1. “What Is Claimed in a Kantian Judgment of Taste?” (Journal of the History of Philosophy, 38 (January 2000): 63-85).

Against interpretations of Kant that would assimilate the universality claim in judgments of taste either to moral demands or to theoretical assertions, I argue that it is for Kant a normative requirement shared with ordinary empirical judgments.  This raises the question of why the universal agreement required by a judgment of taste should consist in the sharing of a feeling, rather than simply in the sharing of a thought.  Kant’s answer is that in a judgment of taste, a feeling assumes the role of predicate.  Such a solution presents a problem as serious as the one it purports to solve.
 

2. “Can Kant’s Deduction of Judgments of Taste Be Saved?” (in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 84 (2002): 20-45) and “The Trouble with Kant’s Deduction of Judgments of Taste” (abbreviated version of the same; in Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des Neunten Internationalen Kant Kongresses (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), 3:462-67).

Kant’s argument in § 38 of the Critique of Judgment is subject to a dilemma: if the subjective condition of cognition is the sufficient condition of the pleasure of taste, then every object of experience must produce that pleasure; if not, then the universal communicability of cognition does not entail the universal communicability of the pleasure.  Kant’s use of an additional premise in § 21 may get him out of this difficulty, but the premises themselves hang in the air and have no independent plausibility.  What Kant offers as a proof of our right to make judgments of taste is more charitably construed as an indirect argument for the adequacy of a speculative account of the subjective conditions of judgment as the explanation of a presumed right to make judgments of taste.
 

3. “The Concept of Disinterestedness in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics” (Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002): 67-87).

British writers of the eighteenth century such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson are widely thought to have used the notion of disinterestedness to distinguish an aesthetic mode of perception from all other kinds.  This historical view originates in the work of Jerome Stolnitz.  Through a re-examination of the texts cited by Stolnitz, I argue that none of the writers in question possessed the notion of disinterestedness that has been used in later aesthetic theory, and that they had no notion of a specifically aesthetic mode of perception.  Their conception of taste differs in essential respects from the Stolnitzian conception of “the aesthetic.”
 

4. “Kant’s Beautiful Roses: A Response to Cohen’s ‘Second Problem’” (forthcoming in British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003)).

According to Kant, the singular judgment “This rose is beautiful” is, or may be, aesthetic, while the general judgment “Roses in general are beautiful” is not.  What, then, is the logical relation between the two judgments?  I argue that there is none, and that one cannot allow there to be any if one agrees with Kant that the judgment “This rose is beautiful” cannot be made on the basis of testimony.  The appearance of a logical relation can, however, be explained in terms of what one does in making a judgment of taste.  Finally, I describe an analogy between Kant’s treatment of judgments of taste and J. L. Austin’s treatment of explicit performative utterances, and trace it to a deeper affinity between their respective projects.
 

5. “Kant’s Concept of Practical Interest” (in progress).

The concept of interest figures in three areas of Kant’s thought:  his account of the pretensions and limits of human reason, his conception of rational agency, and his analysis of aesthetic judgments.  My paper concerns his use of the concept in the second and third of these areas, in which I identify, and attempt to solve, three problems.  (1) Kant’s two attempts in the Groundwork to draw a contrast between moral and non-moral interest are beset with incoherence.  The solution is, in one case, to reject Kant’s definition of interest, and in the other, to eliminate his personification of reason as the subject of interests.  (2) Kant sometimes identifies moral interest with respect for the moral law.  I shall argue that this identification is an error in relation to his own theory, and that it is best eliminated.  (3) Kant’s definition of interest in the Critique of Judgment is incompatible with the existence of moral interest unless certain modifications are made to his terms and assertions.  Making the appropriate adjustments, besides solving this problem, clarifies the meaning of the thesis that “the satisfaction in the beautiful is without any interest.”