Contra Mothersill Contra Kant: The Imperative Judgment of Taste in Beauty Restored and the Critique of Judgment

This article defends Kant’s aesthetics, drawn mainly from the Critique of Judgment. The author discusses the intricacies of Kant’s argument by exposing the errors in Mary Mothersill’s interpretations of Kant in her book Beauty Restored. One by one, the author supports his four theses. 1) Kant uses imperative language to surpass the counter intuitive deduction of aesthetic judgments, but those judgments are not any more or less normative compared to empirical judgments. 2) Kant does not demand for a principle to ground the judgment of taste: logic does. 3) Kant cannot be called conceptually biased because judgments of taste do not stem from concepts. 4) Kant is fully aware of the role that dialectic plays in the tentative, contingent nature of the aesthetic judgment: it is a prerequisite for arriving at valid judgments of taste