The Normativity of Nature: Essays on Kant's “Critique of Judgement.”

In the introduction to the third Critique, Kant offers the following description of a distinctive sort of pleasure that he thinks obtains in our scientific investigation of nature: “The discovered unifiability of two or more empirically heterogeneous laws of nature under a principle that comprehends them both is the ground of a very noticeable pleasure, often indeed of admiration, even of one which does not cease though one is already sufficiently familiar with its object” (Kant 1900–, 5:187).¹ Though Hannah Ginsborg's book The Normativity of Nature is not a scientific treatise, nevertheless when reading it one can feel something very much like the pleasure and admiration that Kant describes here. For what Ginsborg offers is a way to conceive of the unity of two familiar but seemingly disjoint objects: the first and third Critiques. Resisting the tendency to read...