Pre-cognitive experience is important to Kant's epistemology, but for decades, the scholarship tended to leave this aspect aside. Pre-cognitive experience must be reintegrated, and several important works have made progress toward this goal. Some scholars maintain that the distinction between the A- and B- editions of the Critique of Pure Reason largely relates to the role of pre-cognitive experience in Kant's system. I offer an account of what Kant calls the "obscure functions of understanding," drawing from the third Critique, the Anthropology, and other writings in which Kant discusses pre-cognitive experience. I argue that the key to integrating pre-cognitive experience into Kantian epistemology lies in the proper analysis of sensus communis, or social feeling. Reflective judgment provides the logical structure by which both social feeling and the experience of the sublime come to be synthesized with cognitive experience. The result of my argument is a deepened and enhanced understanding of autonomy (which pervades the entire architectonic).

The thesis of this essay is to show that there is a complex and deep ground in Hannah Arendt ́s political thinking. A ground that, thru Immanuel Kant ́s first and third critiques, is going back to the thinking of the ancient Greek ideas of insight, nous, a concept used especially by Aristotle, but also by Parmenides. My idea is that Arendt ́s attempt to establish her political thinking in the idea of common sense, or in Latin:sensus communis, needs a deeper understanding, thou the use and interpretation of common sense as a concept today is deeply under influence of a liberal ideological preunderstanding; meaning the (moral) things everyone knows without any special efforts. In my view there is no chance that Arendt joins, or supports that kind of shallow interpretation of the idea of common sense, thou that would make her political thinking as banal as she accuses most of the modern politics to be, which of course is very contradictive. In other words must her understanding of the concept of common sense, sensus communis, be founded on a much deeper level, a level which we can find in her essays if we look real hard, and read as open as a real reading must be based on. Her language and her recurring references to time, gives us the leads to where to dig; to where, and through which thinking, we can find her deeper ground, a ground that hopefully will make all her political thinking clearer.

The main aim of public art is to be avaliable and accessible to all. Public art is often connected to social and economical intentions in so far as its presence in the public space ought to benefit the general public. To ensure access to good art, rules and regulations determine the commissioning and procurement of public art. Councils work collaboratively to reach a unified and collective assessment of its quality. This essay argues that the legal framework nevertheless overlooks important aspects of how the quality assessment of public art succeeds in attaining its general status, where this status must co-exist with the fact that aesthetic judgements are grounded in subjective experience. The essay sets out to offer constructive recommendations for how the process surrounding such qualitative assessment of art for public space ought to work.  In order to examine the quality assessment of public art, and the ways such qualities is said to be guaranteed, I will use the competition West Link: Chronotopia (2017) as a case study. I will analyze the conditions under which the jury's assessment of the winning contribution for a new train station at Korsvägen in Gothenburg was made. By extrapolating Immanuel Kant's theory of aesthetic judgements (Critique of Judgement, 1790) I will show how aesthetic judgements can lay claim to the general validity while being rooted in subjective experience. To bridge this seemingly contradiction, I will examine the notion of sensus communis in relation to the case study.  The result of the essay shows that assessment of art depends largely on our abilities to communicate subjective appreciation. The legal framework turns out to have only a secondary role and does not limit how a jury motivates its assessment of the work's aesthetic qualities. Instead it encourages the jury in subjective reflection on the work's qualities.  The essay concludes by defending the claim that there is a pressing need to make more visible the role of aesthetic judgement in the quality assessment process of public art. Assessing with general validity must be grounded in the artwork's own premises, as manifested in our subjective impressions of them. Social communication is especially encouraged, and enables human beings to trust their own thoughts and feelings in balance with those of others. This essay thus defends the idea that public art, as an object of aesthetic judgement, has a very important role to play in our society.

Den här uppsatsen undersöker förhållandet mellan Kants estetiska omdöme, såsom det formuleras i Kritik av omdömeskraften, och Jacques Rancières estetiska projekt, framförallt i förhållande till begreppet dissensus. Dels försöker uppsatsen spåra arvet från Kant hos Rancière och visa hur detta tar sig uttryck, dels ställer den frågan om hur Kants omdöme politiseras med Rancières dissensus. Detta sker i två kapitel, varav det första är en läsning av Kants kritik av den estetiska omdömeskraften, mot bakgrund av idén om dissensus, och det andra en genomgång av Rancières formulering av dissensus, samt relaterade begrepp såsom konstens identifikationsregimer och ”fras-bilden”. Vidare jämför det andra kapitlet Rancières dissensus med Kants idé om det ”intresselösa” i det estetiska omdömet, samt visar vilka politiska eller metapolitiska implikationer Rancière tillskriver det senare. Uppsatsen visar hur Kants estetiska omdöme är oumbärligt för Rancières estetisk-politiska filosofiska projekt och att flera av hans viktigaste begrepp vilar tungt mot Kant. Den visar också, med hjälp av Rancière, på ett möjligt sätt att ge Kants estetiska omdöme politisk betydelse, delvis i motsättning till de politiska läsningar av den tredje Kritiken som främst tar fasta på sensus communis som ett vittne om en konsensuell gemenskap. Rancière visar med sina omformuleringar av Kants intresselösa omdöme att en sådan gemenskap alltid föregås av ett visst dissensus – ett brott med de dominerande formerna för den gemensamma sinnligheten. / This paper explores the relationship between Kant's aesthetic judgment, as formulated in the Critique of Judgment, and Jacques Rancière's aesthetic project, specifically the way in which the concept of dissensus is developed in the work of Rancière. The purpose of the paper is two-fold: first, to trace the legacy of Kant in Rancière and second, to pose the question of how Kant's judgment is politicized in Rancière's reading. This is discussed in two chapters, the first of which is a reading of Kant's critique of aesthetic judgment in light of the notion of dis-sensus; the second chapter examines the concept of dissensus in Rancière, as well as other related concepts, such as the regimes of art, and the 'image-phrase'. The second chapter also offers a comparison between Rancière‟s dissensus and the notion of 'disinterestedness' in Kant's aesthetic judgment, showing how Rancière draws out from the latter a set of political or meta-political implications. Ultimately, the paper serves to underline the essential role that Kant's aesthetic judgment plays in the development of Rancière's aesthetic project, examining how several of Rancière's most important concepts lean heavily on Kant for philosophical support. With the help of Rancière, the paper also provides an alternative way to give political significance to Kant's aesthetic judgment, partly in opposition to those political readings of the third Critique that primarily focus on sensus communis as a testimony of a consensual community. By way of rearticulating Kant's disinterested judgment, Rancière shows that this community is always preceded by a certain dissensus – a break with the dominant forms of a shared sensible community.

