Critique of Judgment

Synopsis

In THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT (1790), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) seeks to establish the a priori principles underlying the faculty of judgment, just as he did in his previous critiques of pure and practical reason. The first part deals with the subject of our aesthetic sensibility; we respond to certain natural phenomena as beautiful, says Kant, when we recognize in nature a harmonious order that satisfies the mind's own need for order. The second half of the critique concentrates on the apparent teleology in nature's design of organisms.