Poetics, Speculation, and Judgment: The Shadow of the Work of Art from Kant to Phenomenology

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 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.