Miles Rind: Research interests

If one can distinguish between doing the history of philosophy philosophically and doing philosophy historically, then, of my two current philosophical projects, one belongs to each of these enterprises. My project in the history of philosophy is a series of articles on Kant’s aesthetic theory. In this work, my aim is to understand and to assess Kant’s contribution to philosophical aesthetics. I believe that such work is useful for thinking about certain issues in aesthetics in their own right, but that is a happy benefit rather than an aim of it. My published work on this project so far has only concerned Kant’s conception of judgments of taste, but I intend to extend it into his theory of fine art and his account of the relation of aesthetic judgments to moral judgments.
My other project is a series of articles on the concept of disinterestedness in aesthetics. In this project, historical inquiry, along with conceptual analysis, is a means to the end of resolving certain perplexities in aesthetic theory. The project has three aims: (i) to clarify the sense or senses that the term “disinterested” bears in its ordinary use, apart from philosophical preoccupations; (ii) to analyze the historical sources of the term’s use in aesthetics; and (iii) to apply the knowledge gained from these inquiries to the assessment of theories of aesthetic experience. On the last point, my main claim is a negative one: that the term “disinterestedness” will not serve to distinguish so-called aesthetic experience from any other kind of experience, or a supposed aesthetic attitude from any other attitude, as it properly signifies only an elementary virtue of judgment quite generally.