Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Analytic of the Beautiful

Immanuel Kant published the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgment, commonly the "third Critique") in 1790, seven years after the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) and three after the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). Kant conceived it as a bridge between his two earlier critiques: the first had established the a priori conditions of theoretical cognition of nature, governed by the understanding (Verstand) and mechanistic causality, while the second had established the a priori moral law governing free rational agents. The third Critique addresses the faculty of judgment (Urteilskraft) itself, which Kant divides into "determinant" judgment, which subsumes particulars under already-given universal concepts, and "reflective" judgment, which must find a universal for a given particular without a rule to guide it. Aesthetic judgments of taste and teleological judgments about organisms both belong, for Kant, to this reflective mode, and the book is accordingly split into two main parts, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and the Critique of Teleological Judgment, unified by the underlying concept of purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit) without a determinate purpose.