Ido Geiger, Kant and the Claims of the Empirical World: A Transcendental Reading of the Critique of the Power of Judgment Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022 Pp. xiv + 225 ISBN 9781108834261 (hbk) £75.00

Abstract

Catherine Wilson once described Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement as ‘a long, worried, ambivalent book about evolution, beauty, and living forms’ (2008: 98, n. 63). Her pithy remark might explain a widely acknowledged feature of scholarship on the third Critique, namely its piecemeal character. The apparent ambivalence of Kant’s work – moving as it does across aesthetics and philosophy of art, philosophy of biology and the general theory of science, and even philosophy of religion and the final end of human existence, all the while elaborating his baroque philosophical psychology – has led to a suitably fragmentary body of secondary literature. One interpretative challenge, thus, has been to present a unified reading of the treatise, which would show a single overarching thesis running through its fascinating discussions of beauty, sublimity, art, biology, cognition and religion. Ido Geiger’s new monograph takes up this challenge, but with qualifications. Rejecting ‘collaged’ readings of the third Critique (p. 50), he offers a partial remedy to the problem of its unity. The remedy is partial inasmuch as the thesis Geiger sets out to defend – that the principle of purposiveness is a transcendental condition of empirical cognition – only addresses one of the questions Kant identifies as his concern and, indeed, not the principal question. Geiger’s account deals with the narrower of the two ‘transition’ problems Kant raises in the Introductions: the transition from an account of the universal, transcendental laws of nature to an account of its particular, empirical laws. In Geiger’s preferred formulation, this problem amounts to articulating ‘the transcendental conditions of a particular empirical experience and knowledge of nature’, as opposed to the general conditions of experience laid out in the first Critique’s Analytic of Principles (p. 10). The account presented here sets aside, however, the central problem of the third Critique: that of bridging the ‘incalculable gulf’ between nature and freedom, or between the respective claims of epistemic and moral rationality, with which Kant aims to bring the critical enterprise to a close (CPJ, 5: 175). Readers expecting an interpretation of the third Critique as a unified whole guided by that task, as advertised in the front matter of the book, will be disappointed. Geiger openly admits this limitation, stating plainly in his introduction that such a reading is not on offer – notably, the sections on the sublime and on fine art as well as the Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment are excluded from his account, as is Kant’s intriguing and, for the main transition problem, crucial discussion in the Methodology of Teleological Judgment of physicoand ethico-theology. In brief, with regard to the unity of the third Critique, Geiger’s reading avoids being a collage only by passing over what is arguably the book’s central concern. That said, with respect to his specific objective, Geiger presents a compelling and provocative argument for the thesis that the principle of the purposiveness of nature