"Un'arte celata nel profondo...". Gli aspetti semiotici del pensiero di Kant

My book aims to investigate not only Kant's few observations on language and semiotics, but especially the semiotic problems that arise from his theoretical philosophy and aesthetics. For this purpose the work gives considerable weight to the material contained in Kant's Nachlass. The first chapter examines the first attempts to define the concepts of sign and symbol in the precritical writings, with particular reference to the Untersuchung über die Deulichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral. In this essay, which is an important step for clarification of the methodological distinction between philosophy and mathematics and shows a first attempt to define the concept of sign, emerge in nuce the difficulties that will mark the vicissitudes of the concept of symbol throughout the evolution of Kant's thought. The largest portion of my work is devoted to the conception of imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason (second chapter) and to the theory of symbol in the Critique of Judgment (third chapter). These problems are examined in their relation to some specific topics of the two works (schematism of sensible concepts and cathegories, analogy, Beispiel and Exempel, aesthetic ideas and attributes) and to the general theory of signs, as it is embryonically structured in the Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht and in other writings interesting from a logic-theoretical and an aesthetic point of view. The last chapter deals with the "pragmatic" aspects of Kant's aesthetics as they emerge from the theory of Gemeinsinn, and in particular with the problem of establishing a community of taste based on communication and consensus.