The Normativity of Nature
Essays on Kant's Critique of Judgement
Hannah Ginsborg
Reviews and Awards
"Ginsborg's interpretive analysis of the Critique of Judgement is masterful, thought-provoking, and timely. It has the capacity of bringing unity to a seemingly non-unified corpus of Kant's reflections on aesthetics and teleology. It is attentive to Kant's text without ever being exegetical. It is an essential contribution to contemporary trends on normativity, as much as it speaks to contemporary debates in aesthetics and philosophy of biology too. This is Kant scholarship at its best." --Intellectual History Review
"Ginsborg offers a sophisticated and successful defense of the intelligibility of taking a normative approach to the natural.... Whether or not readers accept all of [her] many expertly crafted solutions, they will benefit from her skill at framing very basic, but intricate, philosophical puzzles in an exceptionally clear way. Each essay presents interpretations of central issues in Kant's Third Critique (and, to a lesser extent, in his First Critique), but that is almost an incidental feature of them (except for Kant scholars, for whom the collection is an essential tool). The focus of this important collection is on advancing philosophical understanding." -- Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online
"A historic landmark in Kant scholarship...Ginsborg's book will undoubtedly serve as a definitive critical benchmark for scholarship on the third Critique and Kant's Idealism as a whole for decades to come." -- Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
""Over the past twenty-five years, Ginsborg has been building an original body of work that helps us rediscover the third Critique as making a pivotal contribution to Kant's theory of cognition and thus as a necessary complement to the first Critique. Now presented as a whole, The Normativity of Nature embodies the full force of these careful and transformative efforts" --Philosophical Review
"Hannah Ginsborg's The Normativity of Nature is a tour de force and arguably the most philosophically stimulating book written on Kant's third Critique" -- Karl Ameriks, British Journal of Aesthetics
"The appearance of Ginsborg's book...is particularly gratifying for me in that there is no writer on Kant from whom I have learned more about how Kant's third Critique matters to specifically aesthetic concerns. Her writings on this text have always stood out for me for their steadfast concern to be faithful to aesthetic experience and judgement, as well as for the systematic reading of the third Critique in the context of Kant's general theory of judgement." -- Richard Moran, British Journal of Aesthetics
"Ginsborg's interpretation of [Kant's] project is sophisticated and highly original. Having her papers available in one collection is important not only for the sake of convenience but also because it draws attention to a tight thematic thread running through the diverse and seemingly disunified parts of the third Critique on her reading. It thereby draws attention to the deep unity of Ginsborg's own ideas on such prima facie disconnected topics such as beauty, concept formation, and biology." -- Angela Breitenbach, British Journal of Aesthetics