Book Description
This entirely new translation of Critique of Pure Reason is the most accurate and informative English translation ever produced of this epochal philosophical text. Though its simple, direct style will make it suitable for all new readers of Kant, the translation displays a philosophical and textual sophistication that will enlighten Kant scholars as well. This translation recreates as far as possible a text with the same interpretative nuances and richness as the original.
Customer Reviews:
a good translation.......2007-03-23
I find this translation straightforward and transparent, in that one is not forced to disentangle the philosophical content from the personal idiosyncracies of the author and/or translator. I do not read German, so I am unable to compare with the original, but whether Kant intended it or not, he himself, as an individual with a particular voice, disappears from the work, leaving only the philosophy. This "effect," when the philosophy takes over and the individual disappears, I find very helpful, especially so in regard to a work this complex. Highly recommended, as is the Guyer Critique of Judgement. I have not read the C. of Practical Reason yet, but it is most likely of comparable quality. These are obviously my opinions, as are the statements of other reviewers.
seminal work of the greatest of philosophers.......2006-10-05
I am an avid reader of philosophical books and without any doubt i consider Immanuel Kant as the greatest mind who has ever written on such abstract subjects.This work is a real copernican revolution,putting forth the structure of our cognitive systems and the way we perceive the world around us.At least it changed my own worldview,making me recognize that i am the creator of my thoughts and not a simple observer.For this reason i consider it one of the most important books i have ever read.
Poor translation.......2006-07-05
I read the long but fruitful review about the results of different translations of this text. So I went to my in-law who is German and she read a few paragraphs from the German. When I showed her the parallel text in English by Guyer and Wood, she was appalled at how inaccurate it was. She said the German was beautiful prose whereas the translation was aweful and didn't reflect the style of the German at all. She thought that the NK Smith was good English, but that it wasn't very accurate either. Unfortunately, I didn't get her opinion on the other translations.
The only reason I can think of for Cambridge using the utterly untalented efforts of Guyer and Wood is because of their privileged chairs in their respective University. Once again, power and privileged has done the public disservice in the academic world.
A Very Poor Translation.......2005-12-20
Please note that I am reviewing only the Guyer-Wood translation, not the work itself.
There are four previous English translations of this work: Francis Haywood (1838, revised 1848); JMD Meiklejohn (1855); F Max Müller (1881, revised 1896); and NK Smith (1929). All of these (save the first) have considerable merit. Meiklejohn shows considerable skill in making Kant speak idiomatic English. As Müller points out, however, Meiklejohn not infrequently flounders in Kant's monstrous gothic sentences, and loses the thread of meaning. As a native German speaker and scholar of language, Müller's 1881 version set the standard for this work for intelligibility, clarity, and readability.
Smith's version has been standard for many years, but even a cursory comparison of Smith with Müller will show that the latter often has a clearer grasp of the German, and provides a better expression of the key concepts. Smith had also come under the influence of the radical neo-Kantians, and his translation suffers severely from that.
Prospective readers of a great philosopher's work come to the work with certain expectations. They have the right to expect - nay demand - prose that reflects that greatness. Kant's great work is a work of literature, and must be respected as any other work of literature. He often employs literary devices (such as metaphor) to make his point clearer. Sensitivity to idiomatic English style must be paramount in the translation of so difficult a work as this.
In short: Translating a work of this kind calls for special talents. Guyer and Wood, unfortunately, do not possess these talents.
They have no credentials in literary translation, translation theory, or semiotics. Despite this, they have installed themselves as General Editors of the Cambridge Kant translation series.
They expressly affirm that they have tried not to 'interpret' as they translate, but to translate 'literally', and leave interpretation to the reader. The difficulty is that such a stance is ideological, rather than practical, and as such it is unsupportable.
Their translation follows the original in a slavish, word-for-word fashion. The results are wooden and unnatural, and often unintelligible. For a truly successful translation of a work such as this, it is absolutely necessary to interpret, and to rewrite the interpretation in idiomatic English, specifically late 18th-century philosophical English. Often, complete reconstruction of the sentence is necessary. Guyer and Wood never do this, and are in fact incapable of doing this.
There is no excuse for allowing a translation to be unintelligible or unidiomatic. If there are textual problems in the original (and in this text there are many) the translator must attempt to resolve them. Simply passing them along for the reader to dispose of (even though the reader may be utterly incapable of 'interpreting' the resulting gibberish), in the name of 'accuracy', is a mistaken notion. It does no-one any good. The translator, not the author, will be blamed.
As a consequence, the Guyer-Wood translation is the worst ever of this work, except for the very first one from 1838, by Francis Haywood, and for the same reasons, cited by JMD Meiklejohn in his translation of the Critique, published in 1855. Speaking of Haywood's primitive, literal, word-for-word approach, Meiklejohn remarks:
"A translator ought to be an interpreting intellect between the author and the reader; but in this case the only interpreting medium has been the dictionary."
The same can be said of the Guyer and Wood translation. It is interesting that Guyer and Wood, in their preface, praise the very Haywood translation denounced by Meiklejohn, because (they say) it was so 'literal' (folks, I'm not making this up!).
This is quite revealing of the incompetence of these two translators. The best translation of this work was that of F. Max Müller, in 1881/1896. How do I know? I checked them all!
For example, the Guyer-Wood team show their insensitivity to English usage by translating the expression "gewöhnliches Schicksal" as "customary fate", which is un-idiomatic and totally absurd. 'Fate' has nothing to do with 'custom'; in fact, this is an oxymoron. Fate has to do with things that are beyond men's control. What is 'customary' has to do with what men habitually do. (The correct choices include "usual fate" or perhaps "common fate".) This absurdity appears to be a direct consequence of Guyer and Wood's stated preference for using a single English term to render a single German term. But it results in absurdities like 'customary fate'.
Translation of one language into another requires thought and interpretation. It is not a mechanical process. The words are not numbers that can be processed as if through a computer, though Guyer and Wood approach it that way. For that reason, Guyer and Wood simply have no business translating anything. They are incompetent; among other things, they import medieval meanings into Kant's text, something for which they have no legitimate basis. This work demands a sensitivity to language, and an ability to write in an English style that is readable. Guyer and Wood lack that ability.
They have stated that their translation is intended for academics and scholars. No translation, though, can ever take the place of the original for scholarly purposes, no matter how carefully and scrupulously the work is performed. Translations are suitable only for introductory to intermediate classes. Anyone attempting serious study of a work of this kind must refer to the original, and that means learning to cope with Kant's somewhat idiosyncratic German.
Because Guyer and Wood do not understand the limitations of the process of translation, their work is misguided. That in turn has led them to make unfortunate choices in their translation. For this reason, and because they themselves have no apparent literary talent, this translation cannot be recommended.
----------NOT RECOMMENDED------------
A foundation stone for modern philosophy.......2005-10-09
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is considered one of the giants of philosophy, of his age or any other. It is largely this book that provides the foundation of this assessment. Whether one loves Kant or hates him (philosophically, that is), one cannot really ignore him; even when one isn't directly dealing with Kantian ideas, chances are great that Kant is made an impact.
Kant was a professor of philosophy in the German city of Konigsberg, where he spent his entire life and career. Kant had a very organised and clockwork life - his habits were so regular that it was considered that the people of Konigsberg could set their clocks by his walks. The same regularity was part of his publication history, until 1770, when Kant had a ten-year hiatus in publishing. This was largely because he was working on this book, the 'Critique of Pure Reason'.
Kant as a professor of philosophy was familiar with the Rationalists, such as Descartes, who founded the Enlightenment and in many ways started the phenomenon of modern philosophy. He was also familiar with the Empiricist school (John Locke and David Hume are perhaps the best known names in this), which challenged the rationalist framework. Between Leibniz' monads and Hume's development of Empiricism to its logical (and self-destructive) conclusion, coupled with the Romantic ideals typified by Rousseau, the philosophical edifice of the Enlightenment seemed about to topple.
Kant rode to the rescue, so to speak. He developed an idea that was a synthesis of Empirical and Rationalist ideas. He developed the idea of a priori knowledge (that coming from pure reasoning) and a posterior knowledge (that coming from experience) and put them together into synthetic a priori statements as being possible. Knowledge, for Kant, comes from a synthesis of pure reason concepts and experience. Pure thought and sense experience were intertwined. However, there were definite limits to knowledge. Appearance/phenomenon was different from Reality/noumena - Kant held that the unknowable was the 'ding-an-sich', roughly translated as the 'thing-in-itself', for we can only know the appearance and categorial aspects of things.
Kant was involved heavily in scientific method, including logic and mathematical methods, to try to describe the various aspects of his development. This is part of what makes Kant difficult reading for even the most dedicated of philosophy students and readers. He spends a lot of pages on logical reasoning, including what makes for fallacious and faulty reasoning. He also does a good deal of development on the ideas of God, the soul, and the universe as a whole as being essentially beyond the realm of this new science of metaphysics - these are not things that can be known in terms of the spatiotemporal realm, and thus proofs and constructs about them in reason are bound to fail.
Kant does go on to attempt to prove the existence of God and the soul (and other things) from moral grounds, but that these cannot be proved in the scientific methodology of his metaphysics and logic. This book presents Kant's epistemology and a new concept of metaphysics that involves transcendental knowledge, a new category of concepts that aims to prove one proposition as the necessary presupposition of another. This becomes the difficulty for later philosophers, but it does become a matter that needs to be addressed by them.
As Kant writes at the end of the text, 'The critical path alone is still open. If the reader has had the courtesy and patience to accompany me along this path, he may now judge for himself whether, if he cares to lend his aid in making this path into a high-road, it may not be possible to achieve before the end of the present century what many centuries have not been able to accomplish; namely, to secure for human reason complete satisfacton in regard to that with which it has all along so eagerly occupied itself, though hitherto in vain.' This is heavy reading, but worthwhile for those who will make the journey with Kant.
Book Description
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most rewarding and difficult of all philosophical works. Norman Kemp Smith's translation is immensely valuable, not simply because he rendered Kant's language into readable English, but also because his own extensive understanding of the Critique made him acutely aware of the pitfalls of translation. This text is that of the second edition of 1787, with an additional translation of all first edition passages which in the second edition were either altered or omitted. For this reissue of Norman Kemp Smith's classic 1929 edition, Howard Caygill has contributed a new Preface, setting this translation into the context both of Kemp Smith's own life and work, and of his influence on Kant scholarship.
Customer Reviews:
Useful & reliable edition.......2007-09-11
I'm writing only to add some mundane notes about this edition: 1) Kemp's translation is readable but consistently precise and fairly well annotated; 2) The paperback binding holds up well, particularly for a 700 page text; and 3) The text includes a detailed index -- this, at least in my experience, has been indispensable. A fabulous edition, particularly given the price.
Standard translation of landmark text.......2006-03-02
Norman Kemp Smith's translation seems to be one of the standard English translations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Is it the best? I don't speak German, but it's certainly serviceable.
This is a daunting work. It's also a necessary work, inasmuch as any understand of contemporary thought and intellectual history must encounter it. Kant has influenced nearly every major school of thought and cultural trend for the last 200 years. Below, I'll try to sketch his thought in this Critique.
This is the story of Immanuel Kant, who found philosophy a mess and sought to fix it. Specifically, he was a former Rationalist who was disconcerted by the critique of British Empiricism (specifically the skeptical philosophy of David Hume). He sought to provide a grounding for the truths of empirical science and mathematics, establish the possibility of religious faith and practice, while at the same time avoid dogmatism in metaphysical reasoning.
How did he seek to do this? By establishing a critique of reason whereby he understands the validity of all mental constructs. Kant distinguish between judgments which are a priori (prior to experience) and a posteriori (arising out of experience), and judgments which are "analytic" (trivial, tautological) and "synthetic" (where the predicate adds something that is not contained within the subject). Are synthetic a priori judgments possible? Kant answers yes, and much of this book deals with what follows from that.
First Kant deals with how we have sense experience. He claims that space and time are necessary a priori conditions for sense experience -- not physical things in the world. The content of our experience is sense-data: raw sensation that arises outside ourselves or inside ourselves and is "given" in experience. The forms in which we construct that experience are space and time.
Sensations, organized within us spatially and temporally yields sense experience (perceptions).
Kant then proceeds to our abstract thought. What he terms "Understanding" has pure, a priori concepts according to logical form. He calls these "Categories." These do NOT arise as a mere empirical habit/convention -- they are prior to experience and are necessary forms that allow rational beings to experience the world intelligibly. Thus, we take the raw givens of our Understanding, which are perceptions (which we dealt with under "Transcendental Aesthetic"), and we impose the categories upon these perceptions -- we "schematize" our experience.
