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Critique of Pure Reason

by Immanuel Kant, J.M.D. Meiklejohn (Translator)

3.77 · rating details · 3,506 ratings · 175 reviews

One of the cornerstone books of Western philosophy, here is Kant's seminal treatise, where he seeks to define the nature of reason itself and builds his own unique system of philosophical thought with an approach known as transcendental idealism. He argues that human knowledge is limited by the capacity for perception.

Paperback, 400 pages

Published November 17th 2003 by Dover Publications (first published 1781)

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Jul 01, 2010

David rated it

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Immanuel Kant is the kind of guy who not only sucks all of the joy out of life; he takes great pleasure in opening the spigot of your happiness-tank and watching it all spill out onto the burn-out lawn and sink into the earth -- seeping toward the planet's molten, pitiless core and, thereupon, toward its irrevocable dissipation.

If he were alive today, I suggest to you that Kant's corporeal manifestation would be that of a paunchy, balding man, eternally sixty years old, who is ofte...moreImmanuel Kant is the kind of guy who not only sucks all of the joy out of life; he takes great pleasure in opening the spigot of your happiness-tank and watching it all spill out onto the burn-out lawn and sink into the earth -- seeping toward the planet's molten, pitiless core and, thereupon, toward its irrevocable dissipation.

If he were alive today, I suggest to you that Kant's corporeal manifestation would be that of a paunchy, balding man, eternally sixty years old, who is often seen in his yard, cleaning out his gutters or basement wells or tending his garden joylessly. He's perhaps wearing a modified pith helmet and too-tight khaki shorts which reveal the topography of his bunchy twill underpants as he crouches to slake the thirst of his prized marigolds. Of course, his plastic eyeglass frames are a mottled brown -- no, not tortoise-shell, but a harsh two-tone pattern reminiscent of the formica customarily surrounding a late 1970s basement wet bar. Additionally, the lenses are several sizes too large to conform to even the most deluded strictures of fashion. His socks (or 'stockings,' as he calls them) are a heavy, nauseous tan, ribbed but slouchy. A stubborn elastic band around the stockings' crown tries to hold them steadily around the mid-calf, but the up-again, down-again athleticism of gardening forbids this vain hold-out against gravity. Consequently, the stockings occasionally puddle around his knobby ankles. But not for long. He grunts, squats, hoists -- grunts, squats, hoists. If the ritual's speed were only increased and set to an uptempo adult contemporary favorite, we might suspect it was a dance. Or else an elaborate tic.

Next we should discuss his legs, shouldn't we? Necessity seems to demand it... Kant's legs -- when both his safari-aspirational shorts and his stockings are performing optimally -- are visible from the mid-thigh to the mid-calf and are fantastically white and nearly hairless. It's the kind of white that shames even the newest-fallen snow, and the kind of hairlessness that visits certain men at an advancing age. It's almost as if the sproutings of those once-masculine hairs had wearied over time and just surrendered the puttering gardener to a pleasant sexual neutrality. His legs, otherwise, are surprisingly bulbous with muscle at the height of the calf: a cleft, spastic musculature, as in the shape of cloven hooves. His sandals are wide and deep brown about the straps (three straps in total, none crossed or set at provocative angles), and vaguely semitic in design -- which is to say, tough as citrus rinds, in order to deflect the cruelties of the Negev.

This is what Immanuel Kant would look like today, probably. If he were your neighbor (a half dozen houses down the street, perhaps) and you were driving to your vinyl-sided ranch or bungalow with a sackful of perishable groceries in the trunk of your Volvo S40, and if you tapped the horn friskily and waved at Mr. Kant as he dug in his garden, he would, I assure you, remain defiantly crouched, folded in upon himself, beholden to some faithless prayer. He would seem as if to have not heard your car or your horn and neither to have suspected your hand were raised in salutation. But of course he is nothing else but an intelligent man, and so he hears and of course he knows, or at least suspects. But he simply straightens his sun-bleached helmet, sinks his fingers more deeply into his yellow suede work gloves, and digs toward an object which will bring him no joy or satisfaction, but rather a steady, textureless hum within and throughout his consciousness which passes in some muddled cultures for the noise of enlightenment.(less)

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Jan 12, 2008

Charissa rated it

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Recommends it for: people who have dropped enough acid to find it amusing

Shelves: weltanschauung, threw-across-room

I just Kant stand him.

