The Critique of Judgement

Part I:

Critique of Aesthetic Judgement

Immanuel Kant

translated by James Creed Meredith

The Critique of Judgment, 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).

The faculty of knowledge from a priori principles may be called pure reason, and the general investigation into its possibility and bounds the Critique of Pure Reason. This is permissible although "pure reason," as was the case with the same use of terms in our first work, is only intended to denote reason in its theoretical employment, and although there is no desire to bring under review its faculty as practical reason and its special principles as such. That Critique is, then, an investigation addressed simply to our faculty of knowing things a priori. Hence it makes our cognitive faculties its sole concern, to the exclusion of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure and the faculty of desire; and among the cognitive faculties it confines its attention to understanding and its a priori principles, to the exclusion of judgement and reason, (faculties that also belong to theoretical cognition, ) because it turns out in the sequel that there is no cognitive faculty other than understanding capable of affording constitutive a priori principles of knowledge.