Submitted Abstract
My proposed research aims at pointing to a topic that has so far been neglected in the debate of Kantian conceptualism/nonconceptualism, namely Kant’sviews on aesthetic experience as expressed in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. My research hypothesis is that judgments of taste have cognitivevalue (i.e., inform us about the world) and nonconceptual content has an essential role to play in judgments of taste. It is precisely by virtue of beingnonconceptual but cognizable that a particular given representation (an intuition) sets our representative faculties in free play. Furthermore, we can judgesuch nonconceptual representations to be beautiful because they are representationally significant, i.e. accessible on the personal level, and accessible insuch a way that the subject is aware of the representation quâ nonconceptual representation. If judgments of taste are based on nonconceptual contentand they do indeed have cognitive value or representational significance, as Kant proclaims, then the nature and role of nonconceptual content in Kant’saesthetics is crucial to the debate about nonconceptualism vs. conceptualism. In addition to Kant’s theory of the judgment of taste, where cognitivefaculties, i.e.: the imagination and understanding are involved, the interplay of these faculties is further spelled out in his theory of genius. In exploring therole of nonconceptual content in Kant’s aesthetic I would like to focus on the above two fields, to which no specific literature has been dedicated yet fromthe specific point of view of the existence and role of nonconceptual content in cognition.