Kant on the Purposiveness of the Reflecting Power of Judgment

Abstract

In this paper I argue that 1) Kant’s power of judgment is constitutively always reflecting, as its lawful employments involve a preliminary self-reference of the faculties the power of judgment itself is required to connect and let them match with each other. Accordingly, I claim that 2) the principle of purposiveness is the principle of the power of judgment as such, and not just of an allegedly self-standing reflecting branch of this faculty. I criticize the view that Kant draws a dichotomy between reflecting and determining judgments and argue that 3) Kant’s point in the third Critique is to rule out the amphiboly between the reflecting and the determining employment of the principle of purposiveness. The power of judgment is, as such, always reflecting: while in the case of cognition it also works in a determining way, in the case of both aesthetics and teleology it is only reflecting, i.e., self-purposive – as it sets its function as its own end.