Reply to Michael Friedman

 

HENRY E. ALLISON | Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. An Analytical-Historical Commentary | Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015

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By Henry Allison

I wish to thank Michael Friedman for both his extraordinarily rich discussion, which amounts to a commentary of his own on the B-Deduction, and his generous comments about the import of my own work. Given the detailed nature of his reading of the text, with much of which I am in agreement, I shall not here attempt to comment on his account as a whole, since that would require a reply of almost equal length to his. Instead, I shall focus first on what he suggests is our major point of disagreement, namely, the conceptual-non-conceptual issue, and then consider some of our more specific differences.  

In recent years, the contrast between conceptualist and non-conceptualist readings has become the great divide in interpretations of the Transcendental Deduction. And, as Friedman notes, the focal point of the dispute is the note that Kant attaches to the first paragraph of §26 of the B-Deduction. It reads:

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Reply to Lucy Allais

 

HENRY E. ALLISON | Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. An Analytical-Historical Commentary | Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015

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By Henry Allison

I wish to thank Lucy Allais both for her extremely generous comments and her attention to many of the often messy details of my account. She has given my book what I believe any self-respecting author should want: a close and fair minded read. I am particularly pleased by the many points of agreement that she notes and by the fact, which she also notes, that many of our disagreements are relatively minor. Since she had taken a somewhat more combative stance towards my non-metaphysical or, as she put it in her book, “deflationary” interpretation of this idealism in her own recent book (Allais 2015), I was pleasantly surprised to see that even in this area we share more common ground than I had previously supposed.

Reply to Alison Laywine

 

HENRY E. ALLISON | Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. An Analytical-Historical Commentary | Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015

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By Henry Allison

At the close of her comments, Alison Laywine notes that she “had the luxury of focusing on just […] one” aspect of my book and she chose my conception of a normative necessity. Assuming that a respondent should focus on a single aspect of a work under discussion, she has certainly chosen correctly, since this is a focal point of my account. Accordingly, I gladly accept her invitation to say more on the topic, and I am grateful for the opportunity that this has provided to clarify my view.

To begin with, by normative necessity I understand the kind of necessity that Kant attributes to empirical judgements or, in the language of the Prolegomena, to judgements of experience. That Kant attributes a kind of necessity to such judgements, despite their empirical or a posteriori grounding is indisputable.  For example, in a passage cited by Laywine, Kant writes:

Robert R. Clewis on Serena Feloj’s “Estetica del disgusto”

 

SERENA FELOJ | Estetica del disgusto. Mendelssohn, Kant e i limiti della rappresentazione | Carocci 2017

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By Robert R. Clewis

Contemporary aesthetics continues to show great interest in negative aesthetic experiences, especially ugliness and disgust, with numerous books and articles recently appearing on both topics. While The Aesthetics of Disgust: Mendelssohn, Kant, and the Limits of Representation is best characterised as a study of the history of (eighteenth-century) philosophy, it is also informed by the contemporary debates in aesthetics and empirical psychology.

It is a stimulating study of how disgust (Ekel) has been developed in the work of Mendelssohn, Kant, and contemporary researchers. Feloj, who recently translated Winfried Menninghaus’s impressive study Ekel (1999), not only investigates the writings of Mendelssohn and Kant, but also examines recent work on disgust by psychologists (Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, Clark McCauley) and phenomenologists (Aurel Kolnai) as well as Martha Nussbaum and Jacques Derrida. The book is divided into equal parts on Mendelssohn (pp. 21–81) and Kant (pp. 83–144), followed by a shorter, third part on contemporary philosophy and empirical research (pp. 145–67).