revolution": assignment of responsibility for some structural features of knowledge to the nature of the activities of knowing subjects rather than to the nature of the objects known.While this is, of course, an important aspect of his view, as I understand things it is a relatively late-coming move; it occurs significantly downstream from his most radical and important innovations, whose significance owes nothing to this subsequent, optional way of developing them.I want here to sketch in very broad terms some Kantian ideas that it seems most important to me for us to keep in mind in our own thinking about mind, meaning, and rationality.Some of these are very familiar, others less so.And the structural relations I perceive among them seem to me often not perceived. I. FROM EPISTEMOLOGY TO SEMANTICSDescartes gives philosophical thought about the mind an epistemological turn by using the character of our knowledge of them to distinguish minds from bodies.