Colloquium by Alberto L. Siani on ‘Kant’s Places. Habitats, Aesthetics, Culture’

Alberto L. Siani (Associate Professor, Pisa University) will give his talk ‘Kant’s Places. Habitats, Aesthetics, Culture’ on Friday 12th January at 17:00. JF 507

Abstract

This paper stems from two main roots. The first is an interpretation of Kantian aesthetics that might be called “pragmatist”. The second is a more recent interest in the philosophy of landscape. Kant and the landscapes have found a confluence in the first chapter on a book on Landscape Aesthetics due to appear 2024. In that chapter, I argue that the philosophical location of landscapes is a theory of habitats which I outline based on Kant. What I present in this paper is the more strictly Kant-related material from that chapter.

I begin by investigating the Kantian taxonomy of philosophical spaces in the second paragraph of the Introduction to his Critique of Judgment, entitled On the domain of philosophy in general, with a specific focus on his notion of “habitat” (Aufenthalt). Habitats are the spaces of empirical contingency, where humans cannot hope to establish necessary and universal laws, but at most a provisional, a posteriori order of familiarity. As I will highlight in the following section, the groundwork for this possibility is an aesthetic one. On this basis I then proceed to discuss the paradoxical centrality of the liminal space of the “habitat” and sketchily develop it toward a non-dualistic, pragmatist idea of culture in its relationship with the inhabited space and on the background of, in a broad sense, environmental concerns.