Book Description
From Preface:

"Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.

Customer Reviews (32)

Incredibly Difficult, but Highly Rewarding
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
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
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
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
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Masterwork of Moral Philosophy
Kant's Groundwork (or Foundations) of the Metaphysics of Morals is probably the single most influential work of philosophical ethics since Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics.While Kant himself considered this a sort of introduction to ethical thinking, it's come to be his most influential and widely read work on ethics. Despite its length--it's less than a hundred pages--this is a work of remarkable depth and intellectual insight.

This isn't an easy work, however.It needs to be read and re-read (and, I suppose, re-read) to be fully understood and appeciated.I've never found Kant as difficult and obscure as his reputation would suggest, but as a writer of philosophical prose he's certainly not the caliber of, say, Hume or Descartes.As many have noted, Kant is the first great philosopher of the modern era to have been an academic, and it shows.He writes long, meandering sentences, and the organization of his works leaves quite a bit to be desired.Furthermore, his penchant for arcane terminology and architechtonic can make his work seem more forbidding than it is.Still, Kant's ideas in the Groundwork, while subtle and sometimes elusive, are profound and original, and this book is a must-read for anyone interested in philosophical ethics.I should also note that the importance of this book isn't solely historical since there has been a recent resurgence of Kantian moral thinking in the English-speaking world.

Kant's aim in the Groundwork is to discover the fundamental principle of morality.In the first section he attempts to derive this fundamental principle from odinary moral thought.In particular, he attempts to derive this principle from considerations concerning what is unconditionally good.Kant claims that the only thing that is unconditionally good is a good will.Moreover, its goodness is not a matter of the results of acting on a good will; it is good in itself.As a matter of fact, Kant claims that the results of an action done with a good will and the aims and inclinations of the agent with the good will are morally insignificant.

What, then, is it to act with a good will?It is, Kant argues, a matter of doing one's duty for duty's sake, regardless of one's feeling and the results of doing so.What is it to act from duty's sake?It is to act from principles that accord with the fundamental principle of morality.And here we get the first formulation of the fundamental principle of morality:act only on maxims that you can consistently will to be universal laws.In other words, if one is unable to will the principle of one's action to become a universal law, the action is morally impermissible.

In the second section of the Groundwork Kant attempts to draw the same conclusion from some philosophical points about the nature of duty.He begins by claiming that our knowledge of our duty is a priori and based on the exercise of reason.He then argues that facts about our duties are necessary facts, and that this shows that they must be based on a categorical imperative:that is, that our duties apply to us insofar as we are rational beings, irrespective of the contingent aspects of their nature.And, Kant argues, the one categorical imperative is the fundamental principle of morality mentioned above.He then applies this principle to some examples in order to display just how it grounds our duties in particular cases.

The rest of the second section is filled with lots of interesting, ableit abstruse, ideas.First, Kant attempts to ground the categorical imperative in something that is of unconditional worth.What is that something?The existence of rational beings, which, he says, is an end in itself.And this leads to a second formulation of the categorical imperative:(ii) act only in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in the person of yourself or someone else, as an end and never merely as a means.

This section also includes a third formulation of the categorical imperative:(iii) act only on maxims that you could will to become universal laws legislated by your own will.This formulation encapsulates Kant's claim that we can achieve autonomy only by acting in accordance with the moral law.Conformity with the moral law does not constrain our freedom since we legislate the moral law for ourselves.The moral law is not forced on us from without; its source is to be found in our own rational nature.Indeed, it is only by acting morally that we are able to achieve genuine freedom by transcending the contingent desires and inclinations that are beyond our control.

Of course, that doesn't come close to summing up the Groundwork.But it's a start.