Storytelling is often looked at as something archaic or something that simpler cultures engage in. However, in our sophisticated and highly technological world storytelling swirls about us though we may not always recognize it. This thesis looks at the phenomenon of digital storytelling that functions to create community on the Internet. In order to ground this phenomenon in theory, I examine the works of Giambattista Vico, the 18th-century Neapolitan philosopher/rhetorician, who lived on the cusp of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. Furthermore, as a teacher of rhetoric to youth, Vico admonished young people to study the arts of poetry, painting, and oratory. These three arts are part of digital storytelling with the story line, visuals, and voice over. Digital storytelling, therefore, reaches more people because these arts are easily understood and accepted by people of all ages and education. Marshall McLuhan, the 20th-century Canadian scholar was an eclectic critic of technology and culture who anticipated the Internet. McLuhan used Vichian theory as the basis for some of his writings on technology. My study synthesizes and makes connections between McLuhan's writings on technology and the particular technology of digital storytelling. The new technologies bring back a secondary orality as well as more visual communication such as the radio and television in a print saturated culture. Today we are living in a world where writing, the spoken word and music, and visual images blend together in the digital milieu of the Internet. Digital storytelling is just one way that technology is being used to enhance an ancient genre. As one of its goals is to create community, this genre is trying to achieve what McLuhan suggested in the coming together of a global village.

The following dissertation is an endeavor to put forward the conceptual background of Gadamer&rsquo / s assertion in Truth and Method that art has a truth value. This conceptual background includes many important concepts which are indispensable in understanding the assertion that art has a truth value. Second chapter is mainly concerned with Bildung and sensus communis. Bildung describes the nature of knowledge which flourishes in the character of the person and which changes that person by penetrating the personality of him. Sensus communis describes the relationship of truth with the power of persuasion and the power of making right choices in social life. Taste, on the other hand, not only accompanies us when we are fulfilling our most basic needs in life and also shows itself in all of our moral decisions. In that sense, a developed taste is very effective in directing us to the truth. The third chapter offers an analysis of Gadamer&rsquo / s critique of Kant&rsquo / s aesthetics revolving around the concepts of judgment, taste, genius and Erlebnis. For Gadamer, Kant has subjectivized aesthetics. This subjectivization has two sides. Firstly, Kant argues that the experience of beauty does not give us any knowledge about the beautiful object. That is to say, Kant insists that aesthetic experience does not contain any cognitive element, because he believes that the only source of truth and knowledge is science. Secondly subjectivization means that Kant reduced art and beauty only to the experience of it / he talks only about experience of beauty, not about work of art itself at all. The forth chapter introduces the ontology of the work of art which is elaborated mainly on concepts of play, representation, mimesis, total mediation, contemporaneity. When inquiring into the mode of being of play, Gadamer defends that the subject of the play is play itself and in the same way in the experience of art the subject is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work of art. In the last chapter history of hermeneutics is elaborated in order to find the proper place of Gadamer&rsquo / s constituting concepts in the general frame of hermeneutics.

This essay is an examination of the examples in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. The examples which I have focused on all converge in an idea of wildness. These examples of the beautiful are illuminated by a culture-historical perspective, where the literary and scientific travelogue genre is of great importance. Apart from being exegetic and culture historical, my method is also analytic. The general ambition is to answer the question; what is the parrot doing in the third Critique and what makes it a better example of a free beauty than a jackdaw? Taking as point of departure Jacques Derrida’s notion of parergonality, the example is primarily understood as formative for the thesis, not only as illustrative. By analysing Kant’s use of the wild, exotic and colourful objects as examples the essay intends to show how imagination and understanding operates in the beautiful. The parrot thus corresponds with the role of imagination in its relation to understanding in aesthetic judgement. The examples manifest the strength of the imagination and how it dominates understanding through its wildness. The aim is to present a way to approach the restful contemplation that Kant ascribes to the mind in the experience of the beautiful as bearer of a movement with considerable importance. Rodolphe Gasché’s emphasis on the wild examples as a precognitive minimum for understanding and Hannah Arendt’s view on imagination as an ability of intuition without the presence of the object, have also been essential for my argument.