Books

First edition of Kant's third and final Critique - The Critique of Judgment - the scarcest of his major works. It lays the foundation for modern aesthetics and is divided into two parts, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and the Critique of Teleological Judgment. Kant's long introduction provides an extensive overview of his entire critical system. Goethe said the Critique of Judgment was the first philosophical book ever to move him, and Fichte called it 'the crown of the critical philosophy'. Warda 125; Adickes 71. 'Scholars have long asked a basic question about the two halves of the Critique of Judgment. What do the beautiful and sublime have to do with any alleged necessity of taking a teleological approach to the study of organisms? One avenue for finding unity across these topics is to connect both to the idea of a purpose. Kant provides a definition of purpose (and the related notion of 'purposiveness') in the Introduction. A purpose is "the concept of an object, insofar as it at the same time contains the ground of reality of this object . . . The correspondence of a thing with that constitution of things that is possible only in accordance with ends [purposes] is called the purposiveness of its form." He maintains that beautiful art is purposive without a purpose. It does not aim at some good, yet it can only be understood as possible in accord with purposes. In a similar way, the arrangement of parts in an organism is contingent with respect to the basic laws of matter; yet it is purposive because the possibility of this arrangement can be understood only as the product of a purpose' (Patricia Kitcher, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Oct. 2015). PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: 8vo, lviii, 476, [1] pp., contemporary boards with green spine label lettered gilt, rubbed and worn at extremities, title-page with a hint of an old penciled name at the top, pages exceptionally fresh and unspotted, internally the cleanest copy we have seen.

Critik der Urtheilskraft, or Critique of Judgement, is a philosophical work by Immanuel Kant, published in 1790. It is the third of his critiques, following the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). The work addresses aesthetics and the philosophy of science, exploring the faculty of judgement.