Kant: Critique of Pure Reason (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant)

Don't be put off by the initial difficulty, sometimes even unintelligibility of Kant's discourse. Very soon you will discover that the whole book features just a few key notions which the author subjects to almost infinite reiteration and only slight variation. Once you have cracked the Kant code, this book will become a page-turner that you can even learn to enjoy.

Perfect condition!

Extremely important reference book which is referred and thought in the University philosophy degree

received as promised

Exellent

I'm not an uncritical fan of the Guyer-Wood translation (and incidentally, the bold type is an aesthetic nightmare), but Grindel's complaint that 'customary fate' is unidiomatic and in some way contradictory is utter tosh. It's perfectly standard English, and even appears in a fairly well-known quote by T. H. Huxley: 'It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.' It's ironic that someone with a poor grasp of idiomatic English makes this the foundation of his criticism of a translation; and on that count alone, I'm not inclined to trust this review.

The importance of the Critique of Pure Reason is well-established and requires no reviews. It is not a book one is likely to stumble across and think, "this looks interesting", if for no other reason (pure or otherwise) than that a quick dip into the book shows it to be dense and difficult. The key question is: which translation makes this dense and difficult book most clear now I have decided to tackle the most important philosophical thinker since Aristotle? The Cambridge edition (1998) is one of the most up to date and is, perhaps, set to become the standard. But Norman Kemp Smith's translation (1929) is still the standard used for reference, even though this Cambridge version is probably better. There is also the free version of Meiklejohn; venerable and old fashioned and not recommended. Pluhar is widely used in the USA and has its fans. And finally there is the Penguin 2007 translation, by Weigelt based on the Max Muller version, which has an attractive layout and style; to me this seems a more naturally flowing style. Compared to Kemp Smith the Penguin is clearer as the active voice is used more than the passive and key terms are set in bold.The difference between translations in their use of words is not the only difference. The Critique was published in two editions and it is usual to combine the two and here's the difficulty: each translation orders the paragraphs from the two editions (A and B) in a slightly ways, as it seems to me. So to compare Guyer and Smith Kemp's translations is not so easy as they each choose the sequence of combining the two editions that seems to them most comprehensible. Weigelt uses italics to differentiate the first editions (A) from the second (B). As I wrote in the previous paragraph, the standard is still Kemp Smith, meaning that reference works will refer to his paragraph numbering. Over time the newer Cambridge translation will become the reference point; in the meantime expect to see Kemp Smith's paragraph numbering as usual reference in commentaries. So, although choosing this edition has many attractions, following the text in some commentaries may be problematic. This Cambridge edition has academic weight - it's part of a whole project covering Kant's work - and is the one I reckon is that reflects most up to date academic thinking. Added to that are the recommendations of Guyer's translation by most academics. All that said, Weigelt has had the benefit of reading the Guyer version and no doubt considering what it makes clearer compared to Kemp Smith. Incidentally, he considers Guyer has made some mistakes in translation, and although he is not an academic of the standing of Guyer, there is no doubting his understanding of his subject as demonstrated by his lengthy and insightful introduction.Students will probably be advised to buy the version their lecturer is using, but for those with the freedom to choose (see what Kant has to say on this topic) then a more modern translation is probably best, and for that Guyer is the most academically respectable; but if you can afford it buy the Penguin as well; it does seem to me to be more readable. At the same time as buying the book you will need a guide. It is quite impossible to understand the book without one, not least because the arguments Kant puts forward address philosophical debates current when he wrote and which will not be apparent.I consider Sebastian Gardner's book to be quite brilliant. Also read the Prolegomena before reading the Critique.Andrew Stephenson's diagram is very useful in summarising the overall architecture of Kant's book. http://nebula.wsimg.com/72e5f4d1fd8e675801ad578eba2fe8e4?AccessKeyId=A9004B8B795F6CE7B9FA&disposition=0&alloworigin=1Finally, and not to miss the opportunity for praising Kant, reading this book will give you an insight into quite a remarkable mind as it works its way through some fundamental questions about our experience of reality, or do I mean the appearance of reality? All that said, I do think Kant would have benefited from an editor who could have helped clarify and standardise some of the terms used and reduce some of the repetition. If you are not confused by Kant you are either a genius or you have not been paying sufficient attention. It's a maddening book that requires effort.

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.

The book, in terms of physicality, has not much to offer, but it is good in its form. It has a nice, sleek covering, and is a good height. It's pretty heavy but that's because of how long it is. The pages are great quality, a nice white, and the font is a good size and easy to read. The writing itself is a little hard to understand for me at times, so beware if you're a beginner to philosophy, or to Kant in general. Overall, great job, and a must-read, assuming you can actually read it.

Haven't read the whole book but whatever I've come across really takes time to understand.

Rien à redire

Kindle version is a scanned PDF of the book.Not a digitised text, so no text highlighting, no access to note making, no access to dictionary or translation notes.

