Book Description
This collection of essays by eminent scholars on the reconstruction and critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy in the Indian context specifically discusses his ideas on perpetual peace, universal history, and critical philosophy. ... Read more

Book Description
This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship.In it, one of the preeminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. An authoritative guide to the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (the first and most important part of the Critique of Judgment), no one with a serious interest in Kant's aesthetics can afford to ignore this groundbreaking study.Download Description
This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the normativity of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

An Excellent Overview of K's CPJ
The standard texts on this topic are by Guyer, Barnham, Crawford, and Ginsborg (dissertation).The Guyer text is thorough and rigorous--a quite careful reading and interpretation of the Third Critique--I recommend it along with Allison's recent work. (Allison and Guyer sometimes disagree on important points....)

Allison is an astute and keen defender of Kant (see his Transcendental Idealism/Yale UP).This new book is aptly in line with his best scholarship and cautious reading.I highly recommend it.

Allison's text is divided into four parts.First, he deals with Kant's "Conception of Reflective Judgment," whereby I recommend that you also review B. Longuenesse's book on judgment (Princeton UP).Allison's interpretation here differs from L's, and he clearly states how his view is unique, as well as a more balanced comprehension of the conncetion between the reflective judgment of taste and the epistemic role of reflection.

I daresay, the second part of the book is the most important (Chs. 3-8); it deals with the quid facti/quid juris distinction in the domain of taste.Chs. 6-8 are quite useful, especially ch. 8, which is on "the Deduction of Pure Judgments of Taste."An understanding of this material is crucial to a more certain grasp of K's Third Critique.

Part 3 deals with the connection between judgments of taste and moral judgments.Ch. 10 discusses the mirror-like connection between 'duty' and pure 'aesthetic judgments.'

Part 4 discusses genius and K's notions on sublimity.For specific coverage on this topic, see Crowther on the Kantian Sublime (Oxford UP) in conjunction with this chapter.

A must read for serious scholars of 3rd Critique
Allison's book provides a wealth of interesting and semi-interesting arguments on the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.The book is important in engaging with Guyer and the tradition of analytic aesthetics.It responds to many of the lacunas in Guyer's *Kant's Theory of Taste*, particularly as regards the status of judgments of taste as reflective. However, Allison by no means goes far enough in explaining the import of this status.Those interested in the 3rd Critique are adivsed to get Makkreel's much more readable work if they wish to understand the reflective character of aesthetic judgments, including their contribution to reflective interpretation. Also, Allison at times goes too far in attacking Guyer, leaving Guyer able to readily deal with many of Allison's points, and thereby continue his own critique of Kant. ... Read more

Book Description
This collection of seminal essays on Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics provides the student of philosophy with an invaluable overview of the issues and problems raised by Kant. Starting with the Carus translation of Kant's work, the edition offers a substantive introduction, six papers never before published together, and a comprehensive bibliography. Special attention is paid to the relationship between Kant and David Hume, whose philosophical investigations, according to Kant's famous quote, first interrupted Kant's "dogmatic slumber." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

What Was He Thinking!
Metaphysics?Come on, Kant!Do you think anyone worries about this dross anymore?Go back to your poetry, your punk rock reviews: you were much better at critiquing modern America than anything else.Too bad you havechosen to waste your talents on a subject so dry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An intelligible overview of the system implicit in Kant's obscure writings
Palmquist is the first commentator on Kant who makes sense. The system of perspectives that is implicit throughout Kant's writings becomes explicit -- even diagrammed -- in Palmquist's interpretation.

*Kant's System of Perspectives* is the first volume of a planned -- but, alas, long delayed -- four-volume series. *KSP* provides an overview of Kant's whole philosophical system.

The book's detailed table of contents, glossary, and full index are useful aids to the serious reader.

Palmquist is clearly a teacher. He explains everything. He provides plenty of cross-references. He documents his assertions, citing both other modern scholars and Kant's own writings, especially Critique of Pure Reason. Palmquist is also forthright in saying that his presentation of Kant's system is an interpretation -- which means that Palmquist had to fill in gaps for Kant's notorious vagueries and missing elements. But overall, it is indeed Kant's system of perspectives that emerges. The evidence for various elements of the system range from certain to merely plausible -- which is understandable given Kant's chaotic and uneven presentation of his own philosophy.

