Critique of Pure Reason

by Immanuel Kant, Werner S. Pluhar (Translator), Patricia Kitcher (Introduction)

Like Werner Pluhar's distinguished translation of Critique of Judgment (Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), this new rendering of Critique of Pure Reason reflects the elegant achievement of a master translator. This richly annotated volume offers translations of the complete texts of both the first and second editions, as well as Kant's own notes. Extensive editorial notes by Werner Pluhar and James Ellington supply explanatory and terminological comments, translations of Latin and other foreign expressions, variant readings, cross-references to other passages in the text and in other writings of Kant, and references to secondary works. An extensive bibliography, glossary, and detailed index are included. Patricia Kitcher's illuminating Introduction provides a roadmap to Kant's abstract and complex argumentation by firmly locating his view in the context of eighteenth-century—and current—attempts to understand the nature of the thinking mind and its ability to comprehend the physical universe.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Classics, German Literature, Metaphysics, Science, Psychology

1096 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1781

About the author

Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century philosopher from Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He's regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe & of the late Enlightenment. His most important work is The Critique of Pure Reason, an investigation of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics & epistemology, & highlights his own contribution to these areas. Other main works of his maturity are The Critique of Practical Reason, which is about ethics, & The Critique of Judgment, about esthetics & teleology.

Pursuing metaphysics involves asking questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Kant suggested that metaphysics can be reformed thru epistemology. He suggested that by understanding the sources & 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's possible that there are objects of such a nature that the mind cannot think of them, & so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. 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 & the rationalists. The empiricists believed that knowledge is acquired thru 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 & empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer saw themselves as correcting and expanding Kant's 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.

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thesis

Turgid, dogmatic, overrated and well past its sell-by.

Proof

As Einstein exasperatedly said: if Kant had only been able to stop pontificating about the nature of time and space, he might actually have discovered something interesting about them. Einstein, with considerable justification, felt that he had refuted Kant, and was surprised to find that philosophers were reluctant to accept his claim. To me, it seems clear-cut. Kant repeatedly tells us that time and space are not things; but Einstein's insight is that this is wrong. Space-time is, indeed, a thing that we can roughly conceptualize as a kind of invisible fluid in which we have our physical being. Matter acts on space-time to change its shape, and space-time acts on matter to cause it to move. This interplay between space-time and matter is what we experience as gravity.

Einstein has done far more than correct a detail. The most obvious consequence is that the greater part of the Antinomy of Pure Reason - a good hundred pages of Kant's book - is rendered invalid. Kant argues, roughly, that it is not meaningful to inquire about whether the universe is finite or infinite in space and time. The fact that time and space are things radically changes the situation. Contrary to Kant's claims, the whole of space-time is now also a thing. The question of whether it is finite or infinite turns out to be related to its curvature, which is something we can measure. Thus the finiteness of the universe is part of the world of phenomena, and astronomers during the last few decades have done a great deal of practical work investigating these questions.

In the field of literature, Proust was as annoyed as Einstein. The following passage from La prisonnière (presented here with the Scott Moncrief translation) eloquently sums up his feelings:

– J’y vais, Madame, j’y vais », finit par dire Brichot comme le général Deltour s’éloignait. Mais d’abord l’universitaire me prit un instant à part : « Le devoir moral, me dit-il, est moins clairement impératif que ne l’enseignent nos Éthiques. Que les cafés théosophiques et les brasseries kantiennes en prennent leur parti, nous ignorons déplorablement la nature du Bien. Moi-même qui, sans nulle vantardise, ai commenté pour mes élèves, en toute innocence, la philosophie du prénommé Emmanuel Kant, je ne vois aucune indication précise, pour le cas de casuistique mondaine devant lequel je suis placé, dans cette critique de la Raison pratique où le grand défroqué du protestantisme platonisa, à la mode de Germanie, pour une Allemagne préhistoriquement sentimentale et aulique, à toutes fins utiles d’un mysticisme poméranien. C’est encore le « Banquet », mais donné cette fois à Kœnigsberg, à la façon de là-bas, indigeste et assaisonné avec choucroute, et sans gigolos.

