The Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), also known as the third critique, is a philosophical work by Immanuel Kant. Philosopher in Meditation (detail), by Rembrandt. ... Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804), was a German philosopher from Königsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). ...

Foundations

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement, also known as the third critique, simultaneously completes Kant's Critical project and lays the foundations for modern aesthetics. The standard English translation is the one made by James Creed Meredith, though recently Paul Guyer's translation, published by Cambridge University Press, has gained some popularity. Guyer translates the title as the Critique of the Power of Judgement, though this title has not caught on as the standard way of referring to the text. Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804), was a German philosopher from Königsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). ... James Creed Meredith (28 November 1875 - 14 August 1942) was an Irish lawyer and judge and a Kant scholar. ...

The book is divided into two main sections, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the Critique of Teleological Judgement, and also includes a large overview of the entirety of the Critical system, arranged in its final form. A critic (derived from the ancient Greek word krites meaning a judge) is a person who offers a value judgement or an interpretation. ...

The Critical project, that of exploring the limits and conditions of knowledge, had already spawned 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 supposed not to be free-standing entities but manners in which the mind organizes and structures the sensory world. The end result of this inquiry (and this article declines to plod through the argument) 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. This article or section is incomplete and may require cleanup and/or expansion. ... Space has been an interest for philosophers and scientists for much of human history, and hence it is difficult to provide an uncontroversial and clear definition outside of specific defined contexts. ... A pocket watch, a common timekeeping device. ...

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 goings-on in the world. Put simply, causal determinism expresses the belief that every effect has a cause, and therefore science, pursued diligently enough, will explain all natural phenomena and thus produce a TOE (Theory of Everything). ...

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. cover of 1898 English edition of the Critique of Practical Reason The Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) is the second of Immanuel Kants three critiques, first published in 1788. ...

The Critique of Judgement constitutes a discussion of the place of Judgement itself, which must overlap both the Understanding (which proceeds within the determinist camp) and Reason (which exploits the camp of spontaneity).

Aesthetics

The first part of the book, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, discusses the four possible reflective judgments - the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime, and the good. Kant makes it clear that these are the only four possible reflective judgements, as he relates them to the Table of Judgements from the Critique of Pure Reason. The agreeable is a purely sensory judgement – things in the form of "This steak is good", "This chair is soft", or "This night of unpurposed sexual passion is satisfying." They are purely subjective judgements, based on inclination alone. Look up beautiful in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis (exalted)) is the quality of transcendent greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual or artistic. ... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... This article or section is incomplete and may require cleanup and/or expansion. ...

The good is essentially a judgement that something is ethical – the judgement that something conforms with moral law, which, in the Kantian sense, is essentially a claim of modality – a coherence with a fixed and absolute notion of reason. It is in many ways the absolute opposite of the agreeable, in that it is a purely objective judgement – things are either moral, to Kant, or they are not. Ethics is a general term for what is often described as the science (study) of morality. In philosophy, ethical behavior is that which is good or right. ...

The remaining two judgements - the beautiful and the sublime - occupy a space between the agreeable and the good. They are what Kant refers to as "subjective universal" judgements. This apparently oxymoronic term means that, in practice, the judgements are subjective, and are not tied to any absolute and determinite concept. However, the judgement that something is beautiful or sublime is made with the belief that other people ought to agree with this judgement - even though it is known that many will not. The force of this "ought" comes from a reference to a "sensus communis" - a community of taste. Hannah Arendt, in her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, suggests the possibility that this sensus communis might be the basis of a political theory that is markedly different from the one that Kant lays out in the Metaphysic of Morals. According to Aristotle, the part of the psyche responsible for binding the inputs of the individual sense organs into a coherent and intelligible representation. ... Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German political theorist. ... This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. ...

The judgement that something is beautiful is a claim that it possesses the "form of finality" - that is, that it appears to have been designed with a purpose, even though it does not have any apparent practical function. The judgement that something is sublime is a judgement that it is beyond the limits of comprehension - that it is an object of fear. However, Kant makes clear that the object must not actually be threatening - it merely must be recognized as deserving of fear.

