Introduction

Summary

The Introduction to Kant on Freedom, Nature, and Judgment: The Territory of the Third Critique argues that the question that orients and unifies the Critique of Judgment is: For what may I hope? This question is fundamentally about the unity of the system of freedom and nature. What the Critique of Judgment develops is a third, independent, and mediating sphere of human experience that at once completes and expands the critical system. It accomplishes this through judgments of reflection that both pattern themselves after as well as refer us to life, understood as a causal unity of freedom and nature. The Introduction lays out the basic argument of the text, as well as situates the manuscript within the larger history of the reception of the third Critique in German Romanticism and Idealism, and later the neo-Kantians.