Seriously though... why does so much Western philosophy remind me of arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? I swear, these gentlemen had their panties wrapped so tightly I don't know how they ever took a proper dump.

The problem with Kant (aside from how much he enjoyed listening to the sound of his own voice droning on and on) is that he was irretrievably mired in a Christian world-view, separated from nature, and cursed with ...more

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Jul 28, 2008

Tyler rated it

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Recommends it for: Academics & Philosophy Majors Only

Shelves: philosophy

Parts and pieces of this master work intrigued and enlightened me, but Kant's overall proposal escapes my grasp. After reading through it, I can see why no univocal interpretation of the text can ever be possible.

The troubling aspect of Critique is its complexity. No explanatory system should demand an exegesis so convoluted, using so much idiosyncratic language, and terminating in so many loose ends and vagaries. Intended to explain the world of experience, among other things, this...more

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Apr 11, 2007

Jenny Park rated it

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immanuel kant is by farrrrr the world's most precise philosopher... EVER! haha.. this text, like many philosophical texts out there... was really dry.. and um.. long. but there's definitely a reason why this one's regarded as one of the greatest philosophical pieces out there. so the book's premise in a nutshell... noone can argue FOR or AGAINST an afterlife/God. he also digs into the idea that our understanding of the world and our ideas are based not only on experience, but on a priori concept...more

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Jul 13, 2011

Ceridwen marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Dour young men

Recommended to Ceridwen by: Dour young men

There was this one time, when I was traveling with Mum in England(?), and we were staying in this B&B. We'd washed out our underthings and put them on the radiator to dry, and we were really, really punchy from jet-lag. We were making all these roasting underpants jokes, and laughing harder and harder. The guest in the neighboring room was this dour looking kid, the all-black-wearing sort with his bangs in his eyes, and we tipped over into full insanity when Mum said, "I'm sure we're interr...more

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Sep 22, 2011

Archetech rated it

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This is a great work. Nearly all philosophy after has been a reaction to it or an outgrowth from it. One cannot tell if this is because Kant was truly so influential or because he saw with such depth and unity the fruitful course philosophy would take.

The language can be daunting and exhausting. It is, however, precise and if one can follow the concepts in it, it works almost like a dry poetry that seems to lay bare the foundations of knowledge and experience. It is such a chor...more

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May 06, 2010

JabBeRwoCkY rated it

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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Kant begins with the simple statement that all knowledge is based upon experience. It is the last easily understood sentence in the book. Philosophy had established two types of knowledge: analytical and synthetic. A valid analytical statement is always absolutely true, thus is "known". The statement "The sum of two right angles in the Euclidian system is equal to a straight line" is an analytical statement. It is "true" in that the statement is derived from Euclidi...moreKant begins with the simple statement that all knowledge is based upon experience. It is the last easily understood sentence in the book. Philosophy had established two types of knowledge: analytical and synthetic. A valid analytical statement is always absolutely true, thus is "known". The statement "The sum of two right angles in the Euclidian system is equal to a straight line" is an analytical statement. It is "true" in that the statement is derived from Euclidian propositions and agrees with the propositions from which it is derived. It says nothing about the actual nature of the world. The statement "The cat is on the table" is a synthetic statement. The word synthetic used means a synthesis of known and knower. The synthetic statement is open to dispute. It may be the product of deception, imagination or any number of other factors which make it beyond absolute knowledge. Kant's book is an attempt to establish that there is or is not some connection in some manner in which any synthetic knowledge can be known with the certainty that an analytical statement can be "known". Synthetic statements include all scientific knowledge, such as the second law of thermodynamics. The second law necessitates existencce of physical material which obeys it. In order to be "knowable" the knowledge must be a priori as a necessary condition. The closest that Kant comes to establishing this connection is via the type of knowledge called synthetic a priori, which is to say a joining of the known and knower without experience of the known by the knower. The closest he comes to establishing that this type of knowledge is real is the knowledge of TIME, which he asserts is not itself experienced but whose reality can be asserted via the experience of events which have sequence. A.N. Whitehead uses the example of space as synthetic a priori, in that space known within a given distance can be known a prior that it extends far beyond possible experience. A priori is necessary for certainty, but not sufficient. Neither TIME nor SPACE establishes that anything synthetic can be known with the total certainty that an analytical statement can be "known". As he puts it, "Existence is not a true predicate." It should be obvious that Kant considers any knowledge which is not absolutely certain to be something less than knowledge. It is interesting that the later German philosopher Schopenhauer would consider no-one a man who had not read and understood the "Critique of Pure Reason". It was on my high school reading list, and I tried to read it then, but interested people who are not advanced students of logic and philosophy would doubtless be better off reading an abridged version.

