Imaginative Reflection in Aesthetic Judgment and Cognition

Abstract

Kant is well known for his strict distinction between aesthetic judgments and judgments of determinate cognition. Aesthetic judgments, and in particular judgments of beauty, are the domain of the reflecting power of judgment; they involve the free play of imagination and understanding.1 Judgments of determinate cognition, and in particular empirical cognition, are the domain of the determining power of judgment; in them the products of the imagination are subordinated to the concepts and principles of the understanding.2 This contrast notwithstanding, Kant takes both types of judgment to be related in important ways. Both involve the same faculties. And in both, these faculties are employed in a way that is sufficiently similar to warrant treatment in one book: the Critique of the Power of Judgment develops Kant’s aesthetics as well as key tenets of his theory of cognition.