Kant and the Feeling of Life
Beauty and Nature in the "Critique of Judgment"
Collects together for the first time essays devoted to a detailed historical and systematic discussion of the topic of life in Kant's work.
Description
Kant and the Feeling of Life positions Kant's concept of life as a guiding thread for understanding not only Kant's approach to aesthetics and teleology but the underlying unity of the Critique of Judgment itself. The "feeling of life," which Kant describes as affecting us in various ways—as animating, enlivening, and quickening the mind—lies at the heart of Kant's philosophical project, but it has remained understudied for a theme of such centrality. This volume brings together, for the first time, essays focused on the topic of life in Kant's work, providing a wealth of perspectives and analyses ranging from the Critique of Judgment to Kant's early aesthetics, his social and political philosophy, his work connected to the body and health, and his moral theory.
Jennifer Mensch is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. She is the author of Kant's Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy.
Reviews
"While there are other very good collections that address either the Critique of Judgment as a whole or Kant's biological/scientific writings, none offer the combination of high-level scholarship and an editorial voice as innovative as Mensch's. While this volume is structured as a collection of essays that follow the development of the Critique of Judgment, Mensch is offering the theme of life as a way not only to interpret the third Critique but to connect its varied discussions far beyond Kant's text within his corpus and beyond." — Avery Goldman, DePaul University