This edition of the Groundwork, which has been translated by Lewis White Beck, is a readable one.It is, perhaps, easier to read than many other editions of the Groundwork, though it may provide for this readability at the cost of some accuracy.Beck's edition also includes a copy of Kant's essay "What is Enlightenment?" along with some slight editorial material.There's a short, albeit useful, introductory essay in which Beck sketches the main outlines of the argument of the Groundwork's three sections and considers and dismisses some common objections to Kant's moral theory.The editorial also material includes a very short biographical sketch and a slight and out-of-date bibliography.Neither of these is very helpful.There are better editions of the Groundwork out there--see, for example, the editions published by Cambridge (translation by Gregor) and by Harper (translation by Paton)--but this is fine edition for the student and the general reader.And it comes at a good price. ... Read more

Book Description
The Metaphysics of Morals is Kant's major work in applied moral philosophy in which he deals with the basic principles of rights and of virtues. It comprises two parts: the "Doctrine of Right," which deals with the rights that people have or can acquire, and the "Doctrine of Virtue," which deals with the virtues they ought to acquire.Mary Gregor's translation, revised for publication in Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, is the only complete translation of the whole text. It includes extensive annotation on Kant's difficult and sometimes unfamiliar vocabulary. A new introduction by Roger Sullivan sets the work in its historical and philosophical context. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

As promised
The book arrived timely and in great condition. I would purchase from this seller again.

Small pieces of a big puzzle
It is nice to be able to buy books from a publisher that believes in doing things right, even if the books might be a bit obscure for all the usual reasons.Having purchased the Great Books Volume 39 on Kant earlier this year, which was an economical collection that included his three most famous volumes as well as Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) and Preface and Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, which are works that Kant's THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy does not include, it is interesting to see how these two books still manage to overlap.

The Great Books Kant includes a translation (1887) by W. Hastie of Kant's 1797 works General Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals (pp. 383-394) and The Science of Right (pp. 395-458).This book contains Mary Gregor's translation of the same text on pages 1-124.

Since Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States in 1861-65, Americans have tended to think that everybody who was important to us would be living in the same country, and democracy would allow the majority to dictate the basic laws which everyone would have to adhere to.Kant has to come up with rules for wars between states that need to maintain a balance of power, but his result is to deny economic motives."The reason there cannot be a war of subjugation is not that this extreme measure a state might use to achieve a condition of peace would in itself contradict the right of a state; it is rather that the idea of the right of nations involves only the concept of an antagonism in accordance with principles of outer freedom by which each can preserve what belongs to it, but not a way of acquiring, by which one state's increase of power could threaten others."(section 56, p. 117).A written constitution ought to be more powerful than treaties "which can be dissolved at any time, not a federation (like that of the American states) which is based on a constitution and can therefore not be dissolved."(section 61, p. 120).

Somehow Kant lacked the idea that heads of state would regularly be deprived of their rule and punished for official acts."The sovereign can also take the ruler's authority away from him, depose him, or reform his administration.But it cannot punish him . . .; for punishment is, again, an act of the executive authority, which has the supreme capacity to exercise coercion in conformity with the law, and it would be self-contradictory for him to be subject to coercion."(section 49, p. 94).If the ultimate weapons wipe out life on the planet, we would find ourselves in a condition already imagined by Kant:

"Accordingly, every murderer--anyone who commits murder, orders it, or is an accomplice in it -- must suffer death; this is what justice, as the idea of judicial authority wills in accordance with universal laws that are grounded a priori. -- If, however, the number of accomplices (correi) to such deed is so great that the state, in order to have no such criminals in it, could soon find itself without subjects; and if the state still does not want to dissolve, that is, to pass over into the state of nature, which is far worse because there is no external justice at all in it (and if it especially does not want to dull the people's feeling by the spectacle of a slaughterhouse), then the sovereign must also have it in his power, in this case of necessity (casus necessitatis), to assume the role of judge (to represent him) and pronounce a judgment that decrees for the criminals a sentence other than capital punishment, such as deportation, which still preserves the population.This cannot be done in accordance with public law but it can be done by an executive decree that is, by an act of majesty which, as clemency, can always be exercised only in individual cases."(section 49, pp. 107-108).