"The Critique" is a continuation of the tradition of attempts to prove the existence of God, which was seen by some as being "necessary" and therefore true in a sense that the existence of the natural world is not "necessary". That view was followed up by Descartes' famous assertion "I think, therefore I am." Kant rejected both these views with his famous assertion "Existance is not a true predicate." Later, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell modified Descartes' statement to "There is thought, therefore there is existance."
Russell lived after Kant, so Kant's reaction is unknown. Kant uses logic to come to oppposite conclusions, contradictions. In "A Brief History of Time" Steven Hawking shows that some of these contrary statements are in fact identical statements because Kant was using the classical view that time is constant, while the contradictions can be explained by Einstein's thory that time is actually a dependent function, passing at different rates from different viewpoints depending upon velocity. Perhaps some of the theory of relativity could have been extrapolated from the "Critique of Pure Reason", but Kant did not make the connection. Perhaps it influenced some scientists around the turn of the 20th century before the Michaelson-Morley experiment or even before Maxwell. Who knows. Today Kant's influence is principally through his ethical thought, which shows up in some Jewish commentaries on the Bible as well as in the larger community.
His conclusions that synthetic propositions cannot be known with the certainty that analytical propositions can be "known" is simply taken as an everyday part of life today. (less)

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Dec 04, 2011

Erik rated it

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Shelves: kant

My advice for anyone beginning the K.d.r.V. is to maintain your independence of judgment. Don't get buried in the terminology, the secondary literature or your own obsessions or reasons for approaching the book. Try to think through what Kant is saying and bring before your mind all of the possibilities for what he could mean, then eliminate them one by one, until you have arrived at your reading of the Kritik. I would encourage doing Leibniz and the Pre-Critical writings first, otherwise you wi...more

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Oct 29, 2009

Anthony rated it

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Shelves: philosophy-etc

I'm trying to decide whether or not I get it.

Sometimes I think I have just understood a passage of Kant only to discover that I have actually just been having my own thoughts pertaining to something or other in the content of the passage, and this is sometimes rewarding, but it is nevertheless not exactly what I intended to accomplish.

Say Kant is writing about perception or being, and say I misunderstand Kant-- what exactly happens when I misunderstand Kant, and by misu...more

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Sep 07, 2007

Erin rated it

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I think that there should be a philosophy book on everyone's favorite book shelf and Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" is mine. Poetic, prophetic and achingly, simply complex. I had a professor once that would say "universal" every time we discussed this book the same way that some people say "God". That's what it's like.

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Jan 24, 2012

Garrett Busshart rated it

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A more readable translation of the text, though I prefer and work with the Guyer/Wood edition for its thoroughness, e.g. both "A" and "B" publications, an index, glossary, footnotes, etc. I have given this review five stars because I would find anything less to be an insult to its original author. This translation would garner roughly three or four stars for its readability (if you can ignore and "read through" the excessive and awkwardly placed commas), with poin...more

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Sep 30, 2009

gokce added it · review of another edition

Shelves: fall-2009

Schema/Synthesis/Imagination

My dissertation project investigates the contradictory perceptions of temporality on the construction site of a renewable energy plant in Abu Dhabi. I am mainly interested in understanding how an apocalyptic environmental time becomes woven together with capitalist time, a time of continuous progress, rationalization and exact knowledge. I explore how architects, engineers and researchers imagine a technologically enhanced space that does not yet fully exi...moreSchema/Synthesis/Imagination

My dissertation project investigates the contradictory perceptions of temporality on the construction site of a renewable energy plant in Abu Dhabi. I am mainly interested in understanding how an apocalyptic environmental time becomes woven together with capitalist time, a time of continuous progress, rationalization and exact knowledge. I explore how architects, engineers and researchers imagine a technologically enhanced space that does not yet fully exist, within a temporal frame that is constantly shifting from infinity to imminent destruction.