["I am going, Madame, I am going," said Brichot, as General Deltour moved away. But first of all the Professor took me aside for a moment: "Moral Duty," he said, "is less clearly imperative than our Ethics teach us. Whatever the Theosophical cafés and the Kantian beer-houses may say, we are deplorably ignorant of the nature of Good. I myself who, without wishing to boast, have lectured to my pupils, in all innocence, upon the philosophy of the said Immanuel Kant, I can see no precise ruling for the case of social casuistry with which I am now confronted in that Critique of Practical Reason in which the great renegade of Protestantism platonised in the German manner for a Germany prehistorically sentimental and aulic, ringing all the changes of a Pomeranian mysticism. It is still the Symposium, but held this time at Kônigsberg, in the local style, indigestible and reeking of sauerkraut, and without any good-looking boys.]

Antithesis

A brilliant and incalculably important book which more or less created modern thought.

Proof

The difficulty of reconciling the world of sensations with the world of concepts is perhaps the central problem of philosophy. No one, before or since, has done it better than Kant did in the Critique of Pure Reason.

I do not think it a coincidence that relativity and quantum mechanics, the great breakthroughs in twentieth century physics, were discovered by German-speaking scientists who were thoroughly acquainted with his work. Einstein's special theory of relativity crucially depends on the insight that different observers experience time and space differently. Lorentz had all the pieces of the jigsaw in front of him, but was unable to put them together into the realization that the "Lorentz contraction" cannot be conceptualized as an objective fact, but is rather observer-dependent. If he had been able to grasp this point, he would have gone down in history as the discoverer.

Quantum mechanics is an even clearer case, where the Schrödinger equation is almost a direct translation of Kant's ideas into mathematical form. The unknowable wave-function represents the noumenal world; the world of phenomena is represented by the system of operators which act on it, where the operators themselves are the senses and their eigenvalues are the sense data. Though one point is oddly reversed with respect to Kant. There is the same duality between determinism and free will, but it is the world of noumena that turns out to be deterministic, while the world of phenomena is not!

The mark Kant made on literature is only slightly less telling. As I recently discovered in Gautier-Vignal's Proust connu et inconnu , Proust was fascinated by Kant, and the whole of the Recherche greatly influenced by his ideas. I must reread Le Temps retrouvé from this new perspective; I suspect that many things which puzzled me first time round will become clearer.
_________________
[Update, Sep 10 2022]

The following passage that I just noticed in Albertine disparue provides evidence from an unexpected quarter of Kant's influence on Proust:

D'ailleurs à Balbec, quand j'avais désiré connaître Albertine la première fois, n'était-ce pas parce qu'elle m'avait semblé représentative de ces jeunes filles dont la vue m'avait si souvent arrêté dans les rues, sur les routes et que pour moi elle pouvait résumer leur vie. Et n'était-il pas naturel que maintenant l'étoile finissante de mon amour dans lequel elles s'étaient condensées se dispersât de nouveau en cette poussière disséminée de nébuleuses?

[Moreover at Balbec, when I had first longed to know Albertine, was it not because she had seemed to me typical of those girls the sight of whom had so often brought me to a standstill in the streets, upon country roads, and because she might furnish me with a specimen of their life? And was it not natural that now the cooling star of my love in which they were condensed should explode afresh in this scattered dust of nebulae?]

In the early 21st century it's tempting to read this as a miraculous anticipation of modern theories of stellar nucleosynthesis; but in fact, I think it's much more likely that Proust is referencing Kant's Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels. The French translation, Histoire naturelle generale et theorie du ciel, came out in 1886, and he would surely have been able to get hold of a copy.
_________________
[Update, Nov 6 2022]

By the way, in case anyone's wondering: it took me longer than I'd intended to get around to rereading Le Temps retrouvé, but when I did it was extremely helpful to think about Kantian epistemology. Gautier-Vignal wasn't exaggerating at all.

[G.R. Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was about seven, my favorite movie was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mom was dating this philosophy professor who was writing a book on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. One day, I asked him what it was about, and he told me it was just like Chitty. It was a kind of magic car that - I can still remember his words - "was able to drive on the roads of sensation, float on the water of concepts, and even fly above the sea of transcendental illusion". And then he told me the whole story of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with Kant replacing Caractacus Potts and the Critique replacing Chitty. Truly Scrumptious was Modern Science, and Baron Bomburst was some philosopher I'd never heard of who didn't like metaphysics. We all sang the title song together with Mom's boyfriend's words, it started like this:

Pure Reason, Critique of Pure Reason
Pure Reason, Critique of Pure Reason
Pure Reason, Critique of Pure Reason

Oh, you, Critique of Pure Reason
Critique of Pure Reason we love you
And, in, Critique of Pure Reason what we'll do...

