Scientific Abstract: A Unified Reading of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment

Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment has been recognized as a work of great philosophical import from its first reception; and it continues to draw much attention to this day. It is nevertheless a highly puzzling book and its interpretation has produced a virtual maze of exegetical controversies. It claims to bring the “entire critical enterprise to an end” (KU 5:170). It appears, however, to address a great diversity of philosophical topics, many of which do not seem to be part of or even related to a critical project. Consequently, many commentators have treated parts of the book – large and small and sometimes very insightfully and effectively – without taking into account their place within the larger whole. Others have devoted considerable effort to showing that its various parts are broadly connected and that the book does present a coherent whole. But they have not shown that the book constitutes a single unified work principally concerned with completing Kant’s critical philosophy. The aim of this research project is to attempt to present such a unified reading of the third Critique. 

I claim that the principal problems addressed are two: 1) the problem of bridging the gap between our theoretical and practical worldviews, which results from the facts that we are practically obligated by a rational system of moral laws but must act in a world governed by a system of natural laws; it is presented in sections I-III and IX of the Introduction and answered in the Methodology of the Teleological Power of Judgment; 2) the problem of the transcendental conditions of a particular empirical experience and knowledge of nature; sections IV and V of the Introduction pose the question and offer in brief the answer to it; sections VI-VIII then explain that a complete discussion of the matter requires treating separately and in turn the aesthetic and the logical (or conceptual) purposiveness of nature.

The problem of the transcendental conditions of empirical experience is thus the principal (though not the only) concern of the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment and of the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment. Employing the results of these discussions of the Introduction’s second question enables Kant to answer his first question in the Methodology of Teleological Judgment. If this is right then the Introduction does indeed introduce the work that follows it and its structure mirrors that of the book. These claims also explain how the third Critique completes the critical project: The second problem sets the task of completing the account of the transcendental conditions of experience presented in the Critique of Pure Reason; the first aims to bridge the gap between the critical practical and (now complete) theoretical worldviews.