Kant's Critique of Taste

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.