I can't remember the rest.

We all had a great time, and I decided that Kant was my second-favorite philosopher, after Mom's boyfriend. I was sure they were going to get married. And then a week later they had a big fight about synthetic a priori propositions and yelled at each other a lot, and he drove off and we never saw him again. I was very sad about it and told Mom not to be so serious about philosophy in future.

I still love that song though.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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.

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

“...Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself.”

Kant's critical turn shows that the problem of self-knowledge, not metaphysics, is the true subject matter for first philosophy. It shows that it is not metaphysics that can serve as a meta-science, or as the discipline that can critique science in order to discern its underlying logical systematicity; rather, it is the theory of self-knowledge that can perform that function. Kant shows that it is the theory of self-knowledge alone that can identify the logical principles by which we can conceive the unity of knowledge. This is perhaps the basic Kantian insight: knowledge is one because experience is one, and all knowledge is based on principles that are ultimately drawn from the structure of experience.

Kant does nothing less in this work than to introduce a new starting point for thought. And yet Kant offers here not “just” another philosophical perspective to set aside all others. It is this that perhaps makes his philosophical intent so notoriously hard to pinpoint. His analysis is not a positive doctrine, so much as an instrument that enables us to take a stance outside and above all positive perspectival stances (in philosophy and beyond), and to place these on a common logical map. This is because his analysis provides us with a means to conceive the logical, structural conditions that ground -any- possible perspective-taking. Wittgenstein's philosophical motto - “I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings” - might just as well apply to Kant.

Kant's Critique seeks to explicate, from a first-person (or what he calls a “transcendental” perspective) the structural, a priori principles that make possible the systematic character of experience and of knowledge alike. In this, Kant is a precursor to the phenomenological approach to describing the structure of cognition. This is because, unlike a third-person, empirical, psychological analysis of cognitive structure, Kant's seeks to render explicit the logic of coherent perspective-taking: i.e., the structural principles that must hold if we are to provide a sufficient explanation of the systematic character of experience.

Kant starts with the fundamental fact overlooked by past philosophers: the intractable fact of cognitive limitation. He points out that a perspective that seeks to start explanation with metaphysical principles that are deemed primary necessarily begs the most fundamental question: that our finite cognitive apparatus is sufficient to the task of grasping the fundamental principles of a world-independent order of things. Kant's Copernican turn is based on the simple observation that the characteristic structure of our own reason provides us with our only pattern for inferring the structure of the real.

For instance, the question we should be starting inquiry with is not whether the world in itself is causally structured. This is because the answer to this question relies on the answer to more fundamental questions still: To what extent are concepts such as cause valid? On which intuitions derived from experience are they grounded? And to which domains do they legitimately apply? The Kantian motto - "thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind" - introduces a key criterion for evaluating the meaningfulness of concepts: that they be given content from intuitions derived from the sensibility. The attempts of pre-critical metaphysics to use these concepts to describe the mind-independent world fail this Kantian meaningfulness test since in such uses, these concepts cannot be given content by any possible experience.

Before attempting a “Theory of Everything,” we must, therefore, map the structure of this finite cognitive system which filters our access to the real. Kant's great epiphany was that it is the constraints placed by the knowledge-construction process that form the most significant factor in determining the shape of any theory of the world. Since our knowledge of the structure of things is constrained more by the structure of thought than it is by the structure of things, we must build our paradigms on the basis of a prior analysis of the structure of thought.

Kant's philosophy is structured as a refutation of Hume. Humean skepticism was based on a reductionist analysis of experience which sought to resolve experience into basic “atoms,” and then to reconstruct it from them. This reductionist approach to describing the structure of experience led him to doubt that any of the structural principles of reason, which were expressed in metaphysics (eg, the concepts of necessary causal connection, and of persisting, substantial identity) had any meaning. This led to his notorious inability to explain the systematic structure of experience, except as a loose aggregate of fictions synthesized out of the repeated “conjunction” of sense-impressions, which forms habits of expectation in us. According to Hume, these fiction-based habits alone are the basis of the regularities that our metaphysical principles express.