Before proceeding further, let me clarify the type(s) of imagination at work within the construction site. Kant identifies two main operations of the imagination, “synthesis” and “schematism,” through which intuitions and otherwise heterogeneous concepts become juxtaposed. Synthesis occurs at the moment when one perceives an object X, and recognizes the object X as a concept. It facilitates the production of generalizations through which objects accrue transcendental meanings. As such, I see a tree, and re-cognize it as a tree, thereby conjoining the object I perceive with a range of objects that I have sensed before, and I will continue to sense hereafter. On the other hand, a schema, Kant argues, is “a monogram of the pure a priori imagination through which, and according to which, images become possible in the first place” (CPR, A-142). Etymologically, the word monogram means single letter, and yet is used to refer to a character formed of several letters in one design. Accordingly, the resulting mono-gram that Kant refers to here (the schema) is a product of multiple letters (pure a priori imaginations), and yet when it is acted out in space and time, it appears to be a single letter. This single letter determines the relationship that a priori imaginations have, or will have, with each other and with space and time. Hence, a schema realizes the mediation of intuitions and concepts, applying a priori concepts to the spatial and temporal conditions of intuition. The critical difference between synthesis and schematism, as Deleuze (1978) identifies, is the order of questions. In synthesis, the tree is available to the subject, and the subject needs to recognize the tree as such. However, a schema is not a rule of recognition. It is a rule of production, which occurs through producing an experience in space and time, in conformity with one’s own concepts (Deleuze 1978). A construction site, then, is the ultimate schema, in which developers, researchers, architects, engineers and construction workers slowly achieve the spatio-temporal projections of their multiple a priori concepts. It is a mono-gram of the manifold pure a priori imaginations that constitute the site.

It is important to stress here that according to Kant, I, the ethnographer, can only know myself as a subject. Everything else that I perceive appears to me as an object only, and I am incapable of experiencing the subjectivities of others whom I attempt to investigate. The gap between us is irreconcilable. Thus in this case, what I perceive is a collection of human objects, creating a schema of their contradicting thoughts, and I rely on their verbal and physical declarations in order to develop a sense of their subjectivities. I synthesize the objects that I perceive and try to build a concept out of my sensory experience. Contrary to what Deleuze (1978) argues, my first responsibility may be to create a record of this sensory information. Then, I try to develop concepts that match the processes that I have witnessed. Indeed, I have prior knowledge that shapes the way that I attend to the process of production. There are certain elements of production that are of interest to me, and others that I cannot be receptive towards. This selection process in fact implies that synthesis does not operate by itself; an active process of schematism, through which I select the objects that fit former knowledge, interests and indeed concepts, assists synthesis. Thus although I wish to be open to cognize all objects, the schematism inherent to my thought process disables such neutrality. Every thought I develop, then, is a double movement of synthesis and schematism. I legislate reality as such.

However, regardless of the kind of imagination at work, let us return to the very moment where I watch the set of human objects and their diverse prostheses building a schema of their concepts. Observing this process of producing the schema I can infer judgments about the various concepts that may be shaping the object that is under construction. My project, then, carries the inherent assumption that the process of putting together the schema is the process that reveals something about the a priori concepts that give direction to this production, as what interests me is not the schema itself, but the a priori concepts that instigate this schema. How does one use the rule of production in order to achieve a priori concepts? Kant argues here, “the concept must contain something which is represented in the object that is to be subsumed under it. This means that the concept must in some way be influenced by the material to be perceived” (CPR, A-137). Thus Kant also points to a double movement: I may wish to develop pure concepts of thought and try to apply them on the world around me, but I develop these concepts via relying on the world around me. Thus, unfortunately, my imagination is somehow limited by the intuitions that I may cognize. As Adorno suggests, “this is the non-subjective element within subjectivity.” It points to the priority of the object over knowledge. He (1959: 137) succinctly argues: “As knowing subjects we only know ourselves. In this sense we are never able to get outside ourselves; we are imprisoned within ourselves. This, too, has its profound truth in Kantian philosophy because it means that the world in which we are captive is in fact a self-made world: it is the world of exchange, the world of commodities, the world of reified human relations that confront us, presenting us with a façade of objectivity, a second nature.” What exactly is it that I may know by observing a construction site? Adorno would suggest that I develop a sense of the-thing-in-itself by analyzing its social production. I trace the conditions that lead to the emergence of this thing as such, while mapping the multiple imaginations of the objects responsible for its constitution.

