L’imbarazzo per un principio. Kant e le due Introduzioni alla Critica del Giudizio

Kant’s explicit claim that the first draft of an Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgement had been substituted due to its excessive length has seldom been accepted as a convincing reason; therefore, the real motivation has been the theme of a long and ongoing debate. Some interpreters search for a “secret” hidden in the first version; others hold it for an illuminating text, the light of which was partially obscured in the published Introduction. )e article proposes the hypothesis that the reason for the rewriting of the text was the profound theoretical difficulty encountered by Kant in establishing a clear definition and a solid foundation of the principle of the power of judgment. His “embarrassment about a principle” was addressed in the second version through a better deduction of the principle; however, the foundation of teleological judgements should still be regarded as an open question.