Kant died over 200 years ago, unaware that economic interests could become so powerful that even the media would act as a single unit and find itself dedicated to perpetuating a power elite that could always, in each and every instance, join with leaders committed to mindlessly militaristic politics that used statistics on gross hyperconsumption to make itself fiscally worse than worthless, deporting jobs, cutting government programs to prepare for a lean and mean future in which worthless i.o.u.s would compete with other countries that still possessed natural resources and productive capacity, as if nothing could be better than to make democratic government as powerless as possible.

In a reply to a reviewer of Kant's book, Kant pointed out, "that there is a categorical imperative, Obey the authority who has power over you (in whatever does not conflict with inner morality) -- this is the offensive proposition called into question."(p. 136).Part II of this book, called Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Virtue (pp. 139-232), has a Preface in which, "Hence all doctrine of virtue, in lecture halls, from pulpits, or in popular books, also becomes ridiculous if it is decked out in scraps of metaphysics.--But it is not useless, much less ridiculous, to investigate in metaphysics . . ."(p. 141).Maxims and duty are discussed in the Introduction, along with "a categorical imperative of pure practical reason, and therefore an imperative which connects a concept of duty with that of an end in general."(p. 149).There are 53 sections and a conclusion on religion being beyond pure moral philosophy.The index on pages 235-241 has few names, but suggests a few pages to check for topics like hypocrisy and ridicule.

Excellent book!
All of Kant's works are outstanding, but what makes the versions of Kant's works good or bad (that I can read) is the translator. Since this book is the only complete translation of both parts of "The Metaphysics of Morals," I had doubts about its quality. But, as I found out, this book has been translated smoothly -- although I cannot compare it with the German version.

What I like about Mary Gregor's translation, is her use of footnotes. She clearly defines Latin phrases and the layered meanings of German words whose depth and meaning would be in too hasty of a translation.

Also, she introduces Kant's main ideas very well; and by doing so, expands and clarifies the ideas he presents in his treatise. The footnotes are not excessive; Gregor seems to have balanced them well.The presentation of the footnotes, typography, and the library grade (acid free) paper make this book a keeper. ... Read more

Book Description
This is the first English translation of all of Kant's writings on moral and political philosophy collected in a single volume. No other collection competes with the comprehensiveness of this one. As well as Kant's most famous moral and political writings, the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysics of Morals, and Toward Perpetual Peace, the volume includes shorter essays and reviews, some of which have never been translated before. There is also an English-German and German-English glossary of key terms.Download Description
This is the first English translation of all of Kant's writings on moral and political philosophy collected in a single volume. No other collection competes with the comprehensiveness of this one. As well as Kant's most famous moral and political writings, the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysics of Morals, and Toward Perpetual Peace, the volume includes shorter essays and reviews, some of which have never been translated before. There is also an English-German and German-English glossary of key terms. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

An Up and A Down
This is a great collection, especially for any student.It is by far the most complete set of translations of Kant's work available to the English speaking audience.Plus, it is a tribute to Mary J. Gregor that this edition exists.That Allen Wood inserted a dedication to her shows the importance of her life's work for anyone interested in Kant's ethical theory.

There is, however, one thing that I, as a student of philosophy, found troubling about this edition--it lacks adequate indexs.Don't get me wrong, it has indexes, but they are not nearly complete enough.

If you need a convenient, relatively light-weight volume of Kant's ethical writings, go for this edition.But if you are interested in in depth analysis of any of the texts, I'd go for the editions pubilished in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy set.The indexes here are much, much more complete.These editions also include thorough and detailed introductions but such respected Kant scholars as Christine Korsgaard and Roger Sullivan.

The Definitive Edition of Kant's Practical Works
This volume should become the indispensable English-language edition of Kant's practical works.The translations contained in this edition are top-notch, which is not to say that I agree with all the decisions made by Mary Gregor, the primary translator.However, unlike, say, the Cambridge Edition translations of the First and Third Critiques, Gregor's translations are arguably categorically better than all other English translations.I personally do not believe that to be the case, but the point is that such a case can plausibly be made, whereas it cannot be said with equal plausibility that the Guyer-Wood translation of the First Critique is categorically better than the Kemp Smith translation (I know others would beg to differ, but this is not the place to take up my disagrements with them; I would merely stress that I do not deny that Guyer-Wood have made many improvements over Kemp Smith).

