Research: Communication and Sociability. Meanings of Sensus Communis in the Critique of Judgment
The dissertation, entitled "Communication and Sociability. Meanings of Sensus Communis in the Critique of Judgment", investigates the role of sensus communis in the Critique of Judgment as the principle of reflective judgment and as the foundation of a non-exclusively dialectical conception of culture. Alongside Kant’s well-known account of cultural development as driven by conflict—expressed in the notion of “unsociable sociability” and in the productive role of competition, antagonism, and even war—the study highlights a complementary principle: common sense as the transcendental condition of the universal communicability of mental states.
Starting from the hypothesis that aesthetic judgment constitutes the ratio cognoscendi of reflective judgment in general, the dissertation argues that the principle of sensus communis, originally introduced to justify the subjective universality and exemplary necessity of judgments of taste, can be extended—mutatis mutandis—to other forms of reflective judgment, including teleological, hypothetical-scientific, and discursive uses. In this framework, the third Critique performs a distinctive subjectivization of transcendental philosophy, making it possible to address at a transcendental level the specificity of the human being as a sensible-rational being.
Sensus communis thus emerges not merely as an aesthetic principle but as the foundation of social conversation and the publicity of reason. Culture is no longer conceived solely as the outcome of conflicting interests, but also as the product of communication and reciprocal critique. Kant’s ideal of an enlightened society—where freedom and constraint converge in the cultivation of taste and of the faculties—finds in sensus communis its dynamic core. The dissertation therefore proposes a systematic reinterpretation of the Critique of Judgment, integrating aesthetics, anthropology, and philosophy of history into a theory of culture grounded in universal communicability.