Critique of Aesthetic Judgment

Critique of Judgment

Title page of the 1790 original work
Author	Immanuel Kant
Original title	Critik der Urtheilskraft a
Country	Germany
Language	German
Subject	Aesthetics
Published	1790
Media type	Print
aKritik der Urteilskraft in modern German.

The Critique of Judgment (German: Kritik der Urteilskraft, KdU), also translated as the Critique of the Power of Judgment, is a 1790 philosophical work by Immanuel Kant. Sometimes referred to as the third Critique, the Critique of Judgment follows the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788).

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment completes the Critical project begun in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason (the first and second Critiques, respectively). The book is divided into two main sections: the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and the Critique of Teleological Judgment, and also includes a large overview of the entirety of Kant's Critical system, arranged in its final form. The so-called First Introduction was not published during Kant's lifetime, for Kant wrote a replacement for publication.

The Critical project, that of exploring the limits and conditions of knowledge, had already produced the Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant argued for a Transcendental Aesthetic, an approach to the problems of perception in which space and time are argued not to be objects but ways in which the observing subject's mind organizes and structures the sensory world. The end result of this inquiry is that there are certain fundamental antinomies in human Reason, most particularly that there is a complete inability to favor on the one hand the argument that all behavior and thought is determined by external causes, and on the other that there is an actual "spontaneous" causal principle at work in human behavior.

The first position, of causal determinism, is adopted, in Kant's view, by empirical scientists of all sorts; moreover, it led to the Idea (perhaps never fully to be realized) of a final science in which all empirical knowledge could be synthesized into a full and complete causal explanation of all events possible to the world.

The second position, of spontaneous causality, is implicitly adopted by all people as they engage in moral behavior; this position is explored more fully in the Critique of Practical Reason.