ABSTRACT
The Kant who is most familiar to an English-speaking philosophical audience is the epistemological critic of the extravagant claims of early-modern metaphysics, found in the Critique of Pure Reason,1 and the “deontological” moral philosopher found in his two works of moral philosophy from the 1780s, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. It is probably not unjustified to say that for much of the twentieth century, for analytically trained anglophone readers of Kant, these texts present the “essential Kant”, the exponent of what I have described as weak TI. A somewhat different Kant emerges, however, if one focuses, not on the
works of the 1780s, but on those commencing with Critique of Judgment from1790 and ending with Kant’s final manuscripts, published only in the twentieth century, as the Opus Postumum. Indeed, from the perspective of later idealists such as Schelling and Hegel, it was in the Critique of Judgment, with its treatment of the operations of judgment in the realms of aesthetics and biology, that was to be found key to a Kantian move beyond the problems of the paradigmatic works of the 1780s, represented by those issues identified by Schiller (Pippin 1997: 129-53). When read with an eye to the potential for Kant’s transcendental philosophy to get beyond the problems of its initial formulations, a somewhat different “essential Kant” takes shape, one that prefigures some of the solutions offered by the post-Kantian “German idealists” themselves. It is this other aspect of Kant that is the topic of this chapter.2