Furthermore, the inclusion of The Metaphysics of Morals in its entirety ought to alleviate a certain one-sidedness in most treatments of Kant in introductory survey courses of the history of moral/political philosophy.These courses typically concentrate on the Grounding and the shorter essays--understandably so, given time contraints.Occasionally the Second Critique will be touched upon.Nor is this one-sidedness confined to survey or even advanced undergraduate courses.I have taken three graduate seminars on Kant and one on German Idealism in three departments at two different universities, and not once did I ever read The Metaphysics of Morals in its entirety.The student who wishes to gain a complete picture of Kant will be glad to have this important work included.

The convenience of having good translations of foundational works, unabridged and collected in a single volume, cannot be overstated.Every serious student of Kant, German Idealism, or moral or practical philosophy ought to own this book. ... Read more

Book Description
This volume is the first to assemble the writings that Kant published to popularize, summarize, amplify and defend the doctrines of his masterwork, the 1781 Critique of Pure Reason. The Prolegomena is often recommended to students, but the other texts are also important representatives of Kant's intellectual development. The series includes copious linguistic notes and a glossary of key terms. The editorial introductions and explanatory notes reveal much about the critical reception given Kant by the metaphysicians of his day as well as his own efforts to derail his opponents.Download Description
This volume is the first to assemble in historical sequence the writings that Kant published between 1783 and 1796 to popularize, summarize, amplify and defend the doctrines of his masterpiece, the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781. The best known of them, the Prolegomena, is often recommended to beginning students, but the other texts are also vintage Kant and are important sources for a fully-rounded picture of Kant's intellectual development. As with other volumes in the series there are copious linguistic notes and a glossary of key terms. The editorial introductions and explanatory notes shed light on the critical reception accorded Kant by the metaphysicians of his day and on Kant's own efforts to derail his opponents. ... Read more

Book Description
This entirely new translation of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgmentfollows the principles and high standards of all other volumes in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. This volume includes for the first time the first draft of Kant's introduction to the work; the only English edition notes to the many differences between the first (1790) and second (1793) editions of the work; and relevant passages in Kant's anthropology lectures where he elaborated on his aesthetic views. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Oh, Kant
Immanuel Kant, in his third critique, makes significant headway into questions of how humans interact with aesthetic objects.He provides useful concepts, some controversial, that we can employ to think about the relationship between reality, art, and existence.The text is very dense and intense, with a lot of ideas packed into each sentence, and it opens up a world of discussion.

Aesthetics, Teleology, and Kant
This book, the 'Critique of Judgement', is the third volume in Immanuel Kant's Critique project, which began with 'Critique of Pure Reason' and continued in 'Critique of Practical Reason'. 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.

This book is divided into two major sections, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, and the Critique of Teleological Judgement. In the part on Aesthetics, Kant sets up for possible judgements - agreeable, good, sublime and beautiful. This relates back to the 'Critique of Pure Reason' (and scholar J.H. Bernard indicates that this framework is sometimes a bit of a shackle placed on Kant). Those things that are agreeable are wholly sensory in character, whereas those things that are good are ethical in nature. Kant argues that those things that are beautiful and sublime fall between the two poles of 'agreeable' and 'good'. Beauty is involved in purpose (teleology), whereas sublimity is that which goes beyond comprehension (and can be an object of fear). This also involves an idea of mind that allows for genius and creative activity.

In the section on teleology, this is a way of looking at things based on their ends (telos), and links to aesthetics in terms of beauty (which has a sense of finality of form) as well as links to scientific purposes - Kant particularly is concerned to explore biology and the telos of the natural world. This also involves physics and logical principles, bringing Kant full circle back to some of the ideas from the 'Critique of Pure Reason'.

This is one of Kant's master works, and while there is much that modern philosophers disagree with, there is also the sense in which no subsequent philosophy can ignore the developments and implications of Kant's Critique project.