Kant recognized that trashing the presumptuous, question-begging fiction of knowledge as passive reflection of a mind-independent metaphysical order which Hume sought to expose means we can't start with the metaphysical question of identifying the rational principles that best characterize the structure of being. The only possible source for rational foundations left now is the structure of experience. Kant sought to show that Hume's reductionist, empiricist analysis of experience was flawed. His Critique attempts to offer a re-description of the phenomenology of experience that does justice to its systematic unity and continuity, and which can ground the principles of reason.

The tragic irony, as Kant argues, is that if Hume's empiricist starting point is correct, the explanatory power of science makes no sense. Science loses all rational grounding. The -fact- of scientific knowledge shows that Hume's understanding of experience is wrong. Kant's first-person, “transcendental method” provides a better starting point from which to describe the principles underlying the unity of experience, which alone make it possible for us to reason scientifically.

This method offers us with the means to answer Hume: the perceived “constant conjunction” of events in sense experience can provide us with a knowledge of causal relations because reason is equipped with a priori principles which help structure and organize sense experience, among which is our concept of cause. These a priori principles act as structural conditions for the possibility of all experience. So, it is not that we infer the generalization of causal relation from various sense experiences, as Hume thought; rather, no coherent experience of the world at all could be had without the structuring effected by these formal principles. As conditions for synthesizing sense impressions into a coherent whole, they define the horizon of our possible perspective-taking on the real, and, thus, the limits of our knowledge.

The structure of reason conditions our access to reality; it determines what we can register as real. Kant shows how real innovations in geometry, mathematics, science, and logic have only been possible via a constructive method that in effect presupposes the cognitive synthetic a priori principles he describes. Thus, reason has only managed to gain insight into reality when it has, in each of these disciplines, first reflected on its own structure, and then formulated idealizations on the basis of its insight into its own structure which served to regulate its empirical inquiries. One can think of the discovery of the concept of inertia, by postulating the ideal, empirically non-realizable fiction of an absolutely frictionless plane. It is only in reference to such idealizations, postulated by reason as abstract stable reference points, that we can measure and carve up the chaos of reality into an organized, systematic whole. We ourselves supply the structure that phenomena can take for us.

Kant's radical insight is that that resultant systematic whole is a function of reason more than it is a function of the structure inhering in phenomena. For while “the material” of sense experience does indeed come from passive perception of the world, via the sensibility, such perception is actively structured from the ground up by the mind: first, via the “pure intuitions” of space and time supplied by the sensibility, which place all sensations onto a spatio-temporal map (for it is Kant's radical contention that we know space and time first as regulative functions of cognition, not as properties of the order of things). All this material is then further structured by being placed in a system of relations via the categories of the understanding, such as cause/effect, substance/mode. Kant thus anticipated the finding of cognitive psychology by two centuries by showing that our knowledge of the order of objects is the product of our cognitive-perceptual filtering. However, he also worked out its full epistemological implications – namely, that we need a new theory of knowledge, an alternative to pre-critical realism, if we are to be true to these facts about cognition.

Kant sought to supply a model of reason that makes explicit the structuring principles that determine the form of even the simplest sense experience. The beauty and power of his vision perhaps stems from his manage to gesture to this systematic unity that he believed characterized the mind. He argued that formal logic isn't enough to characterize the unity of reason; rather, a fuller model is needed to capture our full capacity to structure experience. His “transcendental logic” is intended as an alternative to formal logic which doesn't abstract from the content of experience, but rather lays bare the way experience in all its forms is structured by the categories and the synthetic a priori principles.

He argues that each discipline, from logic to math to the natural and human sciences, is grounded on the synthetic a priori principles he describes. Philosophy can only become as securely grounded as the sciences are if it manages to accurately characterize the map of these synthetic a priori principles. He believes that reason is “an organic unity,” and that these principles together map this unity. Kant redefines the proper subject matter of metaphysics in formal, logical terms, as the study of the unity of reason, and of the principles that are presupposed by the most unitary perspective we can take on our experience:

“Metaphysics... is nothing but the inventory of all we possess through pure reason, ordered systematically. Nothing here can escape us, because what reason brings forth entirely out of itself cannot be hidden, but is brought to light by reason itself as soon as reason's common principle has been discovered. The perfect unity of this kind of cognition, and the fact that it arises solely out of pure concepts without any influence that would extend or increase it from experience or even particular intuition, which would lead to a determinate experience, make this unconditioned completeness not only feasible but also necessary.”

