We may now turn to Kant's central question in the CAJ: how to justify the claims to universal subjective validity in aesthetic judgments or how we may justifiably require all others to share our pleasure in representing an object. Despite the fact that such judgments do not make objective claims, Kant argues, they make justifiable claims on others because they are grounded in the subjective conditions for the possibility of experience. As suggested above, I shall reconstruct Kant's justificatory argument on the model (mutatis mutandis) of the CPR deduction of the categories (as it informs his treatment of judgments of experience, as we shall see): our claims in aesthetic judgments are justified because the principle of such judgments, purposiveness without a purpose, is an a priori principle that makes aesthetic experience possible – is, indeed, constitutive of such experience, of both the representation of objects as beautiful, and the feeling of aesthetic pleasure.

In this chapter, I shall, first, draw out the implication of the arguments to this effect in the preceding chapters, beginning by treating the relationship between Kant's account of aesthetic experience, particularly the activity of aesthetic Beurteilung, and the aesthetic judgment proper (Urteil) (8.1–2), before turning to the way in which the principle of purposiveness justifies aesthetic judgments. I shall argue that aesthetic judgments are justified because judging in accord with the principle of purposiveness is a condition not only for the possibility of aesthetic experience (8.4), but for the possibility of experience simpliciter (8.5f.).