A Conceptualist Reading of Kant's Aesthetic Judgment of Beauty

This essay offers a conceptualist reading of Kant to address two central issues in Critique of Judgment:what is the nature of the judgment of beauty,and how it bears on the a priori principle of judgment.Challenging the popular subjectivist approach which conceives Kant's judgment of beauty as a nonconceptual mental state,I argue that the judgment of beauty in Kant is a fullfledged judgment whose conceptual contents are aesthetic appreciation and criticism,and that the principle of subjective purposiveness in judgment refers to a generic concept instead of a mental episode.My view has the advantage over the subjectivism of both preserving the intuitive idea that aesthetic judgments have rich conceptual contents,and of avoiding the theoretical difficulties which subjectivism suffers.To sharpen my focus,I will present a sophisticated subjectivist reading of Kant's aesthetics given by Hannah Ginsborg in section 2,and in section 3 give my criticism of Ginsborg's theory,which also reveals a fundamental limit of the subjectivist approach in general.Finally,in section 4 I give my own conceptualist reading of Kant's aesthetics and respond to potential challenges from the subjectivist camp.