Novalis
The editors list as one of their principles for rendering Kant's difficult German into English:"Our translators try to avoid sacrificing literalness to readability."Their notion of literalness is simply this:if one of Kant's sentences has five subordinate clauses, the English version should have five subordinate clauses.They obtusely fail to consider that German has grammatical markers that English does not have (e.g., gender of nouns and pronouns).Hence while Kant's German sentence might have a pronoun separated from its noun by some distance, gender will indicate the appropriate reference.In English, the referent for a pronoun is usally the noun most proximate--thus their introduction of great ambiguity into the English that does not exist in the German.The translators also presume that the only way to preserve Kant's argumentative structure is by adhering to his complex surface structure.But the logical grammar of Kant's arguments is obscured in English by the sacrifice of readability to their notion of literalness.Werner Pluhar has a better translation.

A fine edition
The placement of the First Introduction at the beginning of the book is very useful, providing a different feel as to the nature of the work as a whole.The relative of lack of [bracketed] comments compared to the Pluhar edition is also a plus. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (1)

A foundation stone of modern philosophy
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.
... Read more

Book Description
Kant's views on logic and logical theory play an important part in his critical writings, especially in the Critique of Pure Reason. This volume includes three previously untranslated transcripts of Kant's logic lectures: the Blomberg Logic (1770s); the Vienna Logic supplemented by the recently discovered Hechsel Logic (1780s); and the Dohna-Wundlacken Logic (1790s). Also included is a new translation of the Jäsche Logic, compiled at Kant's request from his lectures and published in 1800. Hb ISBN (1992): 0-521-36013-7 ... Read more

Book Description
This volume collects for the first time in a single volume all of Kant's writings on religion and rational theology. These works were written during a period of conflict between Kant and the Prussian authorities over his religious teachings. The historical context and progression of this conflict are charted in the general introduction to the volume and in the translators' introductions to particular texts. All the translations are new with the exception of The Conflict of the Faculties, where the translation has been revised and redited to conform to the guidelines of the Cambridge Edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Imprescindible
Every serious scholar in Kant or Theology must owe this superb volume. It contains many unknown and important works in order to achieve a complete and accurate vision of Kant's moral theory and his philosophy of religion, as well as his whole system of philosophy, developed throughout the three Critiques. Kant himself delimited his philosophical project in the formulations of these three questions: "What can I know" --What I ought to do? and -What am I to expect? (CPR A 804/ B 832). Kant told that the last question, the theological one, was to be answer in "The religion within the limits of mere reason" of 1793 (AK 11: 414), a monumental work that makes clear several issues being somehow murky for the readers of the Groundwork and the Critique of the Pure reason, such as the value of the faith, the intelligible grounds of free will and the relation between morals and traditional religion. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A bit of balance, please!
Since the previous reviewer spent so much time loathing their own inability to understand Kant's writings, I believe a higher rating is in order.From one who CAN understand at least the Prolegomena, I recommend it wholeheartedly to the philosopher who wishes to understand an alternative to Hume and other skeptics.

"Pure thought" or simply obfuscated logic?
Kant was a charlatan who misrepresents the great skeptic philosopher David Hume throughout this monument to logical obfuscation. The plot turns on an attempt to redefine metaphysics for the rest of eternity (now that Hume has essentially disproved its usefulness). Will he succeed? You can be the judge, if you like, but please take the time to read Hume's brilliant work before you waste any time (or money) on this scoundrel's scientific-sounding drivel!