Is it a legitimate task to explore different understandings of time within the construction site? According to Kant, mutable objects transform in time, but time itself endures. It is a pure form, like space, because it structures and precedes all experience, both of outer objects and inner states. How could time have a qualifier? The only qualifier that time would accept is “empty,” where empty time is the time in which one is not. However, Adorno (1959: 228) challenges the idea of a pure form by suggesting that “the relation of form to content is not that of an empty form into which a content flows, as generally appears to be in the case of Kant, but here, too, the situation is one of reciprocity. That is to say, this form only exists if it has a content, because it is form only as the form of a content, just as, on the other hand – as Kant correctly perceived – a content can only exist if these forms can actually be said to exist.” Does this imply that the content gives shape to the form as well? The time-form, as experienced in the construction site in multiple ways, inheres different types of social content, which eventually drag subjects in opposing directions, although enabling them to build this one renewable energy plant. The observation that temporality is experienced in multiple ways, such as capitalist time or environmentalist time, does not mean that I am itemizing time. I am merely suggesting that there are different cognitions of time within and towards the same time-form, which shape the time-form itself. Finally, the social content of time creates and re-creates the inward meanings of time as such.

In this short essay, I tried to briefly touch upon the ways in which Kant’s thought relates to my research questions. Indeed, this is not a comprehensive analysis, but it sheds some light on the ways in which Kantian theory could provide guidance. Benefiting from the cognitive framework of my preliminary ethnographic research, I concluded that the processes of schematism and synthesis cannot be separated, especially because they both produce limits for each other. Finally, I attempted to think through the possibility of an engagement with temporal experience, from a Kantian perspective, thereby understanding that the time form is inevitably shaped by socially mediated time content.

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May 31, 2011

Jesse Lopes rated it

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Kant, with this book, attempted to do what Locke had done: examine how philosophy should be conducted based on if it can be conducted at all. Locke's method ended in the so-called "graveyard of Hume", where knowledge became prejudice, and prejudice, or sentiment, our one and only guiding thread to reality (one can see how this particularized irrational guidance, when generalized, becomes Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand"). To this, Kant put on his cape, and with the resilience an...moreKant, with this book, attempted to do what Locke had done: examine how philosophy should be conducted based on if it can be conducted at all. Locke's method ended in the so-called "graveyard of Hume", where knowledge became prejudice, and prejudice, or sentiment, our one and only guiding thread to reality (one can see how this particularized irrational guidance, when generalized, becomes Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand"). To this, Kant put on his cape, and with the resilience and fortitude of a stoic, erected a most peculiar philosophical edifice. Time and space were deemed unreal, mere formalities of our human ability to perceive and cognize. When these forms dealt with perception, our inferences could be considered true, but when they dealt with cognition, they could only be "dialectical illusions". Kant very brilliantly concludes that we are never satisfied with this because our concepts are often too large for our objects (the drive to religion), and our objects too large for our concepts (the drive to science). But there is a unity for the two, since our sensory experience makes knowledge possible and vice versa. It is not as the empiricists claimed, that science was discovering the object of nature, no more than what the rationalists claimed, that religion was discovering the object of God. In fact, Kant means to say, we were only learning about ourselves. We may have mapped the human genome, but, to Kant, this is not what the human genome really is. The human genome is really a we know not what, an "= x", as Kant puts it, of which we can say what it is, but not why it is, this being unknowable. Part and parcel, then, to the system, is the allowance of an unknowable generative essence, which imputes that we will always mix with disaster if we try and get at it (GMO's are a case in point). A society, in other words, that intends upon producing geniuses will invariably end up producing dullards, since the noumena must by definition retract from the phenomenal knower who knows neither what lies behind consciousness nor beyond it, and so Kant is the point where West concedes to the East some very important philosophical points, which were articulated very long ago in Taoist thought, which were soon to be brushed aside by the Christian optimism of the system of Hegel, and affirmed by the Buddhist pessimism of Schopenhauer.(less)