Take-home points:

-His most important contribution, IMO, is his notion of the transcendental unity of apperception, which is a condition for the possibility of experience as a systematically-organized, science-generating whole. Any theory of mind that misses this key component will run into contradictions when applied to the task of providing an epistemic justification of science.

- Kant refutes formalist accounts of cognition, by showing that concepts are indexed to imaginative constructs that synthesize percepts.

-Kant formed the paradigm for the functionalism in terms of which research in modern-day cognitive science is structured. (see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ka...)

-He invented the transcendental argument form that provides an alternative to reductionist forms of explanation, which seek to explain experience by abstracting from it its “atomic elements,” and then proceeding to re-construct it as an aggregate of elements. The transcendental argument helps us start with experience, as a given whole, and explain its conditions.

-Kant's theory of cognition provides the best refutation of positivism, showing how its criteria of meaning are based on cognitively unrealizable abstraction. For Kant, the whole precedes the parts in cognition. Cognition acts as a systematic whole. Anything that can be given to the mind as either sense datum or fact is identified in relation to the forms of the understanding, which act as a coordinated, systematic whole in structuring any possible experience. Thus, the positivist criterion of meaning, which states that the validity of theoretical constructions must be judged through reference to “hard facts” - is cognitively unrealistic and puts the cart (isolated sense data) before the horse (functioning cognitive systems).

-Mapping our cognitive limits helps us know where we have secure grounds to apply those fundamental metaphysical concepts that are integral to the structure of our reason, and where we overstep the bounds of experience and must halt speculation.

-These formal limits pre-determine the limits of possible development for both ontology and cosmology.

-In the end, we can only have a metaphysics of the experienced world, not of the world in-itself.

Perhaps the endless avalanche of interpretations this work has generated is itself a proof of its immense generative power for thought. The critical POV that Kant identified seems to constitute a nodal point for thought from which one can endlessly regenerate philosophy, either through the generation of new systems, or through the critique of historical ones by comparing them to the structural principles of human cognition.

Kant's formal analysis is the ultimate generator of methodologies. In the sciences, the Critique also made possible the crucial methodological principle of modern physics, i.e., the now necessary reference to the position of the observer in any formulation of physical law. When Heisenberg states that “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” he is merely summarizing Kant's first critique. After Kant, the structural limitations of perspective become the fundamental factor to contend with in all our empirical theorizing. Kant is also the conceptual architect for what would later become the human, esp cognitive, sciences. It is in his critical turn that these methodologies find their ultimate, rational justification.

It also made possible the "perspectivist" turn that lies at the heart of modern artistic practice: in the visual arts, starting at least with the Impressionists, and on to the present moment and traceable through the diverse proliferation of mediums during the last century; in literature, the self-reflexivity we cherish in the modern novel (eg: Proust, Joyce, Woolf). It is ironic that the supposedly austere and unimaginative Kant should become the begetter of whole artistic lineages.

In philosophy, he paved the foundations for phenomenology. It might be useful to picture Kant as mapping one end of the continuum of phenomenological description, with Merleau-Ponty sketching the other. At one end one gains a perspective over the universals of logic, mathematics, and the synthetic a priori principles that ground the various disciplines of reason and unite them into a coherent map of human knowledge, and at the other, we have all artistic attempts to push the development of cognitive form to greater concreteness, and thus to increase its “adequacy to experience."

Kant plants the seeds for a more radical questioning of reason, seen in Nietzsche and evolutionary epistemology. His relativizing of form to perspective blends well with evolutionary pictures of the organismic nature of the knower. Every species prefers certain arrangements that are conducive to its survival, and “abstracts” its world according to these species-specific preferences. Our characteristic capacity and preference for the kinds of cognitive forms that we have is our signature as a species, and not a fact about the world. There is only a step from here to Nietzsche's radical perspectivism.

The critical question concerns the sufficiency of Kant's cognitively-grounded realism. Can you find formal universals at least here, in the mind? Or is this last vestige of universality further deconstructible? If you answer yes to the former, what you're left with is a cognitively-grounded realism. If you answer yes to the latter, you're left in the cul-de-sac of relativism. And if you ignore Kant's critique altogether, as positivism tries to, you risk chasing the shadow cast by your cognitive biases across the cosmos and mistaking these for fundamental ontological principles.