If you are a serious student of Kant -- like him or not -- Palmquist's KSP is very helpful, even if you end up disagreeing with parts of the interpretation. ... Read more

Book Description
This book offers a radically new account of the development and structure of the central arguments of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: the defense of the objective validity of such categories as substance, causation, and independent existence. Paul Guyer makes far more extensive use than any other commentator of historical materials from the years leading up to the publication of the Critique and surrounding its revision, and he shows that the work which has come down to us is the result of some striking and only partially resolved theoretical tensions. Kant had originally intended to demonstrate the validity of the categories by exploiting what he called 'analogies of appearance' between the structure of self-knowledge and our knowledge of objects. The idea of a separate 'transcendental deduction', independent from the analysis of the necessary conditions of empirical judgements, arose only shortly before publication of the Critique in 1781, and distorted much of Kant's original inspiration. Part of what led Kant to present this deduction separately was his invention of a new pattern of argument - very different from the 'transcendental arguments' attributed by recent interpreters to Kant - depending on initial claims to necessary truth. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

a great resource
guyer has delved into the intricate arguments that kant has put together and tries to make sense of them through analysis and argument. this is a very helpful text for a student of kant who needs a fresh view into what kant is trying to do in the critique of pure reason.

Kant without tears
Kant is famous for his claim that space and time are forms of intuition imposed by our cognitive constitution on the raw material of sensation, rendering our empirical world of experience a world of appearances. Thus was provided the foundation of Kant's Transcendental Idealism (TI), a doctrine of synthetic a priori truths aimed at refuting Humean skepticism. But the argument carried a cost, in the form of an unbridgeable gap between the world we know and a bizarre reality beyond the possibility of human experience where our notions of space and time do not apply.Kant does not posit that space and time might not apply in the world of "things in themselves," or the agnostic view that we simply can't know whether or not they apply in that world, but rather he insists that they cannot possibly apply.The reality of space and time are explicity rejected.

Guyer argues that this rejection lacks justification, that Kant fails to present any argument that invalidates the realist hypothesis that space and time are, in fact, features of a real world of objects, and that our perceptions of space and time therefore provide a basically accurate representation of reality. In other words, Kant fails to make the case that space and time cannot be both necessary aspects of human sensibility and also characteristic of things in themselves.

The question of why Kant rejected this obvious and seemingly attractive possibility, known as Trendelenburg's missing alternative, is the major subject of Guyer's thoroughly impressive book. The explanation, in schematic form, is that Kant could not see how to support his notion of synthetic a priori knowledge other than in a world of representations that universally and necessarily incorporated space and time as built-in products of human sensibility. His theoretical edifice would be undermined, he thought, if space and time characterized a world of things in themselves existing outside of human perception, because in such a world space and time could only be contingent, and not a matter of necessity.Needless to say, no two-sentence sketch can do justice to the richness of Guyer's sophisticated and extremely well-researched argument.

This is a very skillfully-argued analysis of the logical foundation of Kant's Transcendental Idealism, a foundation that is found to be deeply flawed. It can be seen as a riposte to Henry Allison's book defending Kant's TI; I found it to be overwhelmingly persuasive. Highly recommended.

Guyer's Kant
Guyer's treatment of the Principles in the Critique of Pure Reason is genuinely helpful. Otherwise his treatment of Kant's text does little to advance our understanding of Kant. It seems rather an exercise in setting up one strawman after another and knocking him down. Kant's crucial notions of apperception and intuition are not illuminated by Guyer's work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Kant at his best - rationally reconstructed!
I've found this book incredibly helpful in gaining an understanding of Kant's philosophy of mathematics (a major section of my dissertation).It is, however, a rational reconstruction and Brittan admits in his preface that he's downplayed the fact that Kant's position changed and developed through his career.So, it is to some extent, not purely Kant's own philosophy of mathematics and science, but Brittan makes clear where he is straying from Kant's own views.The most refreshing thing about this book, however, is the fact that it's chock-a-block with arguments!Unlike entirely too many philosophers, Brittan actually offers arguments to make his case. He has extended and very nearly convincing arguments against reductionism in general, the analytic approach to mathematics, Kant as purely a constructivist, and many other important topics.I simply cannot do this book justice.It deserves to be a classic commentary on Kant.The book is, however, so wide-ranging and so concisely argued that it is a bear to work through.Michael Friedman's "Kant and the Exact Sciences" is written in the same spirit and just as rigorous, but much less dense. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

