Immanuel Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Translated and Analysed

by H.J. Paton (Introduction)

A book on philosophy by Kant, translated and Analyzed by J.P. Paton.

Genres: Philosophy

148 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1956

About the author

Herbert James Paton was Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow University from 1927 until 1937, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts from 1935 to 1937. In 1937 he left Glasgow to become White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College.

Though best known for his philosophical writings, he spent some ten years in the Admiralty and Foreign Office dealing with emergent European states in the aftermath of the First World War. At the Peace Conference of 1919 he was a member of the British delegation which advised on the Polish settlement, about which he wrote in the six volume History of the Peace Conference of Paris.

Paton was an authority on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and his two-volume commentary on the first half of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant's Metaphysic of Experience (1936) is an important work of philosophical scholarship.

Reviews

[James McAllister · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had no idea someone could say the same thing so many times in so few pages.

Kant over explains himself to the point that even he doesn’t seem sure of his own ideas. I’ve never before read an author who writes like he is stuttering. He turns basic ideas into complex mathematical equations that just lose the average reader. There are definitely some great ideas in here and it did alter the way I view morality, but it could’ve been 10 pages long with the fat cut out. I understand the nature of the philosophical field and the context in which this was written, but that doesn’t mean I have to cut it slack for being so boring. The opening analysis in this particular version manages to put Kant’s ideas better than Kant ever could. Maybe Kant should’ve gotten a plain language translater from the start.