What is orientation in judgment?: an essay on Kant's theory of Urteilskraft

In this thesis I provide an account of the faculty of the mind that Kant calls 'the power of judgment' [Urteilskraft].While there is an abundance of literature on various aspects of Kant's theory of judgment in the Critical philosophy, there has been no sustained treatment of the nature of the faculty that is the subject of the third Critique (1790).I argue that the power of judgment is a fundamentally reflective, affective, and orientational capacity that occupies a central place within Kant's account of the human mind.To this end, I trace the development of Kant's thinking on judgment-from the pre-Critical to the Critical period, as well as from the first to the third Critique-to show how it continues to gain prominence within Kant's taxonomy of the mind.The first two chapters set the stage.In chapter 1, I discuss Kant's pre-critical conception of judgment against the backdrop of his German Rationalist predecessors-in particular, Wolff and Meier.For these thinkers, judgment is construed as the logical act of connecting concepts in the mind.I show that the early Kant follows his tradition in putting forward a merely logical conception of judgment, but I draw attention to two striking features of his view at this point, as articulated in the False Subtlety essay (1762) and his 1770s logic lectures.First, Kant already prioritizes judgment within his conception of the mind, even before the power of judgment appears as a distinct faculty.Whereas his predecessors see judgments as composed of concepts (as more basic units of the mind), Kant argues that concepts themselves depend on an act of judgment.Despite only recognizing two higher cognitive faculties (understanding and reason), he describes these as nothing but two different ways of judging (immediate and mediate).Indeed, he even goes as far as to describe them as jointly comprising 'the capacity to judge' [Vermgen zu urteilen] (FS 2:59)-a clear forerunner to his Critical view (KrV A69/B94).Second, Kant already recognizes the limits of logic, as the science of the rules of the understanding, in furnishing a complete account of judgment: there can be no rules for the application of rules (Refl 2173, 16:258).

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.