ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses to identify and defend the productive imagination as it functions in aesthetic judgment as the most refined model of the role of imagination in empirical judgment. Having exegetically identified an alternative notion of the conceptual in the imagination's form of the "power of concepts", the interpretive question naturally becomes what such a general or generic conceptual form would really be. The quarantining of the free and playful aesthetic imagination from the serious business of cognition does, after all, seem to confirm the attitude expressed in the common usage of terms like "imagination" and "imagining". The metaphor of the imagination as a kind of seeing of representations thus misplaces Immanuel Kant's sense of the activity by which the Einbildungskraft invests a form or Bild in a Vortstellung. Aesthetic judgments of taste become a proxy for the general question of reflective judgment because of some peculiar traits that Kant ascribes to beautiful objects.
