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Critique of Pure Reason, Abridged (Hackett Publishing Co.)
by Immanuel Kant (Editor: Eric Watkins) (Translator: Werner S. Pluhar)
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company (1999-02-28)
ISBN: 0872204480
EAN: 9780872204485
Dewy Decimal #: 121
Paperback: 240 pages
Edition: Abridged
SKU: 07110260
Condition: New As issued no jac
Comments: New book. Trade paperback with no marks or creases. Appears unread. Beautiful book.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Eric Watkin's abridgement of Werner Pluhar's masterful translation makes an ideal introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Key selections include the Preface in B, the introduction, the Transcendental Aesthetic, the Second Analogy, the Refutation of Idealism, the first three Antinomies, the Transcendental Deduction in B, and the Canin of Pure Reason. A concise introduction provides biographical information and describes the nature of Kant's projects and the contribution of each major section of the Critique to it.
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Customer Reviews
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Incredibly Difficult, but Highly Rewarding
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-02-11
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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A vitally important work in Philosophy
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-10-20
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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clarifications
Rating  (4)
Date: 2006-06-21
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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Standard translation of landmark text
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-03-02
10 out of 10 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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Serious great book
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-10-11
7 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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