Farshid Baghai

Farshid Baghai is a Ph.D. candidate in Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto. His research interests are Kant, German Idealism, and 20th century continental philosophy.

My current research is on the place and significance of feeling (Gefühl) in Kant's transcendental philosophy. Feeling is the locus of a problem that is mostly deferred and dissimulated in Kant’s critical system. Critique of Pure Reason identifies feeling with desire and excludes it from transcendental philosophy. Critique of Practical Reason takes feeling as the effect of empirical desire or moral law. Only Critique of the Power of Judgment refers to feeling and desire as two distinct faculties of human mind. What is the problem to which Kant’s notion of feeling is a response? What does motivate his system to accommodate feeling as a distinct faculty? How does Kant articulate the relation between imagination, understanding, and reason? Exploring such questions can elucidate Kant’s conception of feeling and how he conceives of its role in inventing and animating problematics and images in terms of which we imagine and orient ourselves in different realms of human life.