Kant and the Unity of Reason (History of Philosophy Series)

Kant and the Unity of Reason is a comprehensive reconstruction and a detailed analysis of Kant's Critique of Judgment. In the light of the third Critique, the book offers a final interpretation of the critical project as a whole. It proposes a new reading of Kant's notion of human experience in which domains, as different as knowledge, morality, and the experience of beauty and life, are finally viewed in a unified perspective. The book proposes a reading of Kant's critical project as one of the most sophisticated attempts in the history of philosophy to articulate a complex notion of human sensi bility as an alternative to both eighteenth-century empiricism and rationalism. The fun damental contribution of rationality to human experience cannot be fully appreciated if the sensuous component of experience is not adequately taken into account. For Kant, sensibility includes functions as different as sensation, intuition, perception, emotion, passion, drive, moral feeling, and feeling of pleasure and displeasure. Kant's idea of reflective judgment is the peculiar discovery of the third Critique. Reflective judgment articulates the interplay between sensibility and rationality, the world of nature and the human mind, in order to constitute human experience and the sphere of human intersubjective relationships. In the act of reflection, Kant's philosophy fi nally comes to reflect upon itself and the meaning of its critical endeavor.