To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Chapter 2 examines Kant’s distinction between free and adherent beauty and its implications for artistic beauty. This distinction is controversial because adherent beauty, which presupposes a concept of what the object ought to be, seems at odds with Kant’s demand that judgments of taste be concept-free. These tensions, heightened by his remarks on fine art and genius, have led some to doubt whether artistic beauty qualifies as beauty. The chapter reviews major interpretations – Crawford’s abstraction account, the incorporation view, and the conjunctive view. While Crawford seeks purity through abstraction, the other views show how judgments of perfection can inform aesthetic appreciation without reducing it to rule-governed evaluation. These approaches, rather than rivals, are complementary and reveal the flexibility of Kant’s framework. The chapter concludes that treating artistic beauty as a form of adherent beauty allows for informed, though impure, judgments of taste. These judgments allow descriptive and contextual considerations to guide critical evaluation while preserving Kant’s core commitments.
Combining historical insight with contemporary theory, this book demonstrates that Kant's aesthetics can ground a robust theory of art criticism. It challenges the widespread view that Kant's rejection of aesthetic testimony – the idea that we cannot simply adopt someone else's judgment without firsthand experience – and his dismissal of general rules such as 'symmetry guarantees beauty' or 'a tragic ending ensures depth' leave critics powerless. If testimony and rules are excluded, evaluations such as 'Blade Runner is a masterpiece' lose authority, while descriptions like 'most of the story takes place in perpetual rain and darkness' seem irrelevant to the critic's evaluation. Kantian Art Criticism locates the solution in Kant's overlooked judgments of perfection such as 'the film innovates within the neo-noir genre.' It reimagines what critical communication can be by positioning these judgments as mediators. They guide aesthetic evaluations and draw support from descriptions of a work's nonaesthetic features.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.