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Summary
Summary
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is the central text of modern philosophy. It brings together the two opposing schools of philosophy- rationalism, which grounds all our knowledge in reason, and empiricism, which traces all our knowledge to experience. The Critique is a profound and challenging investigation into the nature of human reason, establishing its truth and its falsities, its illusions and its reality. Reason, argues Kant, is the seat of all concepts, including God, freedom and immortality and must therefore precede and surpass human experience.
Author Notes
The greatest of all modern philosophers was born in the Baltic seaport of Konigsberg, East Prussia, the son of a saddler and never left the vicinity of his remote birthplace. Through his family pastor, Immanuel Kant received the opportunity to study at the newly founded Collegium Fredericianum, proceeding to the University of Konigsberg, where he was introduced to Wolffian philosophy and modern natural science by the philosopher Martin Knutzen. From 1746 to 1755, he served as tutor in various households near Konigsberg. Between 1755 and 1770, Kant published treatises on a number of scientific and philosophical subjects, including one in which he originated the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system. Some of Kant's writings in the early 1760s attracted the favorable notice of respected philosophers such as J. H. Lambert and Moses Mendelssohn, but a professorship eluded Kant until he was over 45.
In 1781 Kant finally published his great work, the Critique of Pure Reason. The early reviews were hostile and uncomprehending, and Kant's attempt to make his theories more accessible in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) was largely unsuccessful. Then, partly through the influence of former student J. G. Herder, whose writings on anthropology and history challenged his Enlightenment convictions, Kant turned his attention to issues in the philosophy of morality and history, writing several short essays on the philosophy of history and sketching his ethical theory in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). Kant's new philosophical approach began to receive attention in 1786 through a series of articles in a widely circulated Gottingen journal by the Jena philosopher K. L. Reinhold. The following year Kant published a new, extensively revised edition of the Critique, following it up with the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), treating the foundations of moral philosophy, and the Critique of Judgment (1790), an examination of aesthetics rounding out his system through a strikingly original treatment of two topics that were widely perceived as high on the philosophical agenda at the time - the philosophical meaning of the taste for beauty and the use of teleology in natural science. From the early 1790s onward, Kant was regarded by the coming generation of philosophers as having overthrown all previous systems and as having opened up a whole new philosophical vista.
During the last decade of his philosophical activity, Kant devoted most of his attention to applications of moral philosophy. His two chief works in the 1790s were Religion Within the Bounds of Plain Reason (1793--94) and Metaphysics of Morals (1798), the first part of which contained Kant's theory of right, law, and the political state. At the age of 74, most philosophers who are still active are engaged in consolidating and defending views they have already worked out. Kant, however, had perceived an important gap in his system and had begun rethinking its foundations. These attempts went on for four more years until the ravages of old age finally destroyed Kant's capacity for further intellectual work. The result was a lengthy but disorganized manuscript that was first published in 1920 under the title Opus Postumum. It displays the impact of some of the more radical young thinkers Kant's philosophy itself had inspired.
Kant's philosophy focuses attention on the active role of human reason in the process of knowing the world and on its autonomy in giving moral law. Kant saw the development of reason as a collective possession of the human species, a product of nature working through human history. For him the process of free communication between independent minds is the very life of reason, the vocation of which is to remake politics, religion, science, art, and morality as the completion of a destiny whose shape it is our collective task to frame for ourselves.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Library Journal Review
Kant's philosophical standard dates back to 1781. Here he analyzes empiricism and rationalism, the leading schools of philosophy of his time. If your current philosophy is to buy books as cheaply as possible, this Dover edition is for you. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. ix |
Selected Bibliography | p. xvii |
Translator's Preface | p. xix |
Critique of Pure Reason | p. 1 |
Preface [First Edition] | p. 1 |
Preface [Second Edition] | p. 4 |
Introduction [Second Edition] | p. 15 |
I. On the Distinction between Pure and Empirical Cognition | p. 15 |
IV. On the Distinction between Analytic and Synthetic Judgments | p. 16 |
V. All Theoretical Sciences of Reason Contain Synthetic A Priori Judgments as Principles | p. 18 |
