The Critique of Judgment is concerned with “judgment” as a power of the mind that is expressed in particular acts of judging. This is the sense we draw upon when we say of someone that they have good judgment, or when we put our trust in someone’s judgment. I consider Kant’s regress argument concerning judgment in the Analytic of the Principles of the first Critique. Kant has been read as concluding that if cognition is to be possible it must, on pain of infinite regress, bottom out in some non-rule-governed, “immediate” act or entity. I argue that this interpretation misconstrues the moral of Kant’s argument, as it does that of the rule-following passages in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations with which it is sometimes aligned. The point of Kant’s argument is that judgment must be exercised: this is its condition. Kant shares with Wittgenstein (properly read) an awareness of the desire that we may have to evade the exercise of judgment and the revelations of the self that it entails. Reflective judgment, as introduced in the third Critique, is a further development of the notion of judgment as necessarily exercised and reflective of a particular mind.

Chapter 3 addresses the relationship between the various tasks carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason by analyzing Kant’s multifaceted use of the term ‘transcendental.’ Challenging the received view, it maintains that Kant’s seemingly divergent accounts of the subject hinge on his conception of transcendental philosophy proper and transcendental critique as first-order and second-order branches of transcendental cognition, respectively. Drawing on a brief account of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history of the term ‘transcendental,’ the chapter seeks to show that Wolffian ontology and transcendental philosophy proper have more in common than is widely assumed: both disciplines can be said to provide a comprehensive account of the cognitive elements presupposed in any cognition of objects. On this account, the novelty of the Critique consists primarily in the second-order investigation into metaphysics that Kant calls transcendental critique. The chapter concludes by examining Kant’s criticism of the way his predecessors and contemporaries understood the terms ‘ontology’ and ‘transcendental philosophy.’

The second chapter seeks to clarify how Kant in the late 1760s and early 1770s came to conceive of the aim and main arguments of what was to become the Critique of Pure Reason. It focuses in particular on Kant’s evolving understanding of the act of critique. The heart of the chapter consists in an analysis of the Inaugural Dissertation. Challenging the prevailing view, the chapter highlights the critical impetus of the treatise by arguing that the specific criterion it employs to curb the ambitions of metaphysics – intellectual purity – is directed against an assumption common to Wolff, Crusius, and early post-Leibnizian philosophy in general. Moreover, it puts into perspective the alleged break between the Dissertation and the Critique by arguing that this early instance of critique is preserved in the Critique of Pure Reason. The chapter argues that Kant in this work introduces a new form of critique by arguing that any a priori cognition of objects necessarily rests on pure intuition.

Kant’s moral argument for faith in God aims not at converting unbelievers but at offering those who believe a reason for principled assent to the existence of God on moral grounds. It is based on a rational connection between purposive action and assent that applies not only to religious belief but to many other purposes as well, such as what Royce called “loyalty to a lost cause.” The argument in the Critique of Pure Reason differs significantly from its presentation in later works. Kantian moral faith is in tension with Cliffordian evidentialism but not inconsistent with it, and the two together constitute the doxastic virtue lying between the twin vices of uncritical credulity and stubborn incredulity; together they enable us to avoid the complacencies of both despairing resignation and overconfidence.

Posy undertakes to give a precise characterization of the difference between Kant’s critical and precritical philosophy. The need to do this becomes vivid when we notice that many doctrines generally identified with the critical philosophy are already present in Kant’s precritical Inaugural Dissertation (1770). By exposing the Leibnizian roots of Kant’s preoccupation with the metaphysics–mathematics interface, Posy pinpoints the subtle but decisive shift in philosophical standpoint that separates the Critique from the Dissertation.

This chapter shows that the antinomies of pure reason present an analogy between the critique and a civil trial in which reason in the narrow sense is challenged to prove that it can legitimately possess and use its ideas. In reconstructing the different parts of this image, Møller suggests reading the tribunal image as a second-order model of evaluation of judgements. In order to achieve this aim, Møller inspects the different roles and procedures mentioned in the juridical metaphors to see how they fit the different procedures in the antinomies. The chapter untangles the notions of the tribunal itself, the trial, the witnesses, the audience and the verdict. The image of the reader as judge is considered in its intellectual historical context, which shows an affinity between Kant’s use of this image and the project of enlightenment.