Perceptions, given intelligible form according to schemata, yield intelligible concepts. We are justified in doing this because the perceptions are not things-in-themselves, but mere appearances (phenomena), and in order for these phenomena to exist in an experience that is coherent and consistent for us, they must have these forms. We are NOT justified in applying these categories to things-in-themselves (noumena).
This is where Reason eats itself. It tries to do the same thing the understanding did, but now it does this with respect to the big metaphysical questions. It starts with concepts and attempts to unify all phenomenal experience according to concepts and yield the Ideas of Pure Reason. When it does this, it gets all confuzelled. It tries to deal with 3 Big Problems (Kant uses the term "dialectic"):
* Soul - Reason wants to insist that the thinking soul exists, that it is subject (pure substance), that it is simple, and that it is unchangeable through all its activities. These are the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. We need these ideas -- their contraries are unthinkable for us(?), but these are not demonstrable.
* The World - Reason wants to answer questions about the series of appearances that constitute the world: Is the World limited or unlimited in space and time? Is the world made up of simples or composites? Does freedom exist in the world? Is there a necessary being connected with the world? These are the Antinomies of Pure Reason. Unlike the Paralogisms, these questions admit of contradictory answers. They, too, cannot be adjudicated by pure reason.
* God - Reason wants to demonstrate the existence of God. Kant refers to this as the Ideal of Pure Reason. He claims that all arguments demonstating God's existence in fact, despite outward appearances, depend upon one method, the "ontological" proof of God's existence, which Kant disallows as transempirical.
Kant tries to tell us how to employ reason. First, stop arguing speculatively about God, etc.! But he urges us to apply those metaphysical ideas must be employed in practical (moral) contexts. In this, he anticipates the Victorians, who were somewhat skeptical on matters of faith, but stressed the necessity of continuing to act according to traditional morality. The dialectic problems deals with ideas are not verifiable speculatively. They are not constitutive of experience. Rather, they serve a regulative function, specifically in the practical realm of morality.
Kant claims that reason is architectonic: it naturally wants to assume the greatest generality. Kant says this is fine for moral thinking, but bad for speculative thinking.
Kant says that philosophy answers these questions: "What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for?" The bulk of Critique of Pure Reason answers the first question. The Critique of Practical Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Metaphysic of Morals, etc., answer the second question. The third question ties the two together -- this is what Kant deals with at the end of the first Critique.
Kant sees the great transendental ideas as being God, Immortality, and Freedom. They are the starting points of theistic religion (e.g. Christianity and Judaism). These can neither be verified nor disproved by speculative reason (since speculative reason must by its nature deal with givens (Latin, data) either from sense-experience or pure intuition (as in mathematics). These ideas, however, are necessary "regulative" ideas for the guidance of practical (moral reason) and are valid in that connection. Thus, the second Critique answers the question "What ought I to do?" by recourse to the transcendal idea of Freedom. The question, "what may I hope for?", is given response through the transcendental ideas of God and immortality, for if God does not exist, nothing can grant us happiness for moral behavior and unhappiness for immoral behavior, and if we're not immortal, God won't have anyone to reward.
I probably have made errors and inaccuracies in the above, but I hope I give a flavor for his thought. Kant is sober, earnest, and disciplined. Again, he's not easy, but I think he's worth the effort.
A foundation stone for modern philosophy.......2005-10-07
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is considered one of the giants of philosophy, of his age or any other. It is largely this book that provides the foundation of this assessment. Whether one loves Kant or hates him (philosophically, that is), one cannot really ignore him; even when one isn't directly dealing with Kantian ideas, chances are great that Kant is made an impact.
Kant was a professor of philosophy in the German city of Konigsberg, where he spent his entire life and career. Kant had a very organised and clockwork life - his habits were so regular that it was considered that the people of Konigsberg could set their clocks by his walks. The same regularity was part of his publication history, until 1770, when Kant had a ten-year hiatus in publishing. This was largely because he was working on this book, the 'Critique of Pure Reason'.
Kant as a professor of philosophy was familiar with the Rationalists, such as Descartes, who founded the Enlightenment and in many ways started the phenomenon of modern philosophy. He was also familiar with the Empiricist school (John Locke and David Hume are perhaps the best known names in this), which challenged the rationalist framework. Between Leibniz' monads and Hume's development of Empiricism to its logical (and self-destructive) conclusion, coupled with the Romantic ideals typified by Rousseau, the philosophical edifice of the Enlightenment seemed about to topple.
Kant rode to the rescue, so to speak. He developed an idea that was a synthesis of Empirical and Rationalist ideas. He developed the idea of a priori knowledge (that coming from pure reasoning) and a posterior knowledge (that coming from experience) and put them together into synthetic a priori statements as being possible. Knowledge, for Kant, comes from a synthesis of pure reason concepts and experience. Pure thought and sense experience were intertwined. However, there were definite limits to knowledge. Appearance/phenomenon was different from Reality/noumena - Kant held that the unknowable was the 'ding-an-sich', roughly translated as the 'thing-in-itself', for we can only know the appearance and categorial aspects of things.
Kant was involved heavily in scientific method, including logic and mathematical methods, to try to describe the various aspects of his development. This is part of what makes Kant difficult reading for even the most dedicated of philosophy students and readers. He spends a lot of pages on logical reasoning, including what makes for fallacious and faulty reasoning. He also does a good deal of development on the ideas of God, the soul, and the universe as a whole as being essentially beyond the realm of this new science of metaphysics - these are not things that can be known in terms of the spatiotemporal realm, and thus proofs and constructs about them in reason are bound to fail.
Kant does go on to attempt to prove the existence of God and the soul (and other things) from moral grounds, but that these cannot be proved in the scientific methodology of his metaphysics and logic. This book presents Kant's epistemology and a new concept of metaphysics that involves transcendental knowledge, a new category of concepts that aims to prove one proposition as the necessary presupposition of another. This becomes the difficulty for later philosophers, but it does become a matter that needs to be addressed by them.
As Kant writes at the end of the text, 'The critical path alone is still open. If the reader has had the courtesy and patience to accompany me along this path, he may now judge for himself whether, if he cares to lend his aid in making this path into a high-road, it may not be possible to achieve before the end of the present century what many centuries have not been able to accomplish; namely, to secure for human reason complete satisfacton in regard to that with which it has all along so eagerly occupied itself, though hitherto in vain.' This is heavy reading, but worthwhile for those who will make the journey with Kant.
