Response to My Critics

In this article, I give a short précis of my recently published book, The Critique of Judgment and the Unity of Kant’s Critical System, and I also respond to the arguments of my critics, Andrija Šoć, Monika Jovanović, Ted Kinnaman, and Luigi Filieri. In response to Šoć, I take the opportunity to clarify the difference between the realism I argue is in the representations of reflective judgment (“moral image realism”) and the realism in our assent to moral Glaube (“rational necessitation realism”). In response to Jovanović, I endorse her claim that my approach to Kant’s aesthetics relates to contemporary notions of aesthetic cognitivism and further elaborate on how Kant’s text can support this view. In response to Kinnaman, I remind the reader that my book sufficiently acknowledges that a contingent fit between nature and our cognitive faculties must be at the core of the reflective judgment’s principle of purposiveness. I also emphasize that my notion of reflective judgment’s “schema analogues,” although subjective because they respond to the need of reason, are also at the same time objective and in some respect about the world. In response to Filieri, I contend that, for Kant, our representations of the progress of human history presuppose both autonomous human agency and something that surpasses it yet cooperates with its final aims. Thus, the progress of human history is both about “the aim of freedom” and “the aim of nature.”