18th- and 19th-century philosophy

Unraveling the Curtain: Subversive Folds, Cleland's Memoirs, and the Sublime in Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Le Verrou," Rutgers Art Review 25 (2010): 43-62.

by Danielle Lenhard

Drinking and Thinking: Club Life and Convivial Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh.

by Corey E. Andrews

The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 22.1 (Autumn 2007): 65-82.

An intriguing historical feature of the Scottish Enlightenment is the blend of philosophical and drinking clubs to... more An intriguing historical feature of the Scottish Enlightenment is the blend of philosophical and drinking clubs to which leading thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith belonged. Two leading clubs of the period, the Select Society and the Poker Club, are the primary focus of this essay; the clubs provided members with dramatically different types of social experience. For the Select, it was a space for formal debate of topical issues, while the Poker offered a venue for convivial sociability. This essay examines the significant intersections of polite culture and convivial enjoyment occurring in Edinburgh club life, in order to analyze the active negotiation of boundaries between polite and popular tastes. Of particular interest is how that negotiation was played out in the “drinking and thinking” lives of some of polite culture’s most eloquent arbiters.

Kant on Freedom and Radical Evil in Infancy

by Joseph Cannon

forthcoming in the Proceedings of the XIth International Kant Congress, De Gruyter

The Moral Value of Artistic Beauty in Kant

by Joseph Cannon

Published in Kantian Review (16.1 March 2011), with comment by Paul Guyer and reply by the author

In § 42 of the third Critique, ‘On the intellectual interest in the beautiful,’ Kant claims that it is ‘always the... more In § 42 of the third Critique, ‘On the intellectual interest in the beautiful,’ Kant claims that it is ‘always the mark of a good soul’ (5:298) to take an ‘immediate interest’ in natural beauty because it indicates a moral interest in harmony between nature and moral freedom. In the same pages, however, he denies the possibility of a similarly morally significant interest in artistic beauty. This paper argues that according to his own theory of fine art Kant ought not to deny this value to artistic beauty. In the pages that immediately follow his discussion of immediate interest Kant defines artistic beauty as the joint product of a ‘natural gift’ of genius and a freely exercised discipline of skill and taste. This commits him to the claim that artistic beauty embodies and expresses a harmony between nature and freedom in the productive act of a human being, and thus to the claim that one can take an immediate and morally significant interest in artistic beauty, just as much as in natural beauty.

The Intentionality of Judgments of Taste in Kant's Critique of Judgment

by Joseph Cannon

published in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism