Kant's philosophy encompasses metaphysics and epistemology, moral and political philosophy, and also a theory of aesthetics that is closely related to these subjects. In many ways his conception of beauty as an aesthetic value stands in counterpoint to his epistemology, while sharing certain commonalities with his moral theory. The “judgement of taste”, in which for Kant we find pleasure in something deemed beautiful, is the centrepiece of his aesthetics, and the focus of this chapter. Related aspects of his complex theory of aesthetics will be explored briefly towards the end.

Kant presented his aesthetic theory in the third of his three great Critiques, the 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment. The judgement of taste is one kind of judgement situated in a broader theory of judgement carried over from his epistemology. As we know Kant holds, all experience and understanding of objects in the world around us occurs through the application of concepts that identify, when we judge well, what an object is. We know something to be a dog when we subsume it accurately under our concept “dog”. Each empirical concept of this sort functions as a kind of rule for categorizing things; understanding is a matter of developing these conceptual rules, while judgement involves applying them (well). What marks the great contrast between Kant's theory of knowledge and his aesthetic theory is that he came in the Critique of the Power of Judgment to identify forms of judgement in which no concept is actually applied to categorize an object.