Book Description
This thoughtful abridgment makes an ideal introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Key selections include: the Preface in B, the Introduction, the Transcendental Aesthetic, the Second Analogy, the Refutation of Idealism, the first three Antinomies, the Transcendental Deduction in B, and the Canon of Pure Reason. A brief introduction provides biographical information, descriptions of the nature of Kant's project and of how each major section of the Critique contributes to that project. A select bibliography and index are also included.
Customer Reviews:
Incredibly Difficult, but Highly Rewarding.......2007-02-11
I have only finished reading the book for the second time about a week ago. I read the opening seventy pages or so perhaps four times to get a clear grasp of what Kant was saying. Even now I am not able to debate on specific details of how he arrives at his conclusions, but I can more or less grasp the conclusions themselves. This isn't something I do regularly, this is something very few writers merit at all. The reason you will end up rereading large sections in minute detail is twofold. The first part is that Kant's philosophy is very complex. This in and of itself isn't such a bad thing, after all he is reconciling empiricism with rationalism and does a superb job of doing so. He was highly effective in closing most of the philosophical schism that had arisen over the issue. The one major complaint I have, and the second reason the book is so difficult, is that Kant is rather trigger-happy with the archaic terms and the use of academic jargon in his work. You won't be able to dive right into this, though I will say that after about page 250-300 the work gets much, much easier to understand.
Having said that, there are huge redeeming features in the book. One is that despite his painfully dull writing style, his points are concise and he often repeats and rephrases them in addition to using countless examples. In that respect, this beating of dead horses is akin to reading Aristotle, but unlike Aristotle you won't grasp what is being said right off the bat. So even a layman like I am can understand this work if they are dedicated enough.
The aim of this Critique is stated in the title. It is a critique of pure reason. One of Kant's main aims in this book is to establish what we can know. He criticizes pure rationalism as not answering any of its own questions and in fact producing nothing but unanswerable paradoxes and he criticizes pure empiricism as being unable to support its claims. He works toward a synthesis of the two philosophies by examining what we can know and concludes that rational thought is perfectly acceptable as long as it remains withinthe confines of possible experience. As such, questions about God or about the universe being infinite or finite are unanswerable as we cannot experience these things.
Additionally, take what he says about space and time with a grain of salt. His writings on these subjects made up my one major qualm with his philosophy.
Still, this is considered to be possibly the greatest work of philosophy in the modern age, and it deserves to be read. Fortunately he isn't one of those type of people who can just be quoted out of context.
My final suggestion, ultimately, is that you start with something else. The Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics was Kant's own attempt to condense and simplify his philosophy, and although I (arguably) made the mistake of delving head first into this book not everyone should approach his work without a friendly suggestion to pick up a thinner and simpler treatise first.
A vitally important work in Philosophy.......2006-10-20
There is a common saying in Philosophy; before Kant and after Kant.
Roger Scruton justifiably said Kant was the most brilliant philosopher after Aristotle. While I would not say Kant was the only brilliant philosopher, he does deserve a central place in modern Philosophy alongside Hume, Berkeley, Liebnitz, and Spinoza.
The Critique of Pure Reason is Kant's central work and essential to comprehending Kant's overall goal of reconciling philosophical idealism and empiricism while at the same time retaining adequate grounds for the three great questions which confront all rational beings:
1) What should I do?
2) What can I know?
3) What can I hope for?
Kant gives the answers to these questions as freedom, immortality, and knowledge, however in Kant's view all the metaphysical systems of philosophy and their pretentions to provide 'certain' knowledge about these things had all failed, and failed decisively. Kant's central insight, and perhaps his most important one, was of the importance of Hume's critical skepticism towards any attempt by reason to provide sure and certain foundations to knowledge, be it scientific knowledge, philosophical knowledge, or theological systems which try to catalogue the furniture of all worlds from God down to the smallest atom. Hume's scathing and brilliant attacks on all dogmatic systems of belief shattered Kant's faith in the ability of reason to know anything with certainty.
Kant set himself on the task to finding out in the light of empiricism and skepticism, what we can truely know and hope for. The Critique is essentially a long and complex analysis of all the forms of philosophical knowledge and logic of the time and also a comprehensive review of Western philosophy itself, immense in its scope, covering everything from proofs for God's existence to the cogito of Descartes to aesthetics. Kant's key insights in the critique are as follows:
1) Reason cannot know the unconditioned, that is, any reality above the world of possible experience.
2) Reason cannot prove God's existence or non-existence.
3) Our knowledge of things depends essentially on the constitution of the world, as conditioned by our senses, our embodied existence, and the processes of our concious mind.
The third point is especially key for Kant. Kant introduces a system called transcendental idealism. For Kant, it is not sufficient to simply say reality is a creation of Mind or minds (Berkeley) or that our knowledge of reality simply consists in appearances received by a passive mind (empiricism). While each philosophical perspective contains part of the Truth, it is not a complete picture of the truth adequate from the viewpoint of Philosophy. For Kant, the world is certainly empirically real (scientific laws are true laws and will always be so in any possible world of experience) however the world is transcendentally ideal, in the sense our conciousness and how our mind orders appearances is absolutely fundamental in how reality appears to us as a coherent whole, governed by immutable physical law. The existence of time, space, causation, and of the basic categories through which we understand reality is not from things in themselves, but through the way our mind constitutes appearances. Hence the world is given, in a unity because we are 'thinking' animals for whom experience of this world is possible. For Kant, Berkeley and Descartes are right, but so are Hume, Galileo and Newton. The world is possible because of the subject, but the world is also independent of the subject in the sense appearances must and always will appear to us in the ordered way they do because it could not be otherwise, given our sense apparatus and our conciousness and the possibilities of experience it enables.
For Kant there is no 'a priori' insight which allows us to break out of our limited situation in the world of appearance into Reality or the 'thing in itself' (which Kant calls the noumenon) itself, and in fact we can never rationally talk about anything beyond our possible experience, because what is transempirical is beyond any of our categories or faculties of understanding (time, space, perception, substance, etc) and trying to do so only results in nonsense or vain metaphysical exercises which pertain to prove everything but which are really 'sophistry and illusion' which fall apart under the weight of skepticism and paradox. Reason tries to know what cannot be known, and in doing so runs into an abyss which leads to nowhere.