Kant's view of the beautiful and the sublime is frequently read as an attempt to resolve one of the problems left following his depiction of moral law in the Critique of Practical Reason - namely that it is impossible to prove that we have free will, and thus impossible to prove that we are bound under moral law. The beautiful and the sublime both seem to refer to some external noumenon order - and thus to the possibility of a noumenal soul possessing free will. cover of 1898 English edition of the Critique of Practical Reason The Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) is the second of Immanuel Kants three critiques, first published in 1788. ... Free will is the philosophical doctrine that holds that our choices are ultimately up to ourselves. ... The noumenon or thing in itself (German: Ding an sich) is a basic reality underlying observable phenomena. ...

In this section of the critique Kant also establishes faculty of mind that is in many ways the inverse of judgement - the faculty of genius. Whereas judgement allows one to determine whether something is beautiful or sublime, genius allows one to produce what is beautiful or sublime. A genius is a person with distinguished mental abilities. ...

Teleology

The second half of the Critique discusses teleological judgement. This way of judging things according to their ends (telos: Greek for bullseye) is logically connected to the first discussion at least regarding beauty but suggests a kind of (self-) purposiveness. Teleology is the philosophical study of purpose (from the Greek teleos, perfect, complete, which in turn comes from telos, end, result). ...

Kant writes about the biological as teleological, claiming that there are things, such as living beings, whose parts exist for the sake of their whole and their whole for the sake of their parts. This allows him to open a gap in the phenomenal world: since these "organic" things cannot be brought under the rules that apply to all other appearances, what are we to do with them?

Kant says explicitly that while efficiently causal explanations are always best (x causes y, y is the effect of x), there "will never be a Newton for a blade of grass", and so the organic must be explained “as if” it were constituted as teleological. This portion of the Critique is where Kant proves to be his most radical; he posits man as the ultimate end, that is, that all other forms of nature exist for the purpose of their relation to man, directly or not, and that man is left outside of this due to his faculty of reason. Kant claims that culture becomes the expression of this, that it is the highest teleological end, as it is the only expression of human freedom outside of the laws of nature. Man also garners the place as the highest teleological end due to his capacity for morality, or practical reason, which falls in line with the ethical system that Kant proposes in the Critique of Practical Reason and the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals. Sir Isaac Newton, President of the Royal Society, (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) [OS: 25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727] was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, chemist, inventor, and natural philosopher. ...

The ambition with which Kant conducted the final Critique is staggering, and the Critique of Judgment is his most open to interpretation.

Influences

Though Kant consistently maintains that the human mind is not an "intuitive understanding"—something that creates the phenomena which it cognizes—several of his readers (starting with Fichte, culminating in Schiller) decided that it must be (and often give Kant credit, to his posthumous dismay). In this way, Kant accidentally sounds the death knell for the Enlightenment and so gives birth to Romanticism. Intuitive understanding is comprehension without any necessary contemplation or explanation. ... Johann Gottlieb Fichte Johann Gottlieb Fichte (May 19, 1762 - January 27, 1814) has significance in the history of Western philosophy as one of the progenitors of German idealism and as a follower of Kant. ... Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (November 10, 1759 - May 9, 1805), usually known as Friedrich Schiller, was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and dramatist. ... ... Romanticism was a secular and intellectual movement in the history of ideas that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. ...

Kant’s discussions of schema and symbol late in the first half of the Critique of Judgement also raise questions about the way the mind represents its objects to itself, and so are foundational for an understanding of the development of much late 20th century continental philosophy: Jacques Derrida is known to have studied the book extensively. The word schema comes from the Greek word σχήμα (skhēma) that means shape or more generally plan. ... Continental philosophy is a term used in philosophy to designate one of two major traditions of modern Western philosophy. ... Jacques Derrida (July 15, 1930 – October 8, 2004) was an Algerian-born French literary critic and philosopher of Jewish descent, most often referred to as the founder of deconstruction or, by less sympathetic theorists, deconstructionism. ...

Much of modern Aesthetics owes a debt to Kant for providing a framework in which aesthetic questions could be debated; no longer was the claim that "there is no disputing about taste" recognized as a universal call to quiet on the topic. Aesthetics, esthetics or æsthetics is both the study of beauty and a term that denotes those properties of an entity that appeal to the senses. ...

External links

• Kant's Critique of Judgement TXT online text