This part of the study is concerned with Kant's analysis of the nature and validity of judgments of taste, as treated in the Analytic of the Beautiful and the Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments. Its organizing principle is that the distinction between the quid facti and the quid juris, which, as Dieter Henrich has shown, Kant took over from the so-called Deduktion-schriften, which were still widely used in his time to adjudicate various legal claims, is applicable to the Critique of Judgment as well as to the other Critiques. More specifically, the claim is that the quid facti in the domain of taste concerns the question of whether a given judgment of taste is pure, while the quid juris is whether a judgment that meets the conditions of purity can make a rightful demand on the agreement of others. The latter question is obviously the concern of the Deduction; but I am also suggesting that the Analytic of the Beautiful deals with the former, by specifying the conditions that must be met by any judgment that purports to be pure.

The present chapter is intended as an introduction to this part as a whole, but particularly to the next four chapters, which deal respectively with the four “moments” of the Analytic of the Beautiful. It is divided into five parts.