Kant does however, say it is possible to be a rational being, have hope in free will and morality, and in God. Despite his destruction of metaphysics, Kant proceeds to rebuild as he sees it a new foundation for ethics, religion, and knowledge on rational grounds, taking into account that any arguments for these things are grounded on the insight of the limits of our knowledge as finite beings. Kant summarises these arguments in simpler and clearer form in other works, such as 'A groundwork for the metaphysics of morals.'
Kant is not a brilliant writer in the same sense that Plato or Schopenhauer or Nietzsche are. However, Kant, like Aristotle, is not impossible to read and is not even terribly difficult (unlike Hegel) because he takes pains to set out his thought using logical argument. Anyone reasonably familiar with Descartes, Hume, Locke, or Spinoza can grasp the less obscure points of Kant. However, Kant is a philosopher of exceeding brilliance, and his influence is central to Western philosophy in all its forms. If ancient philosophy is a set of footnotes to Plato, then it can be said modern philosophy is a set of footnotes to Kant.
Both the analytical and the continental forms of Philosophy have essentially continued Kant's project, attempting to explore what we can know in light of our limitations as finite beings, and in the light of scientific knowledge.
Understanding Kant is absolutely essential to understanding Western philosophy in its present form, just as Shakespeare is absolutely indispensible to English literature.
Kant stands admirably as one of the most brilliant and original minds of all time, and is rightly praised by Schopenhauer as 'astounding.'
However, I do feel Kant's philosophical system has some flaws, and it is not perfect. I also disagree with Kant's claim we can never know the unconditioned and we can only ever know phenomena. However, Kant does provide an important corrective to any attempts to dogmatize beyond proper limits.
clarifications.......2006-06-21
For those who read the editorial review, know that the "paperback version" is actually an entirely different translation, and while it is abridged, this version is not.
So, for those who read the editorial review and were concerned that this translation was abridged, don't worry, it isn't.
However, for those of you who read the editorial review, which sings the praises of the editor, and think that you're getting a version of innordinately high quality in this book, you're not. the translation is very awkward at points. it still gets the point accross, just sometimes with little attention paid to grammar.
Standard translation of landmark text.......2006-03-02
Note: this is the edition I'm familiar with, but it's out of print. There are new editions (both with this translation and newer ones) that would be worth checking out. This one has no real guide or preface, but I kind of like that.
Norman Kemp Smith's translation seems to be one of the standard English translations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Is it the best? I don't speak German, but it's certainly serviceable.
This is a daunting work. It's also a necessary work, inasmuch as any understand of contemporary thought and intellectual history must encounter it. Kant has influenced nearly every major school of thought and cultural trend for the last 200 years. Below, I'll try to sketch his thought in this Critique.
This is the story of Immanuel Kant, who found philosophy a mess and sought to fix it. Specifically, he was a former Rationalist who was disconcerted by the critique of British Empiricism (specifically the skeptical philosophy of David Hume). He sought to provide a grounding for the truths of empirical science and mathematics, establish the possibility of religious faith and practice, while at the same time avoid dogmatism in metaphysical reasoning.
How did he seek to do this? By establishing a critique of reason whereby he understands the validity of all mental constructs. Kant distinguish between judgments which are a priori (prior to experience) and a posteriori (arising out of experience), and judgments which are "analytic" (trivial, tautological) and "synthetic" (where the predicate adds something that is not contained within the subject). Are synthetic a priori judgments possible? Kant answers yes, and much of this book deals with what follows from that.
First Kant deals with how we have sense experience. He claims that space and time are necessary a priori conditions for sense experience -- not physical things in the world. The content of our experience is sense-data: raw sensation that arises outside ourselves or inside ourselves and is "given" in experience. The forms in which we construct that experience are space and time.
Sensations, organized within us spatially and temporally yields sense experience (perceptions).
Kant then proceeds to our abstract thought. What he terms "Understanding" has pure, a priori concepts according to logical form. He calls these "Categories." These do NOT arise as a mere empirical habit/convention -- they are prior to experience and are necessary forms that allow rational beings to experience the world intelligibly. Thus, we take the raw givens of our Understanding, which are perceptions (which we dealt with under "Transcendental Aesthetic"), and we impose the categories upon these perceptions -- we "schematize" our experience.
Perceptions, given intelligible form according to schemata, yield intelligible concepts. We are justified in doing this because the perceptions are not things-in-themselves, but mere appearances (phenomena), and in order for these phenomena to exist in an experience that is coherent and consistent for us, they must have these forms. We are NOT justified in applying these categories to things-in-themselves (noumena).
This is where Reason eats itself. It tries to do the same thing the understanding did, but now it does this with respect to the big metaphysical questions. It starts with concepts and attempts to unify all phenomenal experience according to concepts and yield the Ideas of Pure Reason. When it does this, it gets all confuzelled. It tries to deal with 3 Big Problems (Kant uses the term "dialectic"):
* Soul - Reason wants to insist that the thinking soul exists, that it is subject (pure substance), that it is simple, and that it is unchangeable through all its activities. These are the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. We need these ideas -- their contraries are unthinkable for us(?), but these are not demonstrable.
* The World - Reason wants to answer questions about the series of appearances that constitute the world: Is the World limited or unlimited in space and time? Is the world made up of simples or composites? Does freedom exist in the world? Is there a necessary being connected with the world? These are the Antinomies of Pure Reason. Unlike the Paralogisms, these questions admit of contradictory answers. They, too, cannot be adjudicated by pure reason.
* God - Reason wants to demonstrate the existence of God. Kant refers to this as the Ideal of Pure Reason. He claims that all arguments demonstating God's existence in fact, despite outward appearances, depend upon one method, the "ontological" proof of God's existence, which Kant disallows as transempirical.
Kant tries to tell us how to employ reason. First, stop arguing speculatively about God, etc.! But he urges us to apply those metaphysical ideas must be employed in practical (moral) contexts. In this, he anticipates the Victorians, who were somewhat skeptical on matters of faith, but stressed the necessity of continuing to act according to traditional morality. The dialectic problems deals with ideas are not verifiable speculatively. They are not constitutive of experience. Rather, they serve a regulative function, specifically in the practical realm of morality.
Kant claims that reason is architectonic: it naturally wants to assume the greatest generality. Kant says this is fine for moral thinking, but bad for speculative thinking.
Kant says that philosophy answers these questions: "What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for?" The bulk of Critique of Pure Reason answers the first question. The Critique of Practical Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Metaphysic of Morals, etc., answer the second question. The third question ties the two together -- this is what Kant deals with at the end of the first Critique.