mostly liberal feminist bitterness 4 kant can be fun to read
i read this book on the road, and found many of its essays to be trite and simplistic, but some very exciting.so i admit some got skimmed and some pored over.
it is very easy to call Kant a woman hating enlightenment ivory tower jerk, which is pretty true, but harder to defend him.
some of the essays are very philosophically technical, and some are technical in their use of feminist concepts, but this book is primarily for folks who know a fair amount of philosophy (alot, in some cases, like the stuff about aesthetics and some political philosophy) and quite a bit less about feminism.
alot of the arguments assume the primacy of the "ethic of care" as suggested by gilligan, but some better essays answer this argument with alot of footnotes to "Feminist Ethics", which is a book for people with a larger understanding of feminism, and less of "philosophy" (e.g. kant and stuff).

this book assumes that you know alot about kant, or have certain popular impressions of him, like that he thought inclination was bad and duty good.

overall, if you think kant is a big loser and a jerk, and get angry every time he uses a male pseudogeneric, you have either already read this book or should.

also, it is well footnoted and i found many of its footnotes and citations very helpful. ... Read more

Book Description
Two centuries after they were published, Kant's ethical writings are as much admired and imitated as they have ever been, yet serious and long-standing accusations of internal incoherence remain unresolved.Onora O'Neill traces the alleged incoherences to attempts to assimilate Kant's ethical writings to modern conceptions of rationality, action and rights.When the temptation to assimilate is resisted, a strikingly different and more cohesive account of reason and morality emerges. Kant offers a "constructivist" vindication of reason and a moral vision in which obligations are prior to rights and in which justice and virtue are linked.O'Neill begins by reconsidering Kant's conceptions of philosophical method, reason, freedom, autonomy and action. She then moves on to the more familiar terrain of interpretation of the Categorical Imperative, while in the last section she emphasizes differences between Kant's ethics and recent "Kantian" ethics, including the work of John Rawls and other contemporary liberal political philosophers. ... Read more

Book Description
Very few biographies of Kant exist. The Neo-Kantian movement renewed interest in his life. During the last half of the 19th century, John Henry Wilbrandt Stuckenberg provided an eminently readable biography of Kant, as seen from a sympathetic, yet detached viewpoint. This well-rounded depiction of his life includes a discussion of Kant's work, which, while at variance with current understanding, is still worth pondering. Originally published in 1882 by Macmillan, this edition contains a new preface by Rolf George. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Palmquist makes Kant's implicit system explicit
Palmquist is the first commentator on Kant who makes sense. The system of perspectives that is implicit throughout Kant's writings becomes explicit -- even diagrammed -- in Palmquist's interpretation.

*Kant's Critical Religion* is the second volume of a planned -- but, alas, long delayed -- four-volume series. The first volume, *Kant's System of Perspectives*, provides an overview of Kant's whole philosophical system. *KCR* focuses on one segment of that worldview/philosophy: religion after being run through Kant's "Critical" meatgrinder.

The book's detailed table of contents, glossary, and full index are useful aids to the serious reader.

Palmquist is clearly a teacher. He explains everything. He provides plenty of cross-references within this volume and to the first volume. He documents his assertions, citing both other modern scholars and Kant's own writings, especially Critique of Pure Reason. Palmquist is also forthright in saying that his presentation of Kant's system is an interpretation -- which means that Palmquist had to fill in gaps for Kant's notorious vagueries and missing elements. But overall, it is indeed Kant's system of perspectives that emerges.

If you are a serious student of Kant -- like him or not -- Palmquist's KSP and KCR are very helpful, even if you end up disagreeing with parts of the interpretation.

A must read for everyone interested in Kant, the Christian.
This book provides a much needed exposition of Kant's commitments to Christianity and (critical) metaphysics.All the facile objections to Kant's Christianity are dealt with, as is the reading we still find from time to time of Kant as broadly anti-metaphysical.Better yet, a synthesis is suggested here:Palmquist argues that a Kantian metaphysics would be, if not Christ-centric, than at least theo-centric.This point really needs a wider audience, as it is very powerfully made.

The book contains a wealth of material that justifies the currently rather hefty price of $99.Buy this book. ... Read more