Natural "beautiful forms". Notes on the functions of "nature" in Kant's aesthetics

Kantian aesthetics, as it unfolds in the Critique of the Power of Aesthetic Judgment, is sometimes considered to be primarily an aesthetics of nature, in contrast to philoso-phical undertakings that would place the fact of art at the heart of their questioning. Without being entirely wrong - there is indeed a question of natural beauty or natural sublimity in several sections of the third Critique -, this understanding neglects the polysemy of the notion of nature in Kantian aesthetics and the complexity of the uses made of this concept throughout the evolution of the philosophical project that will lead Kant from a Critique of Taste, in 1787, to a Critique of the Power of Judgment, where teleological questioning predominates. This article will trace the complexity, in the Critique of the Power of Aesthetic Judgment, of these functions of "nature", understood both as object and as principle of aesthetic judgments.