Kant sees the great transendental ideas as being God, Immortality, and Freedom. They are the starting points of theistic religion (e.g. Christianity and Judaism). These can neither be verified nor disproved by speculative reason (since speculative reason must by its nature deal with givens (Latin, data) either from sense-experience or pure intuition (as in mathematics). These ideas, however, are necessary "regulative" ideas for the guidance of practical (moral reason) and are valid in that connection. Thus, the second Critique answers the question "What ought I to do?" by recourse to the transcendal idea of Freedom. The question, "what may I hope for?", is given response through the transcendental ideas of God and immortality, for if God does not exist, nothing can grant us happiness for moral behavior and unhappiness for immoral behavior, and if we're not immortal, God won't have anyone to reward.
I probably have made errors and inaccuracies in the above, but I hope I give a flavor for his thought. Kant is sober, earnest, and disciplined. Again, he's not easy, but I think he's worth the effort.
Serious great book.......2005-10-11
Anyone who is interested in philosophy's great relics but mainly reads books in English should see the Cambridge University Press translation of Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood published in 1997 sometime to check the Table of Contents on pages 85-90, and compare it with Kant's original Table of Contents from 1781 on page 125, to observe how many parts of this book have become so well known that scholars consulting this monument to philosophical thought feel a need for 132 page references to find whatever interest in Kant they might have at a particular moment. Such a summary might have been open before Nietzsche when he wrote in section 110 of THE GAY SCIENCE that "Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. . . . Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species, include the following: that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself." Kant was concerned with transcendental philosophy, the general problem of pure reason, but in I, Transcendental doctrine of elements, Division one, Book II, Chapter II, Section III, 3, A on "principle of persistence of substance" can be found on page 299; Division two, Book II, Chapter II, Section IX, III, "The possibility of causality through freedom" can be found on page 535; and in II, Transcendental doctrine of method, Chapter II, Section II, "On the ideal of the highest good" can be found on page 676.
Kant's practice of using large heavy type in the text for key terms makes his points much easier to locate in the Cambridge University Press edition, which features some of the heaviest type I ever saw in a book. Page numbers for the A (1781) and B (1787) editions are located in the outer margins, making it easy to locate quotations by later philosophers who frequently invite their students to read the original work. Schopenhauer, in particular, was adamant that Kant spoiled the 1781 edition when he removed pages 348 to 392 and "introduced a number of remarks that controverted it" (THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, translated by E. F. J. Payne, Vol. 1, p. 435) in 1787. This part of the Second Book of the Transcendental Dialectic, First Chapter, The paralogisms of pure reason, was originally intended by Kant to illustrate forms of reason which imitate logical thought, and appealed strongly to Schopenhauer as a basis for his own philosophy, which he declared had placed Will in place of Kant's thing-in-itself as claimed in the 22nd chapter in the second book of WWR, vol. 1, pp. 110-112. Kant was not trying to make things easier for the philosophers who followed him by providing an easy platform they could use to proclaim their own views, as even Schopenhauer discerned when he complained that Fichte had "succeeded in turning the public's attention from Kant to himself, and in giving to German philosophy the direction in which it was afterwards carried further by Schelling, finally reaching its goal in the senseless sham wisdom of Hegel." (WWR, Vol. 1, pp. 436-437).
Schopenhauer does not appear in the index of the Cambridge University Press edition of Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, but the index can be used to locate a few notes on Swedenborg. In Gregory R. Johnson's Introduction for KANT ON SWEDENBORG, Kant's knowledge of Swedenborg's writings are linked to some of the key ideas in Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. "Finally, Swedenborg claims that his visions of the spiritual world do not show the spirit world as it is in itself. Instead, his visions are spatio-temporal representations of a non-spatio-temporal reality. Spiritual realities take on this spatio-temporal garb to accommodate themselves to the requirements of a finite intellect. These teachings presage such central tenets of Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON (1781, 1787) as transcendental idealism and the ideality of space and time." (KANT ON SWEDENBORG, p. xviii). The notes about Swedenborg on pages 731 and 753 of Kant's CRITIQUE call attention to his "ironic attack on Swedenborgian spiritualism in DREAMS OF A SPIRIT-SEER (1766)" and spiritual qualities lampooned then which reappear in Kant's elucidation of the limits imposed by the general conditions of experience:
" . . . or a special fundamental power of our mind to intuit the future (not merely, say, to deduce it), or, finally, a faculty of our minds to stand in a community of thoughts with other men (no matter how distant they may be) -- these are concepts the possibility of which is entirely groundless, because it cannot be grounded in experience and its known laws, and without this it is an arbitrary combination of thoughts that, although it contains no contradiction, still can make no claim to objective reality, thus to the possibility of the sort of object that one would here think. As far as reality is concerned, it is evidently intrinsically forbidden to think it in concreto without getting help from experience, because it can only pertain to sensation, as the matter of experience, and does not concern the form of the relation that one can always play with in fictions." (CPR, A 222-223, B 270, p. 324).
For example of Kant's always already unthink fictions, I would like to suggest the experience of a rock concert, in which a crowd knows the most popular song of the evening. It could be Liz Phair, doing a recent song, `stars and planets' in which "You know it's just the same old story. Stars rise and stars fall. But the ones that shine the brightest aren't stars at all. They're the planets just like us. . . . They're the planets that unite us. And from big to small. We all shine shine shine." So we are.
Customer Reviews:
A superb translation in modern English.......2006-10-14
Mr Werner S. Pluhar has done us all non-German readers a great favor:
A clear, complete (with a German-English Glossary followed by the English-German Index), fluent translation of Kant's major work.
It's the one I feel to be the most enjoyable and closer to the original.
Patricia Kitcher's Introduction is very helpful to any new Kant's reader.
The editing and format of this edition is well designed and inviting to
the eye.
Beautiful translation of a beautiful work.......2004-03-02
Pluhar's translation is wonderful. The extensive annotation makes the whole work perfectly clear, offering alternative translations and pointing out the technical German vocabulary (so essential to understanding Kant). The work flows beautifully, and though the material was dense, I could hardly put it down at times. If you're just starting Kant, do not start here. I'd suggest the excellent series by W.T. Jones called A History of Western Philosophy (specifically volume four). Read and reread it. Understand the basics about Kant, then, when you have the proper grounding, go on to the Critique. It will reward careful study.
