ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will argue that genius is a concept devised to account for an aspect of rational deliberation that is not accommodated by traditional conceptions of reason. We will consider in what sense the concept of genius is a key to Kant’s broader notion of rationality. To further demonstrate this point, I consider conceptions of genius that developed in the wake of Kant’s aesthetic theory, culminating in Wilfrid S. Sellars’s “Myth of Jones” [1956], in which the notion of genius is an artefact of theory, an explanatory device for the process of conceptual innovation.
