  Immanuel Kant’s only significant work in aesthetics, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, came late in his life, at the end of the extraordinary decade in which he had published the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, revised 1787), the Prolegomena to any future Metaphysics (1783), the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and a host of important essays on history, science, and theology as well as philosophy. Although we take its existence for granted now, Kant’s third Critique could only have struck its original audience as a surprising and puzzling work. It was surprising, because the second critique had not announced a forthcoming third anymore than the first had announced that there would be a second; and it was puzzling, because the book not only gives an extended treatment to one topic, namely aesthetic experience and judgment, which Kant had previously denied could be the subject of a science (Critique of Pure Reason, A 21/B 35–6), but also links that topic with another, namely the teleological judgment of both organisms within nature and of nature as a whole, to which Kant had never before linked it. Clearly there must have been some revolution in Kant’s conception of the tasks of philosophy as well in his assessment of the prospects of both aesthetics and teleology. This change in view both made it imperative for him and enabled him to write this book, linking two subjects that were not only disparate but that had also previously been problematic for him, so soon after having completed his exhausting labors on the first two critiques.