The concluding chapter sketches a portrait of Kant the empiricist and highlights what is of broader philosophical interest in it. Kant has a keen understanding that empirical knowledge is gradually acquired through a process of revision and refinement. Empirical knowledge is not an epistemic state but a process – not a possession but an ongoing pursuit. This follows from making a regulative assumption a necessary condition of empirical experience and knowledge. Furthermore, only the complete but unattainable determination of the sensibly given by a complete system of causally explanatory concepts can ground the objectivity and truth science seeks. Empirical truth too is ultimately an end we continuously pursue. Our claims to knowledge and our attempts at scientific explanation lay claim to being objectively true. But they are in principle open to revision, refinement or outright rejection. The chapter further claims that Kant’s conception of the aesthetic purposiveness of nature is an account of the acquisition of our most fundamental empirical concepts of observation, which also explains the fact that what we most fundamentally perceive are unchanging simple objects and their salient sensible properties. Finally, it shows that the aesthetic condition of experience does not prey to the "myth of the given."

Chapter 1 points to two problems with the deduction of the principle of the purposiveness of nature in the Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The first is that it assumes that empirical knowledge must take the form of a comprehensive hierarchical taxonomy of empirical concepts – but does not explain why. Second, Kant creates high expectations by employing the demanding term "deduction" and promising to seek the grounds of the principle of the purposiveness of nature in the “sources of cognition a priori” – but appears simply to declare that finding a hierarchical system of empirical laws is a need of the understanding and that although we have no a priori insight into its existence “such a unity must still necessarily be presupposed and assumed” by the power of judgment. The Introduction further emphasizes the importance of the notion of pleasure and its relation to our successful attempts to discover the conceptual order of nature. It also argues that the introduction of the aesthetic and logical aspects of the purposiveness of nature gives us good reason to think that the two principal parts of the book are concerned with the latter notion and its transcendental role.

Chapter 2 argues that although the Analytic of the Teleological Power of Judgment offers an argument for the necessity of teleological judgments of organisms, Kant is ultimately interested in the conceptual purposiveness of nature as a whole. He constructs an argument from the organism to this conclusion, because it allows him to assimilate characteristic features of a dialectic, specifically the fact that it ensnares ordinary understanding. This serves the end of showing that although the principle of the purposiveness of nature is a transcendental principle of reason, employing it is free of the sort of contradictions that typically beset reason. It has a legitimate and indeed necessary role to play in experience. The chapter further argues that the discussion of the methodology of biology is of great philosophical interest. For Kant all causal explanations are mechanistic and he develops a unique model for mechanistic explanations of the processes through which organisms produce or organize themselves. Teleological judgments of organic nature are not therefore a threat to the project of the comprehensive mechanistic explanation of the natural world. The chapter demonstrates this by examining Kant’s views of contemporary theories of generation, Blumenbach, his papers on human races and his evolutionary speculation.

The Introduction sets the book its principal task: presenting a reading of the Critique of the Power of Judgment that establishes that one of its primary aims is to complete Kant’s account of the transcendental conditions of a particular empirical experience and knowledge of nature. This task is the main concern of the Critique of the Aesthetics Power of Judgment and the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment. It further specifies the methodological commitment to offering a unified reading of the book as a whole, based on close exegesis.

Chapter 5 argues that the feeling of harmony expressed by pure aesthetic judgments is to be understood as the promissory feeling that a sensible manifold can be brought under concepts. The manifold which evokes in us this particular feeling of cognitive purposiveness makes us subconsciously identify it as an object exemplary of a natural kind, even before we have found concepts under which to subsume it and its kind. Furthermore, it is only on the assumption that the same manifolds will bring about this feeling in all of us that we will be able to make cognitive judgments about the same objects. Pure aesthetic judgments underwrite our pre-conceptual identification of spatial forms as exemplary of objective natural kinds. It is a necessary condition of cognition that we carve up the manifold given to us in intuition into objects exemplary of natural kinds in the same manner. The assumption of a common sense is a necessary condition of objective empirical experience and knowledge. It grounds the appeal to universal assent, which aesthetic judgments express. The Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment is an essential part of the transcendental account of the conditions of empirical experience and knowledge.

Chapter 3 tackles the considerable exegetical difficulties posed by the antinomy of teleological judgment. Although the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment poses an antinomy between regulative maxims of reflective judgment, it also presents a conflict between would-be constitutive principles of determinative judgment. This fact has led a number of readers to conclude that the latter conflict is the antinomy of teleological judgment and the former is its resolution – Kant’s explicit claims to the contrary notwithstanding. The chapter argues that posing the conflict between would-be constitutive principles of determinative judgment is explained by the attempt to assimilate characteristic features of a dialectic, specifically the fact that it ensnares ordinary understanding. Building on the earlier discussion of the distinction between explanation and description, it further claims that the regulative maxims of reflective judgment do not contradict one another, even as they are first presented, but in fact essentially complement one another. The maxim of teleology governs the description or observation of organisms as self-organizing beings; the maxim of mechanism directs us to seek to explain their generation and the processes they undergo mechanistically, just as all other causal processes are to be explained.

Chapter 4 contends with the Dialectic of the Teleological Power of Judgment and the discursivity of the understanding. It argues that a discursive understanding must think of the empirical world as ordered by an ideal system of universal concepts, which takes the form of a complete hierarchical taxonomy: from the most general empirical concepts to ever more specific concepts. It argues further that the assumption of a comprehensive hierarchy of concepts determining the sensibly given is Kant’s way of talking about the objective order of nature. Only the complete but unattainable determination of the sensibly given by a complete system of concepts can ground the claims to objectivity made in determinative judgments. Kant ultimately thinks of such a system and its concepts as not merely descriptive but as causally informative and thus explanatory as well. It is a transcendental condition of empirical experience and knowledge, which follows from the fact that we are discursive creatures in pursuit of objective knowledge. An important consequence is that empirical knowledge claims are always revisable and indeed defeasible. A further very important argument shows that the part-to-whole or mechanistic form of physical explanation is also grounded in the discursivity of our understanding.