A literary challenge.......2002-01-23
This Critique is long, difficult, and dry; however, at the same time it is brilliant. Many who rate this book below 4 stars just simply do not have the education or intellect to understand it. I recommend studying early modern philosophy from Descartes to Hume; then, you may be able to comprehend Kant's deep thinking. To this day, I display this book proudly as a trophy, and a thought bible.
Kant you write better.......2000-10-21
"Immanual Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable." In what? did he drink?
This book, the first critique, is genius; there's no disputing that. But how valuable is this particular edition or translation. This is perhaps the only case where, I think, Hackett didn't hack it.
There are an abundance of footnotes, there are references to Kemp Smith, there are references to the Meiklejohn, there are just damn too many references.
This edition may serve the Kant scholar well, but not the student. The words used to replace the "confusing ones" used by Kemp Smith are no less confusing.
But Kant is Kant, and he will remain stable even after a long night of translating alcohol.
What is real?.......2000-06-22
Standard book of german philosophy. It has a historic value and a contemporary relevance, because it enforces rigorous rethinking about the status of perceived objects. Time and space are, according to Kant, on the side of the perceiving subject, and not independently real. But what remains, if we remove space/time from the objects? Such considerations may twist the brain, but are quite amusing and may sharpen ones mental faculties.
Book Description
The Revolutionary Kant offers a new appreciation of Kant’s classic, arguing that Kant's reform of philosophy was far more radical than has been previously understood. The book examines his proposed revolutionary reform — to abandon traditional metaphysics and point philosophy in a new direction — and contends that critics have misrepresented conflicts between Kant and his predecessors. Kant, Bird argues, was not a flawed innovator but an advocate of a new philosophical project, one that began to be appreciated only in the twentieth century.
Customer Reviews:
A masterly repudiation of the "dualism" charge against Kant .......2007-05-17
A highly readable defense of the first Critique against the traditional charge of epistemological dualism. This charge, which surfaced as early as the publication of the first edition (1781), proved massively influential not only in Kantian scholarship, but as a tacit element of the epistemologies propounded by later, analytical philosophies. Bird, founder of the Kant Society in the UK, musters a convincing case for reading the first Critique as a "revolutionary" work in precisely the sense that Kant thought of it. In terms of the Ding-an-sich, this means grasping Kant's notion that although we can "think" the thing-in-itself of any intuited object, how we "know" it (i.e., understand it) is restricted to its appearance as a phenomenon. Bird himself is quick to acknowledge that his position is hardly original with him, but he has produced a most lucid and ably argued commentary. Perhaps the best recent work on the first Critique that substantiates Bird's approach is the 2nd edition of Henry Allison's "Kant's Transcendental Idealism" (Yale 2004).
Book Description
Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason is arguably the single most important philosophical work in Western philosophy. It is also one of the most difficult philosophical texts to study. This clear, straightforward guide to the Critique recasts Kant's thought in more familiar language, avoiding the technicalities that plague other secondary sources on Kant. Sebastian Gardner examines Kant's thought by contrasting two interpretive traditions--those of Strawson and Allison--while setting the Critique in the context of both pre-Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Ideal for anyone coming to Kant's thought for the first time, this accessible guide will be vital reading for all students of Kant in philosophy.
Customer Reviews:
Not a good guidebook.......2007-03-26
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is difficult. Most people will need a guidebook to achieve an adequate understanding of this profound work. In my attempts to read it I took the approach of reading until I felt my understanding was becoming less than adequate, and then started reading the secondary literature. I started reading the secondary literaure after reading the first sentence! Gardner's was one of the first I started to read, but quickly gave up because this book is as difficult to read as Kant. Fortunately, I did not give up but eventually found the one piece of secondary literature I needed -- "A Kant Dictionary" by Howard Caygill. Even more importantly, I found a forgiving translation (Pluhar's) which is blessed with a superb introduction. Even with these aids, Kant is very difficult, and the reader or student is not helped by convoluted, over-complicated texts like Gardner's. So although I found a couple of paragraphs in Gardner useful, I cannot give it more than one star because it fails in the main aim of a guidebook. A guidebook should help the inexperienced reader, not make the severest demands on his or her philosophical understanding. So reader beware, and use the "look inside" feature to its full extent before thinking of buying.
Excellent study guide for Kant students........2006-06-08
Kant is difficult, even with a good teacher. This book makes studying him much easier. Gardner is a clear and readable guide to the terrain, and I found myself returning to him often to make sure that I wasn't going in circles. Or, perhaps an aquatic metaphor: Kant is a stormy sea and Gardner's book is both sturdy vessel and well-marked chart of the ocean currents. I used this book so often that it began to fall apart.
First Rate.......2005-12-17
The person who develops an interest in philosophy is likely to discover that, much as you might prefer it weren't so, you can't get very far without a decent knowledge of Kant. Everywhere you turn, he keeps showing up. You can finesse Hegel, you can finesse Heidegger, but you can't finesse Kant. You have to bite that bullet, the only question is where to start. This is where to start.
Gardner has written a superb guidebook to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and by far the best available introduction to Kant, period. This book has been reprinted four times since it was published in 2000, and I think that's because there is nothing else like it. A few reviewers have complained about a lack of clarity here and there. Well, maybe, (an early section on the problem of reality struck me that way on first reading), but we are talking about Kant here, after all. If you hit a patch like that, just plow ahead and come back and try that section again later on. If it's a discussion of some specialized topic that doesn't interest you, skip it. There is so much in Kant, that if you get most of it, you get a lot.
Besides describing and explaining Kant's ideas themselves, Gardner also does a terrific job of discussing the major issues and controversies connected with the interpretation and implications of those ideas. Some of those, like questions about the ontological and epistemological status of ultimate reality ("things in themselves"), have never receded from philosophical debate and probably never will. Near the back is an excellent chapter that locates the CPR within the larger body of Kant's work; the final chapter describes the kind of reception the CPR got when it was originally published, and the sort of influence it has had subsequently. The bibliography is outstanding, and if you want more, the philosophy department at University College London (Gardner is a faculty member there) has outstanding bibliographic resources available on-line.
Good but sometimes seemed deliberately obscure!.......2005-10-22
I read the whole of Sebastian Gardner's 'Guidebook' to Kant and understood most of it. On the whole I would recommend this as making Kant more accessible. But I think he could have made the subject easier by avoiding the use of some words and phrases to seemingly impress the reader and the frequent use of parenthesis (the latter like Kant himself)
For example...(page 311)
"There must therefore be - if morality is not to be a chimera - some principle of action which is a priori and constrains all rational agents irrespective of their contingent empirical constitution" (page 311)
Avoing the use of the split infinitive and "therefore" both of which are unnecessary and do not improve the meaning I think the above could have been better expressed as follows...
