The Normativity of Nature ─ Essays on Kant's Critique of Judgement

Why read Kant's Critique of Judgment? For most readers, the importance of the work lies in its contributions to aesthetics and, to a lesser extent, the philosophy of biology. Hannah Ginsborg, by contrast, sees the Critique of Judgment as a central contribution to the understanding of human cognition generally. The fourteen essays collected here advance a common interpretive project: that of bringing out the philosophical significance of the notion of judgment which figures in the third Critique and showing its importance both to Kant's own theoretical philosophy and to contemporary views of human thought and cognition. For us to possess the capacity of judgment, on the interpretation defended here, is for our natural perceptual and imaginative responses to involve a claim to their own normativity with respect to the objects which cause them. It is in virtue of this capacity that we are able not merely to respond discriminatively to objects, as animals do, but to bring objects under concepts. The Critique of Judgment, on this reading, rejects the traditional dichotomy between the natural and the normative: our natural psychological responses to the spatio-temporal objects which affect our senses are both causally determined by those objects, and normatively appropriate to them. The essays in this book aim collectively to develop and illuminate this understanding of judgment in its own right, and to use it to address specific interpretive issues in Kant's aesthetics, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of biology; they are also concerned to bring out the relevance of this conception of judgment to contemporary debates regarding concept-acquisition, the content of perception, and skepticism about rules and meaning.

Hannah Ginsborg was born in London and grew up in Edinburgh. She was an undergraduate at Wadham College Oxford, receiving a B.A. in Philosophy and Modern Languages in 1980, and did graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University, receiving her PhD in 1989. Since 1988 she has been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation was issued as a book by Garland Publishing in 1990, and she has published numerous articles on Kant's theory of knowledge, aesthetics, and philosophy of biology. More recent articles are concerned with issues in the philosophy of mind and the theory of meaning, in particular with questions about rule-following, the normativity of meaning, and the relation between perception and belief.