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Hegel's chief criticism of Kant in his early essay Faith and Knowledge is that Kant's philosophy introduces the dichotomy between intuition and concept, between being and thought. As a result, Kantian philosophy fails to explain how the synthesis between concepts and intuitions in experience is possible. Kant's theory of ideas is symptomatic of this failure: Kant's idea refers to the concept of totality, the highest expression of reason, which is nonetheless not accessible to human experience. Yet, Hegel recognizes another conception of an idea in Kant's philosophy: the aesthetic idea in the Critique of Judgment is, according to Hegel, the "most interesting point in the Kantian System." Kant describes the aesthetic idea as an intuition that contains much thought (conceptual content): in the aesthetic idea, then, the concept-intuition dichotomy falls away. And while Kant reduces the aesthetic idea to the subjective framework of reflective judgment, I argue that Hegel treats the aesthetic idea as something like a precursor of the speculative idea: the original unity between thought and being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article focuses on the antinomy of pure practical reason and the deduction of the Highest Good in the Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason (in the second Critique). Although Kant claims that the Dialectic contains both the antinomy and the deduction, the boundaries dividing one from the other are at best vague. It is difficult to make out where the antinomy of practical reason ends and where the deduction begins. To locate both and to distinguish one from the other (with special attention paid to the modality of the Highest Good) are the chief aims of this article. Additionally but no less importantly, I show, against the line of criticism originally traceable to Schopenhauer, that the antinomy of practical reason amounts to more than a reflection of Kant's "architectonic obsession." Not only does the antinomy of practical reason correspond to a genuine dialectical problem in the Critique of Practical Reason, but it also shares a fundamental (even if not immediately apparent) similarity with the antinomy of pure speculative reason. Finally, I consider Kant's transcendental deduction of the Highest Good against the backdrop of his other deductions, especially the deduction of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason, and defend it against the charge of potential circularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a well-known feature of Aristotle's biology that he resorts to the analogy with human art to explain the concept of final causality operative in living things. In this Aristotle's theory of biology is explicitly anti-Empedoclean: whereas for Empedocles a randomly generated animal part is preserved if it happens to suit an expedient function, for Aristotle the formal nature produces an animal part with a useful function in view. In this article, by contrast, I focus on those cases in Aristotle's biology in which nature adapts an apparently purposeless part to some useful function (for example, the omentum). I argue that such cases not only indicate a partial return of Empedocles' logic of generation but are also thought by Aristotle by analogy with human prudence (as opposed to human art). To consider Aristotle's account of nature as prudent is not only to disclose a hitherto underappreciated aspect of his biology but also to gain a more comprehensive understanding of prudence in his ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article considers the problem of the preservation of pleasure in Kant's Critique of Judgment. The problem stems from the fact that the Critique of Judgment contains not one but two distinct definitions of pleasure. In the definition of pleasure in §10 of the Analytic of the Beautiful Kant emphasizes that all pleasure is characterized by the tendency to preserve itself. On the other hand, in the definition of §VII of the unpublished Introduction Kant makes a sharp distinction between interested and disinterested pleasures, whereby only the former kind is defined by the tendency for self-preservation. Yet, how can the disinterested pleasure of the beautiful preserve itself, given that insofar as it is disinterested it can be based on neither desire for its own preservation nor continued existence of the object? In addressing this issue, most commentators erroneously reintroduce desire (whether explicitly or surreptitiously) in the pleasure of aesthetic reflection. By contrast, I propose to resolve this issue by turning to Kant's account of lingering in §12 of the Analytic of the Beautiful and, more importantly, §§43-53 of the Deduction, where Kant affords his conception of aesthetic ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]