First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment

by Immanuel Kant, James Haden (Translator)

Kritik der Urteilskraft (Berlin and Libau: Lagarde and Friederich, 1790), lviii, 476 pp. (2nd ed. 1793) [Ak. 5:165-486] “Critique of the Power of Judgment.” Translated by Werner S. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis: Hackett Publ., 1987). Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Kant claims to have completed the manuscript for this work in mid-September 1789, and he began sending sections to the Berlin publisher beginning 21 January 1790, with the final installment (the preface and introduction) sent March 22. Lagarde was able to have copies printed for the Leipzig book fair at the end of April. This was the only book Kant published with Lagarde.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century philosopher from Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He's regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe & of the late Enlightenment. His most important work is The Critique of Pure Reason, an investigation of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics & epistemology, & highlights his own contribution to these areas. Other main works of his maturity are The Critique of Practical Reason, which is about ethics, & The Critique of Judgment, about esthetics & teleology.

Pursuing metaphysics involves asking questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Kant suggested that metaphysics can be reformed thru epistemology. He suggested that by understanding the sources & limits of human knowledge we can ask fruitful metaphysical questions. He asked if an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that object. He concluded that all objects that the mind can think about must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can think only in terms of causality–which he concluded that it does–then we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect. However, it follows from this that it's possible that there are objects of such a nature that the mind cannot think of them, & so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. So the grand questions of speculative metaphysics are off limits, but the sciences are firmly grounded in laws of the mind. Kant believed himself to be creating a compromise between the empiricists & the rationalists. The empiricists believed that knowledge is acquired thru experience alone, but the rationalists maintained that such knowledge is open to Cartesian doubt and that reason alone provides us with knowledge. Kant argues, however, that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to illusions, while experience will be purely subjective without first being subsumed under pure reason. Kant’s thought was very influential in Germany during his lifetime, moving philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists & empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer saw themselves as correcting and expanding Kant's system, thus bringing about various forms of German Idealism. Kant continues to be a major influence on philosophy to this day, influencing both Analytic and Continental philosophy.

Reviews

[Enrique · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here we have gold.

I read some articles that talked about Kant and artificial intelligence. Not even one talked about this text.

And is really important, because Kant refutes any attempt of the artificial intelligence claims of consciousness (google LAMBDA stochastic BS).

Basically, the discovery of Kant is that the human mind is not only the cognition, he identifies three faculties:

Intellect, cognition (the bad translation that uses the book, and almost any translation, is “understanding”)
Reason, desire.
Judgement, pleasure.

But, he is clear that we must assume that they are the ground of the mind, they are not a system necessarily, they are more like an aggregate (maybe I'm wrong on this, I need to read more)

The point is that it is impossible to talk about “mind” or “consciousness” without these three ingredients.

And I think that this is totally missing on any analysis of the technology: to have super-duper machines that use heavy statistics to respond to questions is not proof that these machines have a mind or are conscious.

Propositions like “this hamburger tastes like sh*t” or “This sandwich is made by God himself”, are not something that any computer, no matter how conscious, can do. And is not reducible to “metaphors”.

Great read!

[Ilya Dvorkin]

I need to read a fragment