Gerad Gentry

Gerad Gentry is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University and specializes in philosophy of mind, ethics, and aesthetics in Kant and Hegel. He is currently working on a Habilitation project on Kant and normativity of reflecting judgment. Recent publications have appeared in the Journal of the History of Philosophy (2023), Journal of the American Philosophical Association (2023), Kant-Studien (2022), and Cambridge University Press (2019, and forthcoming). Previously he was a Humboldt and Fulbright Fellow.

Abstract: The relationship between the free lawfulness of the imagination in the pure aesthetic judgment of the beautiful and the other functions of the reflecting power of judgment under the a priori principle of purposiveness is highly ambiguous. The guiding questions for my research project are these: how can Kant’s conception of the pure form of the mind by which it is active in the reflecting power of judgment in general (including beautiful, sublime, fine art, and natural ends) be understood as a kind of legislative activity? In what sense can the mind be described as self-active and self-legislating according to a free, yet lawful form? Does such an animating form of the mind offer a helpful way of rethinking the nature and unity of the mind in general? I think there is a way of reading Kant’s third Critique in both a maximally charitable light (defending the unity of the third Critique under the pure form of the free lawfulness of the reflecting power of judgment according to the principle of purposiveness) while also extracting a concept of mind that is defined by a concept of animate form and dynamically applicable while remaining true to Kant’s thought. Kant’s notion of free lawfulness seems to me to be key to this endeavour.