BACKGROUND: THE POSSIBILITY OF A CRITIQUE OF TASTE AND TELEOLOGY

The Critique of the Power of Judgment was published at the Leipzig book fair at the end of April 1790, in the week following Immanuel Kant's sixty-sixth birthday (Kant lived from 1724 to 1804). The book completed the series of Kant's three great Critiques, begun with the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and continued with the Critique of Practical Reason in 1788. However, Kant clearly had no plan for such a series of works on the foundations of philosophy when he published the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason nor even when he was writing the Critique of Practical Reason during 1787, which itself began life in 1786 merely as part of the work for the revision of the first Critique, the second edition of which appeared in the spring of 1787.vKant’s original assumption was that the Critique of Pure Reason alone would provide the foundation on which he could erect a system of theoretical and practical philosophy, or as he called them the metaphysics of nature and the metaphysics of morals (the first of which Kant did indeed provide in the 1786 work entitled The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, and the second of which he finally provided, after a decade of delay occasioned not only by the Critique of the Power of Judgment but also by the 1793 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and such political works as the 1795 essay Toward Perpetual Peace, in the 1797 Metaphysics of Morals, which is comprised of two parts, named in analogy to the work on the foundations of natural science, The Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Right, containing Kant’s legal and political philosophy, and The Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Virtue, containing the final form of Kant’s account of our noncoercively enforceable duties of respect and love to ourselves and others). Yet only a few weeks after completing the manuscript for the Critique of Practical Reason Kant suddenly announced, in a letter to the young Jena professor Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823), whose Letters on the Kantian Philosophy of 1786–87 were doing a great deal to popularize Kant’s philosophy,1 that a third Critique was in the offing.