Dr. G. Anthony Bruno has been awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Alumni Fellowship for Spring 2019.
G. Anthony Bruno has been awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Alumni Fellowship for Spring 2019 (April through June) at the University of Tübingen. (He was a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bonn from 2013 to 2015.) He will return to Germany to investigate the cognitive value of particulars that resist determination by universal terms in a judgment, taking as his model Kant’s idea of reflective judgment. This is a kind of judgment that, faced with a certain kind of particular, pursues a universal term despite the impossibility of settling on one. For Kant, the paradigmatic reflective judgment is aesthetic: as we can never conclusively say what beauty consists in, the beautiful eludes final judgment. Anthony will show how reflective judgment (a) facilitates a response to the problem of how to judge the first-person standpoint from which we reason and (b) show how this model is at work in three post-Kantian investigations into this standpoint, namely, Hölderlin's account of human finitude, Kierkegaard's description of subjective interest, and Nietzsche's presentation of personal prejudice.