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Feb 15, 2009

Rhonda rated it

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Shelves: philosophy

There is little to be said of this great work, groundbreaking even as it remains today and a synthesis for modern thought of the nineteenth century and beyond. It requires an amazing attention to language and detail and, I suggest, an excellent instructor to help one past the many hurdles which require the reader to wrestle with concepts he or she, though rightfully kept in abeyance, have allowed to creep back into one's mental processing at weak moments. Criticism will, of course, always be ea...more

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Mar 13, 2010

Andrew rated it

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Shelves: philosophy

This book was truly revolutionary. Critique marks the last phase of the Enlightenment period and opens the transition into more modern philosophy. Whether you are a fan of Hegel, Heidegger or Russell, there's no way to start without first responding to the Kantian challenge.

Put in most simple terms, what Kant did was place the subject and experience as the starting point and the limitation of reason. He argues his point meticulously and systematically. Some reviewers have criticized ...more

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Feb 24, 2011

Guy marked it as to-read · review of another edition

I started this book, once, a long long time ago. It did not appeal to me, then. However, GR friend Stan has recommended it, and perhaps it is time to re-look at it. Stan's interesting and amusing recommendation includes Nietzsche, which I have also dabbled in, and Schopenhauer, whom I have also dabbled in.

I'm thinking that it is an interesting recommendation to me, right now, because my reading Chomsky's Language and Responsibility is filled with his critiques of the poor expression of...more

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May 16, 2011

Jacob Stubbs rated it

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Shelves: philosophy

In this monumental work, Kant critiques Hume's empiricism, thereby sparking a "Copernican Revolution in philosophy". In doing this, Kant creates two realities, the phenomenal and the noumenal and shows that everything man perceives is an imposition of the human mind, thereby creating this phenomenal (experienced reality). In doing this, Kant refutes the cosmological (first cause), teleological (argument from design) and ontological arguments for the existence of God, showing that all o...more

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Jul 14, 2010

أحمد rated it

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لفترة طويلة من حياتي كنت معجبا بالعقلانية و ميالا لها حتي قرأت هذا الكتاب
من اول سطر و كانط بلغة رائعة و منطق بسيط جدا يدخل مباشرة في الموضوع و يناقش محدودية العقل من اوجه مختلفة اوضح الكتاب نقاط الضعف في العقلانية و فندها ووضع الفلسفة وقتها في مأزق
فبعد ان ادعت الفلسفة وقتها (نهاية الاسئلة) و الادراك التام اعادها نقد كانط مرة اخري الي حيرة التساؤل عن الاسئلة الاساسية

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Mar 31, 2011

Mario García rated it

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A must read for anyone who wants to understand the time Moral study was born. Yet various elements making the basis for contemporary studies of the Mind and contemporary Philosophy.

Difficult for most, joyful once you understand what the elements in play are, Kant wants us to comprehend the difficulties and possibilities immerse in human reason.

Kant was a little bit of an optimist as he is the first author aiming to abstract reason to a level he stops talking about humans...more

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Oct 25, 2010

Venus added it · review of another edition

Shelves: philosophy

With each of the other two kinds of imperative, experience shows us that imperatives of the kind in question do exist, and the inquiry into their possibility is the search only for an explanation of them, not for evidence that they exist. It is not so with categorical imperatives.Our investigation of their possibility will have to proceed purely a priori - starting with no empirical presuppositions, and in particular without the advantage of the premise that such imperatives actually exist. ·T...more

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Jul 07, 2010

Spoust1 is currently reading it · review of another edition

Reading Kant as a quasi-structuralist as suggested was possible by Karatani in his excellent "Transcritique." It is going well.

