Critique of Judgment
Much of Ginsborg's research, beginning with her 1989 doctoral thesis "The Role of Taste in Kant's Theory of Cognition," has been concerned with Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Judgment". She has argued for the importance of the "Critique of Judgment" to Kant's theory of cognition and for the internal unity of the Critique of Judgment, which she sees as grounded in a notion of purposiveness as normativity. Within Kant's aesthetics, she has proposed a controversial interpretation of judgments of beauty as self-referential judgments which claim their own universal validity. This "austere" account rests on a distinctive notion of normativity – a normativity not based on rules or concepts—which also figures in her interpretation of Kant's theory of biology.