VI. The General Problem of Pure Reason | p. 20 |
VII. Idea and Division of a Special Science under the Name of Critique of Pure Reason | p. 23 |
Transcendental Doctrine of Elements | p. 25 |
Part I Transcendental Aesthetic 1 | p. 25 |
Section I Space | p. 27 |
2 Metaphysical Exposition of This Concept | p. 27 |
3 Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of Space | p. 29 |
Conclusions from the Above Concepts | p. 29 |
Section II Time | p. 32 |
4 Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Time | p. 32 |
5 Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of Time | p. 33 |
6 Conclusions from these Concepts | p. 33 |
7 Elucidation | p. 36 |
Part II Transcendental Logic | p. 39 |
Introduction: Idea of a Transcendental Logic | p. 39 |
I. On Logic As Such | p. 39 |
Division I Transcendental Analytic | p. 41 |
Book I Analytic of Concepts | p. 42 |
Chapter I On the Guide for the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of Understanding | p. 42 |
Transcendental Guide for the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of Understanding | p. 43 |
Section I On the Understanding's Logical Use As Such | p. 43 |
Section II 9 On the Understanding's Logical Function in Judgments | p. 45 |
Section III 10 On the Pure Concepts of Understanding, or Categories | p. 46 |
Chapter II On the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding | p. 51 |
Section I 13 On the Principles of a Transcendental Deduction As Such | p. 51 |
14 Transition to the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories | p. 55 |
Section II [Second Edition] Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding | p. 58 |
15 On the Possibility of a Combination As Such | p. 58 |
16 On the Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception | p. 59 |
17 The Principle of the Synthetic Unity of Apperception Is the Supreme Principle for All Use of the Understanding | p. 61 |
18 What Objective Unity of Self-Consciousness Is | p. 63 |
19 The Logical Form of All Judgments Consists in the Objective Unity of Apperception of the Concepts Contained in Them | p. 64 |
20 All Sensible Intuitions Are Subject to the Categories, Which Are Conditions under Which Alone Their Manifold Can Come Together in One Consciousness | p. 65 |
21 Comment | p. 65 |
22 A Category Cannot Be Used for Cognizing Things Except When It Is Applied to Objects of Experience | p. 67 |
23 p. 68 | |
24 On Applying the Categories to Objects of the Senses As Such | p. 69 |
25 p. 70 | |
26 Transcendental Deduction of the Universally Possible Use in Experience of the Pure Concepts of Understanding | p. 72 |
27 Result of This Deduction of the Concepts of Understanding | p. 75 |
Brief Sketch of This Deduction | p. 77 |
Book II Analytic of Principles | p. 78 |
Chapter I On the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding | p. 78 |
Chapter II System of All Principles of Pure Understanding | p. 84 |
Section II On the Supreme Principle of All Synthetic Judgments | p. 86 |
Section III Systematic Presentation of All the Synthetic Principles of Pure Understanding | p. 88 |
1. Axioms of Intuition | p. 91 |
2. Anticipations of Perception | p. 93 |
3. Analogies of Experience | p. 100 |
A. First Analogy: Principle of the Permanence of Substance | p. 103 |
B. Second Analogy: Principle of Temporal Succession According to the Law of Causality | p. 107 |
C. Third Analogy: Principle of Simultaneity According to the Law of Interaction or Community | p. 120 |
Refutation of Idealism [Second Edition] | p. 124 |
Division II Transcendental Dialectic | p. 128 |
Introduction | p. 128 |
I. On Transcendental Illusion | p. 128 |
II. On Pure Reason As the Seat of Transcendental Illusion | p. 131 |
C. On the Pure Use of Reason | p. 131 |
Book II On the Dialectical Inferences of Pure Reason | p. 134 |
Chapter I On the Paralogisms of Pure Reason [Second Edition] | p. 134 |
Chapter II The Antinomy of Pure Reason | p. 138 |
Section I System of Cosmological Ideas | p. 140 |
Section II Antithetic of Pure Reason | p. 141 |
First Conflict of Transcendental Ideas | p. 143 |
Second Conflict of Transcendental Ideas | p. 149 |
Third Conflict of Transcendental Ideas | p. 156 |
Section VII Critical Decision of the Cosmological Dispute That Reason Has with Itself | p. 162 |
Section VIII Pure Reason's Regulative Principle Regarding the Cosmological Ideas | p. 168 |
Section IX On the Empirical Use of the Regulative Principle of Reason in Regard to All Cosmological Ideas | p. 172 |
I. Solution of the Cosmological Idea of the Totality of Composition of Appearances of a World Whole | p. 173 |
II. Solution of the Cosmological Idea of the Totality of Division of a Whole Given in Intuition | p. 176 |
III. Solution of the Cosmological Idea of Totality in the Derivation of World Events from Their Causes | p. 181 |
Chapter III The Ideal of Pure Reason | p. 196 |
Section IV On the Impossibility of an Ontological Proof of the Existence of God | p. 196 |
Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic | p. 202 |
On the Final Aim of the Natural Dialectic of Human Reason | p. 202 |
Transcendental Doctrine of Method | p. 204 |
Chapter II The Canon of Pure Reason | p. 204 |
Section I On the Ultimate Purpose of the Pure Use of Our Reason | p. 205 |
Section II On the Ideal of the Highest Good, As a Determining Basis of the Ultimate Purpose of Pure Reason | p. 209 |
Section III On Opinion, Knowledge, and Faith | p. 218 |
Index | p. 225 |