Kant Immanuel - The critique of judgement

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT

IMMANUEL KANT (17241804) was born in Knigsberg, the capital of Eastern Prussia, and spent his entire life as a writer, teacher, and academic in his home city and its environs. He studied philosophy and the natural sciences at the university between 1740 and 1746. He spent the succeeding years as a house tutor and, subsequently, as a private lecturer, publishing a number of substantial essays and treatises on scientific and philosophical subjects throughout this period. Kant finally became Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Knigsberg in 1770. Over the next ten years, which Wilhelm Dilthey described as the silent decade, Kant radically revised his earlier ideas and developed an entirely novel conception of the proper method of philosophy, which culminated in his epoch-making Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. He extended his transcendental approach in the Critique of Practical Reason of 1786 and the Critique of Judgement in 1790, the work which Kant himself saw as completing the entire critical enterprise. Throughout the 1790s Kant also produced an abundance of dense contributions to eminently topical questions of ethics, politics, and history, and religion. Kant retired from lecturing in 1796 and died at the beginning of 1804. The Critique of Judgement has proved particularly influential in the continental philosophical tradition and also remains a central point of reference for the contemporary renewal of interest in Kantian thought as a whole.

NICHOLAS WALKER has published articles and essays in the field of German philosophy and literature and has translated texts by Adorno, Habermas, Heidegger, and Gadamer.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

IMMANUEL KANT

Translated by
JAMES CREED MEREDITH

Revised, edited, and introduced by
NICHOLAS WALKER

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Translation of Critique of Judgement Oxford University Press 1952, 2007
Editorial material and translation of First Introduction Nicholas Walker 2007

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kant, Immanuel, 17241804.
[Kritik der Urteilskraft. English]
Critique of judgement / Immanuel Kant; translated by James Creed Meredith; revised
and edited by Nicholas Walker.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN13: 9780192806178 (alk. paper)
1. Judgment (Logic) 2. Judgment (Aesthetics) 3. Teleology. I. Walker, Nicholas. II. Title.
B2783.E5M47 2007
121dc22
2007001270

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ISBN 9780192806178

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HEGEL famously claimed, if the student transcripts of his lectures on the history of philosophy are to be believed, that Kant spoke the first rational word concerning the beautiful and had thus made a fundamental, and indeed epochal, contribution to what it was now customary to call aesthetics. But in fact the Critique of Judgement, to which he was specifically alluding, is both more and less than what we would commonly understand by the term aesthetics. And in certain crucial respects the enormous influence which this work in particular exercised upon the first generation of German idealist thinkers who succeeded Kant, and upon nearly all of the most important artistic and literary figures of the period as well, lay almost as much in his philosophical treatment of organic nature as in his interpretation of the realm of aesthetic experience. In order to understand the eventual conjunction or coordination of these apparently rather distinct areas of interest and concern in Kants mature thought, it is helpful to recall in outline something of the development of his philosophy before the publication of the first edition of the Critique of Judgement in 1790.

Although Kant had never been an uncritical or unqualified adherent of the rationalist metaphysical tradition associated with Leibniz, and especially with the historically influential codification of broadly Leibnizian views on the part of philosophers like Christian Wolff or Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, this tradition of thought furnished the initial parameters for the development of his own views on the central philosophical issues of the epoch: the precise relationship of reason and the senses in the acquisition of our theoretical knowledge of nature; the ultimate character of the good and the demonstrability of practical, i.e. ethical, principles; the possibility of our knowledge of God by recourse to natural reason and the defence of the essential interests of humanity traditionally associated with such presumed knowledge; the reality of human freedom, the nature of the soul and the hope of immortality; the proper status of judgements concerning matters of beauty and tastein short: the objectivity or otherwise of the claims that had been raised concerning the central questions once addressed by classical metaphysics under the threefold rubric of the true, the good, and the beautiful.