Kant is one of the main reasons philosophy and philosophers are today considered boring. He influenced a generation of fools after him, most notably Hegel and Schoepenhauer. I can attest that Hegel's work is no more valuable, equally unintelligible and obscure, it clearly had no positive influence on history. His idiocy is the main reason why later philosophers Marx and Nieszche, for example, come off sounding so angry! As German intellectuals they had to swim in a sea of Kantian nonsense! ... Read more

Book Description
Were judgements of taste (like cognitive judgements) in possession of a definite objective principle, then one who in his judgement followed such a principle would claim unconditioned necessity for it. Again, were they devoid of any principle, as are those of the mere taste of sense, then no thought of any necessity on their part would enter one's head.Download Description
Were judgements of taste (like cognitive judgements) in possession of a definite objective principle, then one who in his judgement followed such a principle would claim unconditioned necessity for it. Again, were they devoid of any principle, as are those of the mere taste of sense, then no thought of any necessity on their part would enter one's head. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Aesthetics, Teleology, and Kant
This book, the 'Critique of Judgement', is the third volume in Immanuel Kant's Critique project, which began with 'Critique of Pure Reason' and continued in 'Critique of Practical Reason'.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.

This book is divided into two major sections, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, and the Critique of Teleological Judgement.In the part on Aesthetics, Kant sets up for possible judgements - agreeable, good, sublime and beautiful.This relates back to the 'Critique of Pure Reason' (and scholar J.H. Bernard indicates that this framework is sometimes a bit of a shackle placed on Kant).Those things that are agreeable are wholly sensory in character, whereas those things that are good are ethical in nature.Kant argues that those things that are beautiful and sublime fall between the two poles of 'agreeable' and 'good'.Beauty is involved in purpose (teleology), whereas sublimity is that which goes beyond comprehension (and can be an object of fear).This also involves an idea of mind that allows for genius and creative activity.

In the section on teleology, this is a way of looking at things based on their ends (telos), and links to aesthetics in terms of beauty (which has a sense of finality of form) as well as links to scientific purposes - Kant particularly is concerned to explore biology and the telos of the natural world.This also involves physics and logical principles, bringing Kant full circle back to some of the ideas from the 'Critique of Pure Reason'.

This is one of Kant's master works, and while there is much that modern philosophers disagree with, there is also the sense in which no subsequent philosophy can ignore the developments and implications of Kant's Critique project.

You kan't get away from your own presuppositions
Kant is a genius; I give him that.Still, his primary problem is that he presupposes in all his philosophy that there can be nothing beyond the natural and material world.His aesthetics suffer as he tries to find a completely "objective" way of interpreting and appreciating the arts.Not only does this not work in theory, but every human knows empirically that music, sunsets, and Monet are simply not capable of being interpreted completely void of feeling or pleasure.

Someday we will understand this book
The Critique of the Power of Judgment (the 3rd Critique) is the most important work in Modern philosophical aesthetics.The Guyer and Pluhar editions are to be preferred to that of Bernard, as the first two have more extenisve notes, and better translations, including of the First Introduction.

The 3rd Critique presents a vision of beauty, sublimity, and art that avoids reduction of them to them to the biological, a la Nietzsche or Freud.Instead, Kant describes the *justification* of reflective aesthetic judgments in terms of the conditions for using jugment, stressing the contemplative and harmonious character of the experience of beauty.Beauty is linked to cognitive and moral betterment;sublimity, a secondary subject, is discussed more purely in terms of it connection with morality.

The work is difficult;however, there is no substitute for close reading of the whole work. (Certainly not Schiller, who goes far beyond Kant in claiming beauty and art as foundational for knowledge).The 3rd Critique is still very contemporary in its import, including its theory of disinterestedness, which is compatible with intelligent accounts of affect.

