© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009, Unit 6, he Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW CCP 1.1 (2009) 89–104 Comparative and Continental Philosophy (print) ISSN 1757-0638 doi:10.1558/ccp.v1i1.89 Comparative and Continental Philosophy (online) ISSN 1757-0646 he Demand of Freedom in Kant’s Critique of Judgment James Risser Seattle University jrisser@seattleu.edu Abstract his paper examines the issue of the unity of the critical philosophy in Kant’s Cri- tique of Judgment through a careful consideration of the actual bridge that joins nature and reedom. Kant argues that this bridge is made under the demand for the furtherance of life, and is accordingly to be equated with the demand of reedom. his article speciically focuses on this demand that is, in efect, carried out by the principle of purposiveness. It is argued that this demand is somewhat artiicial since it does not fully take into account the real struggle between nature and reedom. Part I Let me begin from the broad perspective that frames the writing of Kant’s third Critique. In the initially unpublished First Introduction Kant tells us that the Critique of Judgment pertains “to the system of the critique of pure reason” in such a way that it efectively serves to complete the critical philosophy. 1 Kant is quick to point out that such a completion would not itself constitute a system of philosophy, that is to say, a system of knowledge from apriori principles, since the entire critical philosophy only serves as an examination of the transcenden- tal possibility of rational knowledge. To complete the critical philosophy will mean accordingly that one exhausts the examination of the faculty for rational knowledge, which is to say the faculty for apriori cognition. Up to this point, Kant has carried out an examination of two of the three faculties of cognition and has discovered that they both successfully legislate apriori, that is to say, they both contribute to rational knowledge: he faculty of understanding con- 1. Immanuel Kant, 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Mat- thews (New York: Cambridge University Press), 41.