Thomas Cantone Wins Outstanding Student Paper Prize

Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Posted by: Julie Van Camp

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The American Society for Aesthetics is pleased to announce that Thomas Cantone has won the Outstanding Student Paper Prize for 2022. Cantone is a doctoral student at the New School for Social Research in New York, with interests in Aesthetics, Classical German Philosophy (Kant), Early Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind (Perception), and American Pragmatism. He received his MA in Philosophy from Duquesne University. He received a BS in Philosophy and a BFA in Visual Art from Rochester Institute of Technology.

His paper, entitled "Kant on the Ground of Aesthetic Norms," will be presented at the 80th Annual Meeting of the ASA in Portland on Saturday, November 19 at 11:15 am. He is writing his dissertation on Kant's philosophy of nature.

The abstract for his paper:

In the Antinomy of Taste in the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that the concept of the supersensible is the ground of the universal and necessary validity of judgments of taste. This metaphysical argument for aesthetic normativity has largely been dismissed as irrelevant to his aesthetic theory. Here, I argue that it is in fact crucial for understanding the normativity of judgments of taste, as it argues a ground, or reason, for the appearance of beautiful natural objects and that this reason licenses a norm about their beauty.

The Outstanding Student Paper Prize is awarded each year, with prize money of $250 and travel to the Annual meeting. It was selected by the Program Committee for the Meeting from among the eighteen student presentations on the program.