"If morality is not to be a chimera there must be some a priori principle of action which constrains all rational agents irrespective of their circumstances (or character perhaps)"
An excellent study guide.......2005-08-14
Gardner's excellent book is one of the best secondary texts on Kant's first critique I've been able to find. Gardner has done a remarkable job of summarizing the leading interpretations for each section of Kant's intricate arguments in the critique, weighing the options and recommending the most plausible view. Gardner's book takes the reader step by step through the text, while keeping the "big picture" firmly in mind.
The book is very highly recommended as a study guide to Kant's first critique for either graduate or advanced undergraduate students. For non-academic or beginning undergraduate students looking for a more rudimentary introduction to Kant's philosophy, I recommend "Kant: A Very Short Introduction" by Roger Scruton. More than anything, I advise anyone seriously interested in Kant's philosophy to help himself to an academic course on Kant; the complexity and profundity of Kant's philosophy make it very difficult if not impossible to fully appreciateand understand without expert assistance.
Average customer rating:
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Essays on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
J. N. Mohanty
Manufacturer: Univ of Oklahoma Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 Epistemology
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History, 17th & 18th Century
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ASIN: 0806117826 |
Book Description
This new, revised edition of Kant's Prolegomena, the best introduction to the theoretical side of his philosophy, presents his thought clearly through careful attention to his original language. Also included are selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, which fill out and explicate some of Kant's central arguments (including famous sections of the Schematism and Analogies), and in which Kant himself explains his special terminology. The first reviews of the Critique, to which Kant responded in the Prolegomena, are included in this revised edition. First Edition Hb (1997): 0-521-57345-9 First Edition Pb (1997): 0-521-57542-7
Book Description
One of the cornerstone books of Western philosophy, here is Kant's seminal treatise, where he seeks to define the nature of reason itself and builds his own unique system of philosophical thought with an approach known as transcendental idealism. He argues that human knowledge is limited by the capacity for perception.
Customer Reviews:
A foundation stone of modern philosophy.......2005-11-07
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is considered one of the giants of philosophy, of his age or any other. It is largely this book that provides the foundation of this assessment. Whether one loves Kant or hates him (philosophically, that is), one cannot really ignore him; even when one isn't directly dealing with Kantian ideas, chances are great that Kant is made an impact.
Kant was a professor of philosophy in the German city of Konigsberg, where he spent his entire life and career. Kant had a very organised and clockwork life - his habits were so regular that it was considered that the people of Konigsberg could set their clocks by his walks. The same regularity was part of his publication history, until 1770, when Kant had a ten-year hiatus in publishing. This was largely because he was working on this book, the 'Critique of Pure Reason'.
Kant as a professor of philosophy was familiar with the Rationalists, such as Descartes, who founded the Enlightenment and in many ways started the phenomenon of modern philosophy. He was also familiar with the Empiricist school (John Locke and David Hume are perhaps the best known names in this), which challenged the rationalist framework. Between Leibniz' monads and Hume's development of Empiricism to its logical (and self-destructive) conclusion, coupled with the Romantic ideals typified by Rousseau, the philosophical edifice of the Enlightenment seemed about to topple.
Kant rode to the rescue, so to speak. He developed an idea that was a synthesis of Empirical and Rationalist ideas. He developed the idea of a priori knowledge (that coming from pure reasoning) and a posterior knowledge (that coming from experience) and put them together into synthetic a priori statements as being possible. Knowledge, for Kant, comes from a synthesis of pure reason concepts and experience. Pure thought and sense experience were intertwined. However, there were definite limits to knowledge. Appearance/phenomenon was different from Reality/noumena - Kant held that the unknowable was the 'ding-an-sich', roughly translated as the 'thing-in-itself', for we can only know the appearance and categorial aspects of things.
Kant was involved heavily in scientific method, including logic and mathematical methods, to try to describe the various aspects of his development. This is part of what makes Kant difficult reading for even the most dedicated of philosophy students and readers. He spends a lot of pages on logical reasoning, including what makes for fallacious and faulty reasoning. He also does a good deal of development on the ideas of God, the soul, and the universe as a whole as being essentially beyond the realm of this new science of metaphysics - these are not things that can be known in terms of the spatiotemporal realm, and thus proofs and constructs about them in reason are bound to fail.
Kant does go on to attempt to prove the existence of God and the soul (and other things) from moral grounds, but that these cannot be proved in the scientific methodology of his metaphysics and logic. This book presents Kant's epistemology and a new concept of metaphysics that involves transcendental knowledge, a new category of concepts that aims to prove one proposition as the necessary presupposition of another. This becomes the difficulty for later philosophers, but it does become a matter that needs to be addressed by them.
As Kant writes at the end of the text, 'The critical path alone is still open. If the reader has had the courtesy and patience to accompany me along this path, he may now judge for himself whether, if he cares to lend his aid in making this path into a high-road, it may not be possible to achieve before the end of the present century what many centuries have not been able to accomplish; namely, to secure for human reason complete satisfacton in regard to that with which it has all along so eagerly occupied itself, though hitherto in vain.' This is heavy reading, but worthwhile for those who will make the journey with Kant.
Customer Reviews:
Kantbuch before the fact.......2000-06-23
A lecture course that eventually became the famous Kantbuch, Heidegger demonstrates his remarkable capacity to think in complete sentences. The reading of Kant is decidedly Aristotlizing, with the priority of the imagination (phantasia) over reason (nous) or sense (aisthesis), and the priority of imagination cannot be separated from the priority of time, the gift which is self giving (or in Kant, self-affection: masturbation). The most clever thing that H does, and which he refrains from in the Kantbuch, is to turn the categories (quantity, quality, modality, and something else) into emanations of past, present, future. H reads modern philosophy as the triumph of the imagination, and that is no clearer than in Kant, but for Heidegger, the future possesses a priority, and the future is "image-poor." The connection of imagination with manipulation (and potentiality) leads some (like Sartre) to identify imagination with negativity, but H wants no part of this "humanism." Imagination and time may possess a priority that Kant "recoils" from, but H demonstrates the reductio in Kant's argument not to valorize imagination but ironically to resuscitate aisthesis, or the potentia passiva, the ability or power to receive, to listen intently, or just to listen.
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