Update: I pick this up here and there. Kant is a horrendous writer; I imagine the book on tape narrated by Ben Stein. Kant - brilliant but blah? At this point, it seems pretty clear that this is not a book everyone needs to read. Kant later wrote "A Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics" as a more compact version of this damned tome. That is a hundred pages, this is 500 ...more

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Jun 24, 2011

Erik Graff rated it

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Recommends it for: everyone who's prepared

Recommended to Erik by: no one

Shelves: philosophy

With adolescence came nihilistic thoughts of suicide. The reasoning was simple. The public schools and an early interest in the sciences had led me to believe that we are part of an ordered universe, the parts of which are finite, the rules of which are determinable. Like an eighteenth century philosophe, I believed the hypothesis of a creative entity outside of the system, a deity, to be unnecessary. In principle, everything was determined, the past seminally containing all of the future. ...moreWith adolescence came nihilistic thoughts of suicide. The reasoning was simple. The public schools and an early interest in the sciences had led me to believe that we are part of an ordered universe, the parts of which are finite, the rules of which are determinable. Like an eighteenth century philosophe, I believed the hypothesis of a creative entity outside of the system, a deity, to be unnecessary. In principle, everything was determined, the past seminally containing all of the future. In principle, a perfect description would be possible given enough time. Basically, without knowing it, I was a logical atomist. Reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus would have been deadly at this time.

The intellectual problem which arose from this belief system had an emotional basis, viz. I was unhappy with the way things were. Entering high school at age fifteen, I was 4'11", pimply and myopic. I had a temporary false tooth until such time as my head finished growing. I had a scar near the navel from a messy surgery in infancy. I was, if one looked closely, ugly. No girl would ever have me on the basis of appearances. Having no real friends, my family having moved four years previous, the only hope of love was to develop virtues of character by trying to be good and by studying very hard so as to be knowledgeable.

Becoming knowledgeable was a clear enough project, but being good was increasingly uncertain. I understood a bunch of ways that people talked about ethical goodness and found some of them preferable to others. I liked Gandhi's kind of goodness, "The Sermon on the Mount", the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements, but, obviously, a lot of other people hadn't or didn't. Living in a town which had just been swept by Goldwater's campaign, I had enough arguments about rights and wrongs to suspect that the moral sense was like the sense of taste, individual, based on genetic nature and social nurture. I didn't have irrefutable arguments to compel others to my sense of the good--nor did they have such arguments to compel me.

Topping off the despair was the abiding belief that everything was determined, that anything I might accomplish was foreordained. It was a fact that I was, by prevailing standards, unattractive. Well, I had little control of that. It might become a fact that I would be very knowledgeable and even approbatively seen as a very "good" person by adjusting to conventional ethical standards. But that wouldn't have made me worthy of love if it were just the outcome of a concatenation determined events, if my sense of free agency were but an illusion. So, why bother?

I didn't know it at the time, I didn't even have the word for it, but my beliefs about the universe were metaphysical. The beliefs that there is (a) a universe that is (b) finite and (c) completely ordered were not based on evidence. They were heuristic assumptions conducive to drawing pictures of an ordered cosmos, assumptions which had tended to confirm themselves by their application in the sciences.

Kant convinced me of that. It was a conversion experience which followed upon a great deal of study, not only of his work, but also of the works of others such as Aristotle and Hume upon which his own thinking was substantially based. I'd been exposed to this basically simple idea before through such writers as Nietzsche, but not compellingly.

Now, a much wiser person, I no longer think nihilistically that suicide is consequent upon enlightenment. Now I just think about good reasons for killing myself. The rest of you should get to reading Kant or preparing to do so.

(less)

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Oct 09, 2009

Brian rated it

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Recommends it for: those willing to be frustrated

Shelves: philosophy

I hated reading this book. I love what I came away with. There are some aspects of metaphysics that I can now understand how to approach thanks to this book. I think it put into reasonable terms certain thoughts I couldn't quite solidify on my own.

This book is important and very worth the arduous task of reading. I learned how to be more disciplined in my approach to reasoning things which can not be reasoned easily. This book really exposes the difficulty we face as humans in taking...more

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Aug 31, 2009

White rated it

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Kant wrote this book as a response to existentialism. Logically he seemed to be on the right track until about midway through, he begins to take a few leaps of faith that leave the reader wondering if he has followed the rules of deductive or even inductive logic. I have wondered ever since. I don't feel as though philosophy does justice to the mathematical sequences of logic until Hume come back with The Critique of Human understanding. I really should give this book a 3.

