This paper claims that Kant’s conception of culture provides a new means of understanding how the two parts of the Critique of Judgment fit together. Kant claims that culture is both the ‘ultimate purpose’ of nature and to be defined in terms of ‘art in general’ (of which the fine arts are a subtype). In the Critique of Teleological Judgment, culture, as the last empirically cognizable telos of nature, serves as the mediating link between nature and freedom, while in the (...) Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, the connection between art and morality passes through culture. In either case, Kant offers distinct, yet interdependent, arguments for how culture demonstrates the amenability of nature to its supersensible ground: the central question Kant claims in the Introduction that the work seeks to answer. Thus, not only does this account advance a concept essential to both parts of the work; it also demonstrates how the two parts can be conceived as complementary, with each supplementing the other to solve Kant’s central question. As such, understanding the Critique of Judgment in terms of culture enables us to see how the two parts of the work do not merely share points of similarity or common themes, but presuppose one another in order to understand how nature is amenable to freedom. (shrink)

This essay considers Kant’s concept of the highest good from a systematic point of view. The two spheres of freedom and nature—of the practical and theoretical—need to be brought into a causal relation for the highest good to be achieved. Kant seems to offer numerous possibilities for how human beings are able to think that it is possible for the highest good to be attainable. I argue that it is only in the third Critique, however, that Kant articulates an answer (...) that also establishes freedom and nature within a larger system. The third Critique does this by positing a third, independent and mediating sphere of human experience that allows a transition between freedom and nature to be effected. This answer to the problem of the highest good is distinctive because the causal efficacy of reason in attaining its own demands is preserved. I examine Kant’s view by way of an analysis of his discussion of ‘territory’ and ‘domain’ in the Introduction to the text. (shrink)

En el trabajo nos ocupamos de desarrollar el problema del enlace entre la filosofía teórica y la filosofía práctica o del tránsito entre naturaleza y libertad tal y como Kant lo aborda en la Introducción definitiva a la Crítica de la facultad de juzgar. Específicamente proponemos la hipótesis según la cual Kant describe el modo como dicho enlace se realiza, a través de la facultad de juzgar, a partir de dos modelos diferentes. Según el primer modelo, el tránsito se efectúa (...) a partir de la idea de un fundamento de unidad de lo suprasensible que subyace a la naturaleza y lo suprasensible por libertad. De acuerdo al segundo modelo, el tránsito es posible porque lo suprasensible por libertad es puesto como causa o fundamento de la ley natura. Nos enfrentamos, así, a dos modos de pensar diferentes el tránsito en cuestión y, por lo tanto, dos modos alternativos de pensar la realización de la libertad en la naturaleza. In the paper I develop the question of linking theory and practice or, in other words, the problem of the transition between nature and freedom in Kant's Introduction to his Critique of the Power of Judgment. I propose specifically the hypotheses according to which Kant describes indeed two different models through which the linking occurs. According to the first one the transition accomplishes thanks to the idea of a ground of the unite of the supersensible that would underlie nature and the supersensible presupposed by freedom. According to the second one, the transition is possible because the supersensible by freedom is put it as cause or ground of the law of nature. Thus we face to two different ways of thinking the linking between theory and practice and, consequently, two alternative ways of thinking the realization of freedom in nature. (shrink)