interested in Kant's analysis will be aware that he cannot stop short
with the analytic phase: Kant will have warned him repeatedly that
the validity of these claims is still very much in question. Two courses
are open to the serious student. He can plunge into the Critique of
Pure Reason and work his way forward. In the process he will
probably become a Kant scholar, an affliction that generally proves
incurable. Or he can be content with a more general understanding of
Kant's solution to the critical phase of the problem, which will leave
him free to pursue his broader interests. One of the merits of Profes-
sor Pluhar's work is that his translator's introduction provides the sort
of background for the Critique of Judgment that will guide the
student interested in aesthetics and philosophy of science through the
critical phases in Kant's discussion of aesthetic and teleological
judgments.

The combination of Kant's critical and substantive concerns, in
this highly complex work, may well account for the long-standing
neglect of the Critique of Judgment as a whole and the interest
recently shown in some of its parts. In his Introduction to the third
Critique, Kant's interest is primarily critical. On the basis of the first
two Critiques he acknowledges a "chasm" between nature and free-
dom that is not to be bridged by way of theoretical cognition. For a
post-Kantian philosopher bent on doing speculative metaphysics, this
acknowledgment indicates the failure of the Critical Philosophy. Not
until nineteenth century idealism had run its course would it seem
worthwhile to consider the more modest task Kant had set himself:
that of making the transition, by way of reflective judgment and its
principle of teleology, from our way of thinking about nature to our
way of thinking about freedom. But even then, the connection between
the Introduction to the Critique and its two parts seemed so tenuous
as to raise doubts about the unity and coherence of the work.

In the meantime, developments in art criticism and aesthetic the-
ory focused attention on Kant's accessible and tightly structured
analysis of our judgments of beauty, the "Analytic of the Beautiful,"
into which we are plunged after the Introduction's prologue in heaven.
The emergence of formalism in art, the collapse of "expressionism"
as an aesthetic theory into a branch of psychology, and the perennial
difficulties of assigning "objective" status to beauty suggest that Kant's
analysis of taste is relevant to contemporary problems. But, after the
analytic, Kant's critical concerns come to the foreground and the

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