This course is devoted to a key moment in the history of philosophy, the period of “German idealism” 

The topic for 21-22 is: Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment

This year’s topics course will be devoted to studying and discussing Kant’s third critique, the „Critique of the Power of Judgment“ from 1790. This text is a key document in the development of what became „German Idealism“ or „Classical German Philosophy“: It poses the question as to how the different parts of Kant’s philosophy can be integrated into a ‚system‘; it extends the scope of human faculties that Kant discusses; it adds an entire list of key topics into the discourse on Kant: Beauty, art, the sublime, organism, teleology, nature as ordered under a system of empirical laws; and it extends our understanding of the methods that are required in philosophy (in particular by emphasizing the „as-if“-character of judgements on beauty and on teleological structures).

Key topics to be discussed in this course include:

• Important topics: Art, beauty, sublime, organism, teleology
• Methodological innovations („As-if“-judgments)
• Implications for our understanding of „German idealism“: The notion of „system“, concreteness and abstraction in fundamental judgments, a novel understanding of (organic) nature
• Particular emphasis will be placed on the unity of the complex text: how do considerations on beauty, on organism, on the systematic character of empirical science, relate to each other? This question, in particular, will also be of relevance for students from HPS
• Issues in the reception of the Critique of the Power of Judgment: Schelling and Hegel on the systematicity of science and philosophy; the emergence of the discipline of ‚biology‘; Kant’s influence on the aesthetics of romanticism; ...