Abstract

This essay examines the reasons for Hegel's frequently professed claim that Kant's Critique of Judgment simultaneously reveals the internal limits of critical philosophy and opens the door to his own system of speculative idealism. It evaluates Hegel's contention that the conceptions of aesthetic experience, organic purposiveness, and the intuitive intellect developed in the third Critique together conspire to undermine the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the theories of nature and freedom advanced in the first and second Critiques . Finally it explains how Hegel understands his logic and real philosophy as a realist and quasi-naturalistic alternative to Kant's subjective idealism, one that purports to generate a system of categories adequate not only to dead matter but also to organic life and free self-conscious spirit.