One by one, Kant's universals have been relativized. The ideal of “transcendental critique” has been left by the wayside. Instead, all critique nowadays is pursued from historicist assumptions which insist on relativity of forms to context. Historicist analyses point out that Kant's candidates for the a priori structures are really static projections of what were mere features of a Western-specific cognitive mode, and that they were not, as a result, the universal and necessary structural principles of mind that he sought. In support of this would be Kant's importing of Aristotle's categories into his transcendental analysis, thereby bringing cultural bias into the project of identifying the a priori. A further example would be his reliance on the Newtonian paradigm for his formulation of the transcendental forms of space and time, which we now know must be grasped relativistically.

This brings up a big problem with the transcendental approach: can we ever identify the a priori on more than a historical basis? We seem to rely, as Kant did, on the thought and science of the day to provide the material for transcendental analysis. Is there any way of filtering out the historical factor and boiling logico-phenomenological analysis down to the real fundamentals?

Another strand of critique of Kant comes from embodied mind theorists. In his “Philosophy in the Flesh,” Lakoff argues that empirical findings show the inadequacy of a formal methodology such as Kant's. He claims such an approach lacks the empirical tools required to discern the phenomenologically-inaccessible yet causally efficacious structure of cognitive unconscious mechanisms, which are the true determinants of thought. Such mismatches between first-and third- person analyses of cognitive form lead such theorists to claim that there is a fatal incompleteness in the first-person method for self-understanding.

Instead, the first- and third-person pictures of cognitive structure are complementary, and any mismatch between them derives from our insufficient understanding of both. Such third-person theorists are in effect changing the subject. Logic is based on formal principles that are not reducible to neuro-cognitive principles. Consider the difference between making a logical proof and describing the neural structures that might support such proof-making process.

In the end, Kant offers the best arguments for why first-person description of the structure of experience has logical primacy in any paradigm.

[Roy Lotz · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is done. I have finally scaled the sheer surface of this work. It involved continual toil, sweat, and suffering—falling down and picking myself up again. But, when you reach the end, when your eyes finally hit the bottom of that final paragraph, the feeling is momentous. You can stand and look down at the steep drop you managed to climb, and reflect with satisfaction that this mountain is one of the tallest. This is an Everest of a book.

That was melodramatic, but only a little. The Critique of Pure Reason is tough, and requires some serious effort to get through. Before attempting it, I would highly recommend first reading Kant’s much shorter Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic, in which he summarizes the essential points that are elaborated and ‘proved’ (in his opinion) in this longer work. Additionally, I would recommend any potential readers to acquaint themselves with the philosophy of David Hume (The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) and Rene Descartes (Meditations on First Philosophy). Thankfully, both writers are more stylish and succinct than Kant.

Nevertheless, I think overcoming a book’s reputation for difficulty can often be as challenging as the book itself. It’s sort of like the movie Jaws—you hear the rumors, you see its fin surfacing in the distance, but you never get a good look at the beast until you get down in the water. Thankfully, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has not been known to eat people or destroy nautical vessels.

I’m not sure how Kant got his reputation as a horrible writer. Certainly, he is far more turgid than Rousseau, Hume, Descartes, Nietzsche, or even Locke. But, unlike more modern prose disasters like Heidegger, he’s far from unreadable. Roughly on a par with Aristotle, I would say. Above all, the reader must pay close attention to his terminology. Kant is systematic—his goal is a perfect, self-contained whole that comprises every aspect of the universe. Bearing that in mind, one would expect his philosophy to be more dense and verbose than his predecessors.

Another way that Kant is unlike some of his forerunners is that he is not a skeptic. He does not begin his investigations by doubting everything he can, but firmly believes in the possibility of human knowledge. Interestingly enough, before writing his three Critiques (which he started in his late fifties), Kant had done some work in the natural sciences, and was quite familiar with Newtonian physics. Being the perceptive man that he was, when Kant read David Hume (who, as Kant says in the Prolegomena, caused him to “awake from his dogmatic slumber”), he realized that Hume’s findings threw the entire scientific endeavor into severe doubt. So at least part of his goal in this work is to save the findings of science.