What Alfred North Whitehead said about Plato (that all of Western philosophy was merely a footnote to Plato) could easily be said about Kant in regard to modern philosophy. It is interesting that Kant has had such an impact because in reality there are very few full blooded Kantians around. There are very few modern philosophers who would agree with the transcendental ideality of space and time, or who would agree that Kant succeeded in deducing the categories and their absolute validity in the transcendental deductions (the heart of the Critique of Pure Reason). But Kant completely changed the trajectory of philosophy. There are no philosophers doing pre-Kantian philosophy (dogmatic metaphysics) anymore. There is no modern Leibniz, and this is as true of the analytic as it is of the Continental tradition. Actually, it is true of our culture in general. Few people find the notion of pre-established harmony very convincing anymore, while lots of people found that doctrine convincing before Kant, and I would argue that that change is largely a result of Kant and his limiting of cognition to what we can experience.So Kant is an extremely important philosopher. In my opinion Kant is the most important philosopher since Plato. Unfortunately the Critique of Pure Reason is also where philosophy started to become esoteric and inaccessible to the lay person. Of course it would be impossible for someone with no formal training in philosophy to pick up a metaphysical tract by John Duns Scotus and understand it. Philosophy has always been difficult. But I think Kant's Critique of Pure Reason introduced a qualitative change into philosophy. While John Duns Scotus may not be immediately accessible to the lay person it was still possible to become acquainted with the problems he was dealing with (the existence of God, the problem of universals, etc.) without necessarily being a professional philosopher. In other words, philosophical debates were not insulated from the debates taking place in non-professional circles, they were often the same debates just carried on at a higher more technical level. With Kant philosophy really becomes an insulated and esoteric discipline where philosophers are debating with themselves, and they are debating issues that non-philosophers do not even consider issues (whether and how categories can be derived from the table of judgments, the transcendental unity of apperception, the transcendental ideality of space and time, etc.). Obviously this is not a hard and fast distinction but I think there is some truth to what I am saying.For those non-philosophers who want to read the Critique of Pure Reason and want some guidebooks to help them make sense of the book I do have some books to recommend but my short answer would be: unfortunately there is probably going to be a limit to how much you can do with the Critique of Pure Reason if you do not have formal training in philosophy. It is like a book in quantum mechanics. There are popular books that can give lay people some sense of quantum mechanics but if you really want to understand quantum mechanics you have to engage in the difficult task of learning the math and the science behind it, which is something few people are capable of doing on their own. The same is true of Kant. You can find popular books on Kant that give you some sense of what he was up to, but if you really want to understand Kant's philosophy you have to commit years to really working at it, and few people are probably capable of achieving it on their own.The first two books on Kant I would recommend to the beginner are not books I have actually read but were recommended to me by my Kant professor as books that are good for absolute beginners with Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. The first is  A Short Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason  by A.C. Ewing and the second is  Kant's Critique of Pure Reason a Commentary for Students  by T.E. Wilkerson. The first is supposed to be more accessible than the second.There is also a routledge philosophy guidebook to the Critique of Pure Reason  Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks)  by Sebastian Gardner (it will not let me link directly to the paperback edition but there is a cheaper paperback available). Personally I found Gardner's commentary to be quite accessible but I have also spent a fair amount of time studying Kant. Some of the other reviewers on amazon complain that it is not accessible to the beginner so if you find that to be the case I would recommend starting with one of the other two I listed above.Finally, there are three books that are extremely important in Kant scholarship for those who want to have a deeper understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason. I actually have not read all of any of them (I have read parts of two of them) but I know that they are definitely not for beginners. They are, however, very important for those who are serious about the Critique of Pure Reason. The First is  Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense  by Henry Allison. The second is  Kant and the Claims of Knowledge  by Paul Guyer (Allison and Guyer offer different, and conflicting, interpretations and there has been a long-standing debate between them about the correct way to interpret the Critique of Pure Reason). The last book that I think is really excellent is  Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the "Critique of Pure Reason"  by Beatrice Longuenesse (I am currently working on a project using this book so I will probably be writing a review in a few months when I have finished).I also want to say a word about the translation. I do not read German but I have a few comments to make. First, there is no such thing as a perfect translation. No matter what you do as a translator you are going to have some people complaining. Anyone demanding a perfect translation, or looking for one, is looking for something that does not exist. If you want to become a Kant scholar you have to learn German. Unfortunately Kant is so important as a philosopher that it is necessary for all philosophers, whether they specialize in Kant or German philosophy or not, to have some understanding of Kant, so translations become necessary. I would not put too much stock in the negative reviews of this translation. This is not a perfect translation, you should know that going in, but I think it is probably as good as any, and there are two reasons I recommend reading this one.First, there are really two "standard" translations of the Critique of Pure Reason. The first is by Norman Kemp Smith and the second is this one by Guyer and Wood. My Kant professor has told me that the Norman Kemp Smith translation, while it was the standard for many years (and it was the first one I read), is very problematic. Specifically, Smith often corrects Kant's text to accord with his own interpretation of Kant. If you are not a serious Kant student that might not make much of a difference since you are probably not going to be delving into the subtleties of Kant's philosophy and Smith's translation should give you an accurate general picture of Kant's philosophy. But if you do plan on delving into the subtleties of Kant's philosophy it would be better to get a translation that has not been doctored to fit a particular interpretation.Second, this is, whether you like it or not, going to be the standard translation of Kant for awhile I think, which means when you read secondaries they are probably going to be using the same terms that Guyer and Wood use. It will make it easier when you are reading secondaries on Kant if you are already using the same terminology as the secondaries. I have not really compared translations so I am not sure how much different translations differ when translating some of the more important terms (sensibility, intuition, understanding, determination, etc.) but I think you will be safe if you stick with Guyer and Wood. In other words, it will not do you much good if you read a secondary which discusses the role of the understanding in cognition if the translation of Kant you read translated "understanding" with a different word (this might be an unrealistic example but things like that can happen with translations).So for those reasons I recommend getting this translation despite the fact that it is certainly not perfect. And good luck! Kant is an extremely exciting philosopher if you can succeed in understanding him (and do not feel too bad if you do not understand everything he says; no one does). A Short Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure ReasonKant's Critique of Pure Reason a Commentary for StudentsRoutledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks)Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and DefenseKant and the Claims of KnowledgeKant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the "Critique of Pure Reason"