Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Traces the development of aesthetic judgment from Kant through German Idealism to modern continental philosophy, offering detailed readings of major thinkers to show how debates about art, truth, and metaphysics continue to shape philosophical thought today.
In this sweeping and intellectually rigorous study, Jacques Taminiaux establishes his stature as one of the foremost historians and philosophers of post-Kantian continental thought. Tracing the fate of aesthetic judgment from its pivotal emergence in Kant's philosophy, Taminiaux follows its reverberations through German Idealism and into the most influential currents of modern and contemporary thought.
At the center of Poetics, Speculation, and Judgment lies a sustained investigation into how questions of judgment, speculation, and aesthetic experience reshape the trajectory of philosophy after Kant. Through meticulous and incisive readings, Taminiaux engages a remarkable constellation of thinkers—including Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—revealing how each reconfigures the tension between art, truth, and metaphysics.
From the "end of metaphysics" to the "death of art," from the nostalgia for ancient Greece to the transformation of aesthetic experience in modern philosophy, Taminiaux illuminates the enduring philosophical stakes of aesthetic judgment. His analyses are as historically grounded as they are conceptually daring, offering new clarity on some of the most contested problems in continental philosophy.
More than a commentary on German Idealism and its aftermath, Poetics, Speculation, and Judgment also charts the intellectual itinerary of Taminiaux’s own thought across three decades—showing a thinker continually testing, refining, and renewing his insights in response to the tradition he interrogates.
"Jacques Taminiaux has demonstrated his preeminence as a historian and philosopher of post-Kantian continental philosophy. In this book, he explicates the emergence of aesthetic judgment in Kant's thought, traces the theoretical provocation it provided for accounts in its wake in German Idealism, and finally, shows the effect of these considerations on developments in more recent accounts. To this end Taminiaux provides important readings of Schiller, Hölderlin, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.
"Taminiaux's discussions of the interface between issues concerning the end of metaphysics, the problem of speculation, and the question of the death of art are especially informative. His analyses throughout are unparalleled, and the book is to be recommended for the insights it provides to issues concerning the history and impact of aesthetics.
"The book also provides insight to the itinerary of Taminiaux's own thought, covering issues which the author has treated over a period of three decades and whose timeliness recurs precisely because he is still willing to put his analyses to the test. His insight regarding questions of the history of aesthetics and its relevance for contemporary issues is unparalleled." — Stephen Watson, University of Notre Dame
Jacques Taminiaux is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, where he is the Director of the Center for Phenomenological Studies. He is the author of Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, also published by SUNY Press.
Preface
1. Speculation and Judgment
2. The Critique of Judgment and German Philosophy
3. Speculation and Difference
4. Between the Aesthetic Attitude and the Death of Art
5. The Nostalgia for Greece at the Dawn of Classical Germany
6. Fire and the Young Holderlin
7. Art and Truth in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
8. The Hegelian Legacy in Heidegger's Overcoming of Aesthetics
9. The Origin of "The Origin of the Work of Art"
10. The Thinker and the Painter
Index