Melissa Zinkin's "Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason"

Melissa Zinkin is Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University (SUNY). She has published articles on Kant, philosophy of art, and feminist philosophy.

Zinkin applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason, and reported the following:

At the top of page 99 of Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason one finds the heading "Comprehension." The rest of the page discusses the passage where Kant defines "comprehension." For Kant, comprehension is the highest degree of cognition. He writes that "to comprehend (begreifen) something (is) to cognize (it) through reason...to the degree that it is sufficient for our purpose." He distinguishes comprehending something through reason from conceiving (concipiren) it by the faculty of the understanding. I note that in German "begreifen" means "to grasp," whereas "concipiren" means "to sketch." From the distinction between these two words-- "grasping" vs. "sketching," we already get a sense of Kant's contrast between how we know something through reason and how we know it through the understanding. The former is a thorough and deep engagement with an object, the latter is preliminary and superficial.

Someone opening my book to page 99 would land on a discussion that introduces a core theme; for Kant, reason is that special faculty by which we have deep cognition, that is, comprehension, of an object. A major aim of the book is to show that for Kant reason is not just the faculty by which we get things "right." As we see today, "getting it right" is an ability that can be outsourced to machines. Human reason is deeper than that. It is that faculty by which human beings learn for ourselves the organizing principles of objects and what makes them what they are. It is also that faculty by which I comprehend for myself why some action is the one that is right for me to perform. By deeply comprehending the "rightness" of objects and actions through reason we make our ideas about them integral to our way of thinking and develop the capacity for good judgment about them in the future.

Later in the chapter that contains page 99, I argue that for Kant the activity of comprehending something is the same activity that is involved in judging something to be beautiful; we think deeply about its central purpose. This is also a central thesis of my book; that our capacity to judge that something is beautiful is fundamental to our capacity to deeply comprehend objects and actions in general.

Learn more about Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue