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Speaker: Dr. Rachel Cristy (Lecturer in Philosophy, King’s College London) 

Title: “Can Beautiful Wine Express Kantian Aesthetic Ideas?”

Abstract: In previous work, I have argued that despite Kant’s own claim to the contrary, his theory of taste permits us to appropriately judge that some wines are beautiful (not merely agreeable), and that wines deliberately ‘composed’ by a winemaker can be regarded as works of art. The possibility that some wines may be works of beautiful art raises a further question within the Kantian framework: what aesthetic ideas do such wines express? An aesthetic idea, Kant says in the Third Critique, is ‘a representation of the imagination, associated with a given concept, which is combined with such a manifold of partial representations in the free use of the imagination that no expression designating a determinate concept can be found for it’ (KU 5:316, §49). Kant suggests that the concepts with which aesthetic ideas are associated are always ideas of reason: transcendent metaphysical and moral concepts traditionally connected with religion (e.g., God, freedom, goodness). But given that this requirement would artificially restrict the possible subject matter of beautiful art, I argue that a suitably expanded conception could allow for the possibility that certain wines express aesthetic ideas. Specifically, I suggest that some of the most beautiful wines express aesthetic ideas associated with the concept of terroir: they represent a particular place (the vineyard) over a specific span of time (the growing season) via a different medium than, say, a landscape painting, at best in such a way that the ‘partial representations’ brought forth by the imagination cannot be exhausted by any finite conceptual description. 

You can find out more about the speaker .