Reductive and, in parts, outmoded aesthetics
The "Critique of Judgement" is Kant's third and crowning work of his critical-transcendental philosophy. In it, he expounds his theory of aesthetics, broken down into two divisions, the "Analytic of the Beautiful" and the "Analytic of the Sublime". The "Analytic of the Beautiful" attempts to explain what we perceive to be beautiful, which is, Kant contends, a four-step process. First, the material for the perception of the beautiful is supplied by the faculty of sensibility, as the basis of the judgement of the beautiful. Secondly, the faculty of the understanding is linked, by means of a unique causal mechanism, to the faculty of the imagination, thus enabling a judgement to be made. In the third part of the process, the judgement is presumed to be disinterested, i.e. "purposive without purpose" -- the subject making the judgement, Kant argues, has no stake in the object of contemplation (being disinterested). Which is to say, he/she regards it as merely beautiful for its own sake. Fourth, this judgement of the beautiful, though singular in logical form, -- i.e., "the vase is beautiful", has the status of universal validity, since the judgement is made in the "a priori" supposition that all rational beings should regard it as valid. Kant's valuable formulation is that there is a distinction between an object which is sensually attractive (the basis of a mere "sensory judgement") and the true object of aesthetic contemplation -- the beautiful itself. However this reductive analytic aesthetics fails to acknowledge that the line between the sensory and the aesthetic may be very unstable. It also cannot preclude the dimension (stressed by later aestheticians such as Nietzsche and Freud and many contemporary philosophers of art) of the drives, out of which the whole realm of the aesthetics exclusively derives, though via the sublimation of affects and percepts, thus ruling out by fiat that any aesthetic contemplation could be "disinterested". The "Analytic of the Sublime" is perhaps the most enduring contribution of Kantian aesthetics, which has been seized on by one of the leading philosophers of postmodernity, namely, Lyotard. Kant defines the sublime as possibly being contained in an object "even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or its presence provokes, a representation of 'limitlessness', yet a superadded thought of its totality." -- In other words, the sublime lies beyond the confines of sense-experience, leading us to form concepts of pure reason. Like the rest of Kant's critical philosophic works, "The Critique of Judgement" is written in the eighteenth century style of the German academy, and is devoid of anything even remotely resembling a single literary flourish. It is best approached as reference text. A livelier work of critical-transcendental aesthetics would be Schiller's "Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man". Schiller casts his own artistic, political and ethical interests within the paradigm of his master Kant, but being a man of letters, he at leasts presents the theory to the reader in a more amenable form.

Got aesthetics?
This is the root of modern (is there any other?) aesthetic. Kant's third critique completes the circle of the trascendental philosphy; perhaps this is the most impotant book of the Königsberg philosopher beacuse it draws abridge between pure and practical reason. ... Read more

Book Description
The purpose of the Cambridge Edition is to offer translations of the best modern German edition of Kant's work in a uniform format suitable for Kant scholars. This volume contains the first translation into English of notes from Kant's lectures on metaphysics.These lectures, dating from the 1760's to the 1790's, touch on all the major topics and phases of Kant's philosophy. Most of these notes have appeared only recently in the German Academy Edition and this translation offers many corrections of that edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Finally, A Kant Book That Kan
How long have the myriad metaphysiphiles in global academe waited for an astute, detailed, precisely annotated, intensely careful translation from the original German of Kant's very own brilliant lectures?This book is, to any serious Kant scholar or meta-groupie, as my collegues and I only mildly jocularly refer to ourselves as well as other devotees of Kant's metaphysics, the land of milk and honey, well seasoned by a plethora of footnote gracefully placed upon footnote.Losing ones "Self" in the densely layered forest of meaning and annotations is a philosopher's uberdream.

Neitzche was a fool!Kant lives on!

If Kant is Your Haupt Mann This is Your Book
I laughed. I cried. What a brilliant translation of Kant's work! Every subtelty, every nauance of the big guys thought brought to sparkling light and clarity. A must for all serious scholars of this German thinker. I raise my glass of tepid water to this magnum opus.

* The publishers at Cambridge have finally answered our prayers with a paperback version of this tour-de-force.At only 38 Samolians this could well be the new chart busting "Mover and Shaker" in Amazon.com's Kantian line-up. Find out why cognitive giants are praising this translation as "brilliant,""definitive"and "bodacious!" ... Read more

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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (36)

Poor Binding
My review refers only to the binding of this book. The text itself I rate highly, with a few quibbles. But after a few months of moderate usage, the poor backing has caused the book to break into four pieces, with the pages flying out like a looseleaf. This trash binding is meant for a Romance novel, not a scholarly work. Perhaps the marketing target is undergraduates who will toss it away after a semester. Cambridge, serious readers and translators deserve better.

a good translation
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
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
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
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------------ ... Read more