One more tension Kant is trying to resolve is that between scientific explanations and free will. If the world is governed by immutable physical laws that can be described by equations (as Kant believed), how can free will exist? And, finally, what can we know about the universe? If we follow in Newton’s footsteps, can humans figure everything out? And, if so, what would be the consequences for religion?

After reading Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (which I would also recommend), Kant perceptively realized that, as human knowledge increases, God will seem less and less likely as an explanation for the natural world. Being a pious Christian, he reacts by attempting to set a firm limit to the reach of human knowledge. This effort, paradoxically, leads Kant to conclude that all metaphysical and logical ‘proofs’ of God’s existence are insufficient, and that humans will never be able to know for sure if there is a God. The upshot of this is that humans will also never by able to disprove God’s existence, leaving room for faith.

When I first read this book, I was very taken by his thinking, and found Kant to be a profound genius. Well, I still think he's a profound genius; but now, however, after reading more philosophy and reflecting on Kant’s system, I am somewhat less convinced, and think there are some fatal errors in his reasoning. That being said, nobody can deny that Kant is a superlative philosopher—scrupulous, methodical, fantastically ambitious—and deserves to be read, and read, and read again. After all, one doesn’t read philosophers in order to agree with them. Precisely the reverse.

[Xeon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have we not learned anything? Those who claim to understand without having actually understood and proceed to provide commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason, a work which draws the line for dogmatists, may be said to be dogmatists.

Curious, though, that a critique of reason, albeit pure reason, was performed using careful reasoning itself.

Curious how the limits of reason and cognition were found from within the confines of reason and cognition itself.

Curious how by virtue of the Critique of Pure Reason, a unity of all thought, reason is able to observe the tendency to unity.

Curious is synthetic a priori knowledge itself; how there can be knowledge of the world that is independent of experience.

Curious how from empirical sources, pure conceptions have been derived.

Curious how the concepts of all concepts may be said to be the categories.

Curious how natural causes can be simultaneous with their effects.

Curious how the cognition of ourselves and cognition of objects are simultaneously necessary for each other. How, “the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience."

Curious how, "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."

It is the claim that whence upon reading the Critique of Pure Reason, the empirical or sensory manifold of raw material of such goes through the faculty of sensibility and becomes an object(s), then through perception within the a prior confines of the concepts of space then time and becomes an intuition(s), then in the understanding through the a priori ~4-12 categories of judgment and becomes a concept(s), then to reason or apperception to become phenomena/appearances or potentially noumena. Simply put, the Critique of Pure Reason itself, "representation of things, as they are given to us, does not conform to these things as they are in themselves, but rather that these objects, as appearances, conform to our manner of representation". This "Copernican Revolution" that which is the Critique of Pure Reason goes through the Critique of Pure Reason itself.

[باقر هاشمی · Rating 4 out of 5]

در این چندصدسال، مرورهای زیادی بر این کتاب نوشته شده و من در اینجا فقط به نوشتن تجربیاتم در باب مطالعه‌ی این کتاب اکتفا می کنم.

‌در باب نُسَخِ متعدّده
اولین بار، ترجمه‌ی میر شمس‌الدِین ادیب‌سلطانی به نامسنجش خرد ناب رو گرفتم که باید اعتراف کنم هیچ... ازش نفهمیدم! و در کل از خوندنش منصرف شدم. تا اینکه یک روز به ترجمه‌ی جدیدی از این کتاب برخوردم. ترجمه‌ی بهروز نظری به‌نامِ "نقد عقل محض" و بی درنگ اون رو تهیه کردم. بهروز نظری کتاب رو توسط یک ناشری در کرمانشاه به چاپ رسونده بود و همین برام جای تعجب داشت که چطور چنین کتابی رو ناشری در کرمانشاه برای چاپ قبول کرده؟
مشغول خوندن اون ترجمه بودم که دیدم همون کتاب با ظاهری آراسته توسط نشر ققنوس بیرون آمده. فهمیدم محمدمهدی اردبیلی این کتاب رو ویرایش کرده و اصطلاحات دانشگاهیِ روز رو دَرِش اِعمال کرده و چون از قبل مکاتباتی داشتیم و چندجا از راهنماییش استفاده کرده بودم به سرعت نسخه‌ی نشر ققنوس رو تهیه کردم و به‌حق که خیلی بهتر از نسخه‌ی بدونِ ویرایش‌اش بود.
اینکه افرادی مثل رامین جهانبگلو میگن این‌جور کتابها قابل ترجمه نیستن پس بیاین به حرفای ما گوش بدین تا به زبونِ ساده براتون بگیم، اصلاً به مذاقم خوش نمیاد. لذتی که خوندنِ یک فصل از منبع اصلی(حتا بدترین ترجمه) داره رو صد ساعت نشستن پایِ صحبت‌های اون بزرگواران نداره.

