Kant's Critique of Taste The Feeling of Life

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment is widely recognized as a founding document of modern aesthetics, but its legacy has fallen into disrepute. In this book Katalin Makkai calls for the rediscovery of Kant's aesthetics, showing that its centerpiece, his investigation of the judgment of taste, paints a compelling portrait of our relationships with works of art that we love. At its heart is a scene of aesthetic encounter in which one feels oneself to be 'animated' - brought to life - by an object, finding there to be something in one's experience of it, beyond what there is to know about it, that one wants to explore and articulate. Tracing Kant's insight that to judge is to reveal one's sense of what bears judging, and hence of what matters, Makkai situates Kant's aesthetics within his larger study, begun in the first Critique, of judgment's fundamental role in the life of the mind.

Introduction: a twofold peculiarity; 1. The art of judgment; 2. Communication and animation in the judgment of taste; 3. Subjectivity and recognition in the judgment of taste; 4. Modes of attunement; 5. Aesthetic liking.

Katalin Makkai is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College, Berlin. She has published articles on Kant and film, and is the editor of Vertigo (2012).