Kant: Judgment

Kant’s conception of judgment both marks a pivotal moment in the development of logic and is at the center of his own philosophy. For Kant, judgment is the discursive rational activity par excellence, and it is in part because of Kant’s influence that subsequent philosophers, like Frege, have taken judgments to be the fundamental units of semantic content. Kant’s conception of the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments has also had a continuing impact. Given how influential Kant’s theory of judgment has continued to be for philosophy in general, it is likely unsurprising that it is also at the crux of his own thought. Broadly, Kant’s power of judgment splits into two parts. Reflecting judgment finds the concept or universal for given particulars. Determining judgment subsumes particulars under a given universal. As the paradigmatic rational activity, judgment is involved in the formation of concepts through the understanding, the making of inferences through reason, in judging theoretically or practically, aesthetically or teleologically, and in relating our immediate sensible representations of objects to concepts.