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Can somebody recommend any? I have come across Wicks & Hughes so far, but I am finding it very difficult. I am also finding it incredibly difficult reading through the Critique itself. Any advice on how to make things more pleasant?

I am mainly interested in the 2nd part of the critique, so it would be great to have a introduction or commentary that would reflect that and not focus on the 1st part only.

Ken Goldhaus
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  • For example: John Zammito, [The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment](https://books.google.it/books?id=WHekZCIodTcC&printsec=frontcover) (1992). – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Mar 13 '16 at 17:55
  • There is a pretty good Blackwell Dictionary of Kant (Cargill) that I find very useful in reading Kant in English on my own....though you may be at a deeper level of detail than I am. To me, it is often helpful just to see the root words in German, the citations, and the lists of related terms. I am not qualified to judge the interpretations or level of scholarship, but most entries are fairly substantive. – Nelson Alexander Mar 14 '16 at 15:20

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A general advice regarding an approach to this book

Understanding the book without having looked into the rest of the system seems hopeless to me.

As a more broad possibility and an embedding into the whole history Kants own works and system as well as German Idealism as a whole I would suggest Eckart Förster's The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy

For the same reason, Paul Guyer's The Cambridge Companion to Kant would be another alternative.

If you, as your comment states, already are an expert in Kant's terminology:

The classical one would be of H. Cassirer, son of Ernst Cassirer, already published in 1938: A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment. Parts of the contemporary review by H.J. Paton (!) are available here.

A more modern work would be the Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant on Judgment From Robert Wicks, new edition from 2007, which explicitly mentions the lack of literature on the book as a whole since Cassirer's commentary because of the focus on the aesthetics of Kant in the first part of the book, claiming to close the gap in the preface, pages X and XI.

The proposal of @MauroAllegranza John Zammito, The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment (1992) may be worth a look as well, but I don't know about it.

Community
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Philip Klöcking
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The most selling and very powerful book on the Third Critique in American academia is Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment---http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo3774594.html

Also, Phillip is correct and that piece of Cassirer's Kant's Life and Work, which is a very important source!

Paradox Lost
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