First Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment

Summary

On philosophy as a system.

If philosophy is the system of rational cognition through concepts, it is thereby already sufficiently distinguished from a critique of pure reason, which, although it contains a philosophical investigation of the possibility of such cognition, does not belong to such a system as a part, but rather outlines and examines the very idea of it in the first place.

The division of the system can at first only be that into its formal and material parts, of which the first (the logic) concerns merely the form of thinking in a system of rules, while the second (the real part) systematically takes under consideration the objects which are thought about, insofar as a rational cognition of them from concepts is possible.

Now this real system of philosophy itself, given the original distinction of its objects and the essential difference, resting on them, of the principles of a science that contains them, cannot be divided except into theoretical and practical philosophy; thus, the one part must be the philosophy of nature, the other that of morals, the first of which is also empirical, the second of which, however (since freedom absolutely cannot be an object of experience), can never contain anything other than pure principles a priori.

However, there is a great misunderstanding, which is even quite disadvantageous to the way in which the science is handled, about what should be held to be practical in a sense in which it deserves to be taken up into a practical philosophy.