This essay defends a new interpretation of Kant’s account of the theoretical use of the ideas of reason based on the idea that reason is the faculty that delivers comprehension, i.e., cognition that essentially involves explanatory understanding. I argue that the ideas are conditions of the possibility of comprehension, just as the categories are conditions of the possibility of experience. Precisely in virtue of being constitutive of comprehension, the ideas are also regulative of experience: our implicit conception of comprehension, which (...) involves the ideas, guides the exercise of the understanding by which we acquire experience. For experience is acquired not for its own sake but for the sake of comprehension, and thus we ought to exercise our understanding, as far as we can, in such a way as to acquire experience that advances our comprehension. (shrink)

Panos Paris suggests that beauty has a privileged place among aesthetic concepts and properties. In this paper, I argue that Kant’s insights can help us further develop and defend this view. On the proposed Kantian view, a capacity to make judgments of beauty is presupposed by a capacity to make other kinds of aesthetic judgments.

This is a review of Katharina T. Kraus, Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation: The Nature of Inner Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2020.