6 - Kant, Hegel and the dynamics of evaluative reason

Summary

While Kant called his third Critique, the Critique of Judgement, what the new work added to the critical project was a critique of two specific kinds of judgement – aesthetic and teleological judgements. It was then, at least in its first part, a critique of evaluative judgement, the type of judgement in which a value, specifically an aesthetic value, and not simply a property, was assigned to an object. But on an inferentialist reading of Kant, this would suggest the existence of a type of reasoning within which such judgements operated. After all, for the inferentialist, as Brandom makes clear, a judgement only has the cognitive status of a judgement qua its potential status as move in a reason-giving language game. In claiming, in the Science of Logic, that ‘the syllogism is the truth of the judgement’, Hegel points in just this direction. Indeed, as we will see, his attempts to show the truth of this inferentialist claim is made specifically in the context of judgements of this type. To the extent that the claim of the continuity of the philosophies of Hegel and Kant is to be defended, we would then have to find some justification for thinking of Kant's third Critique as a critique of evaluative reason.