Abstract

Is a defence of the reading offered in the earlier chapters against another set of objections, including some recently articulated by Paul Guyer. It elaborates ways in which the objective nature of Kantian taste is also connected with another feature that is often denied of it, namely, a fundamentally conceptual character. To say that Kant’s argument presumes that taste is objective and conceptual does not mean that this is to take it to be all objective and all conceptual. Since it is rooted in human perception, taste must involve sensation and feeling, and in this sense it is obviously subjective and intuitive as well – but this does not mean that we should think that Kant means to deny a sense in which it also needs to remain both objective and conceptual, as these terms are commonly understood now. The general structure of Kant’s discussion here fits in well with my overall interpretation of him as a ‘moderate’ philosopher regressively seeking universal features of particular kinds of presumed experience.