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Jun 20, 2009

Mrs_M rated it

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Recommended to Mrs_M by: College assignment

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Dec 26, 2008

Rafael Sanchez rated it

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Shelves: non-fiction

Great thinker, although his moral philosophy holds up better. Very strange structure, don't read straight through. The work is extremely difficult to wade through, not the least of which is because of its translation from German. Find a good guide, or better yet, read Prolegomena instead, still gets you where you want to go. It's sort of Kant's own Cliff's Notes commentary because he was concerned that people wouldn't understand the bigger volume.

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Apr 08, 2010

Andrew rated it

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I won't get into a deep philisophical discussion with myself here. I'll just say that I read this book in a phil 101 class several years ago, and was fascinated. His observations, thoughts on the physical realm, and metaphysics got me thinking about life in a new way. He is a tad dry, but comparativly he's stephen king. He had an ability to make me think, and digest his thoughts with every paragraph, instead of just skimming through apatheticlly.

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May 30, 2008

Stephen A rated it

· review of another edition

First off, I am not going to say that I have read all the way through this beast of a book, but I have read enough of it and understand enough of it to somewhat get what Kant was getting at..
After hours of reading, studying, and wanting to shoot myself, I was able to get a grasp of what his main emphasis in his book was, his 'Copernican Revolution.' Probably one of the hardest philosophical ideas to be understood, it is in equal weight one of the most hardest philosophical ideas once under...more

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Dec 11, 2010

Charles rated it

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Shelves: nonfiction

This is actually not the version I originally read, when I was in graduate school. That one contained just the critique itself with very little about Kant. I started reading the book as a challenge to myself, to see if I could understand it and make my way through it. At first it seemed a bit of a choir but I actually got pretty interested in it as I went through it and I can say I enjoyed it.

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Dec 12, 2011

laura added it · review of another edition

it doesn't feel right giving this old bastard of a book a star-rating. i can neither give it five stars nor less than five stars. it's not a book to love, but it is, you know, the crowning intellectual achievements of an age. and for all its errors, i will say this (which goes, i think, for all of kant's work): its animating spirit is something less severe and dour, more subtle and vibrant, than what its critics (myself included) tend to give it credit for.

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About Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and of the late Enlightenment.

His most important work is The Critique of Pure Reason, a critical investigation of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics and epistemology, ...moreImmanuel Kant was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and of the late Enlightenment.

His most important work is The Critique of Pure Reason, a critical investigation of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics and epistemology, and highlights Kant's own contribution to these areas. The other main works of his maturity are The Critique of Practical Reason, which concentrates on ethics, and The Critique of Judgement, which investigates aesthetics and teleology.

Pursuing metaphysics involves asking questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Kant suggested that metaphysics can be reformed through epistemology. He suggested that by understanding the sources and limits of human knowledge we can ask fruitful metaphysical questions. He asked if an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that object. He concluded that all objects that the mind can think about must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can think only in terms of causality – which he concluded that it does – then we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect. However, it follows from this that it is possible that there are objects of such a nature that the mind cannot think of them, and so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside of experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. And so the grand questions of speculative metaphysics are off limits, but the sciences are firmly grounded in laws of the mind.

Kant believed himself to be creating a compromise between the empiricists and the rationalists. The empiricists believed that knowledge is acquired through experience alone, but the rationalists maintained that such knowledge is open to Cartesian doubt and that reason alone provides us with knowledge. Kant argues, however, that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to illusions, while experience will be purely subjective without first being subsumed under pure reason.

Kant’s thought was very influential in Germany during his lifetime, moving philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer saw themselves as correcting and expanding the Kantian system, thus bringing about various forms of German Idealism. Kant continues to be a major influence on philosophy to this day, influencing both Analytic and Continental philosophy.(less)

More about Immanuel Kant...

Books by Immanuel Kant

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Texts in the History of Philosophy)

Critique of Practical Reason (Texts in the History of Philosophy)

Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science with Kant's Letter to Marcus Herz 2/27/1772

The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (Critique of Judgement 1)

The Metaphysics of Morals (Texts in the History of Philosophy)

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“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. ” — 83 people liked it

“Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment...” — 39 people liked it

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