و امّا الحوادث الواقعه
این کتاب یکی از مهمترین کتابهای دنیایِ فلسفه است.اگر برای پخت یک قورمه‌سبزیِ فلسفی، آراءِ افلاطون رو در حکم آتش در نظر بگیریم، آراءِ کانت حتماً حکمِ آب رو خواهند داشت! این کتاب شاه کلیدیه که اگه جویای فلسفه اون رو نخونده باشه، برای فهمیدن آراءِ فلاسفه‌ی بعد از کانت(از جمله هایدگر و شوپنهاور) به مشکل بر می خوره. چه بسا شوپنهاور در مقدمه‌ی جهان همچون اراده و تصور میگه: هر کس کانت نخونده کودکه و سرِ کلاسِ من نشینه.
من برای اینکه این کتاب رو بفهمم مجبور شدم برگردم به فلاسفه ی یونان و به ویژه کتاب متافیزیک ارسطو. و برای بهتر فهمیدنش رفتم سرِ کلاس دکتر مرواید در دانشگاه فردوسی نشستم. (هر چند هیچ ادّعایی در کامل فهمیدنِ کانت ندارم!) و چند کتاب دیگه هم همزمان با این کتاب مطالعه کردم که به بیشتر فهمیدنش کمک شایانی کردن. از جمله فلسفه ی نقادی کانت که نوعی گام‌به‌گامِ کانت به حساب میاد و کتاب نقادیِ نقدِ عقلِ محض که توسط ویراستارِ همین کتاب نوشته شده.
امیدوارم تا اینجا، تونسته باشم شما رو از خوندن این کتاب منصرف کنم!

در باب نقد عقل محض
کانت در این کتاب آمده خطاهایی که ذهن در اندیشیدن، گرفتارِ اونها میشه و از مسیر صحیحش منحرف میشه رو شناسایی کرده و راه حل هایی برای در دامِ خطاهای اندیشه نیافتادن به ما داده. در این کتاب از فلسفه‌ی استعلایی صحبت کرده.
.استعلایی یعنی عاری از هرگونه تجربه و ایده‌ی عقل محض، بر پایه‌ی همین فلسفه‌ی استعلایی بنا نهاده شده.
در فلسفه‌ی کانت نقد عقل محض درباره‌ی فلسفه‌ی استعلایی صحبت می‌کنه و نقد عقل عملی در باره‌ی اخلاق و سیاست صحبت می‌کنه.

کانت در این کتاب این موضوعات زیر رو مورد بررسی قرار میده:
حسیات استعلایی
منطقِ استعلایی
تحلیلات استعلایی
تحلیلاتِ اصول
دیالکتیک استعلایی
مفاهیم نقدِ عقلِ محض
قیاس‌های دیالکتیکی عقلِ محض
آموزه‌ی استعلایی روش

تشریح این مباحث نه تنها در این مقال نمی گنجه بلکه نیاز به همخوانی گروهی یا خوانش زیرِ نظر یک استاد فلسفه‌ی کانت داره. و هر چه با ظرف بزرگتری به سمت کانت بریم، بهره‌ی بیشتری از فلسفه‌اش خواهیم برد.
جالب بود که فهمیدم نیما یوشیج هم مقاله‌ای در باب نقد عقل محض کانت داره. فکر می‌کنم کانت در جهت دادن بهمسیر ادبیات ایران هم نقش داشته!

خُلاصه کنم: این کتاب اصول تفکر انسان رو شُخم میزنه، آفت زدایی می‌کنه و در نهایت بارور می‌کنه. و
بعد از آن هرچه که کاری بَر دهد
نرگس و نسرین و سی‌سَنبَر دهد

[Luís · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone claims to be Kantian today, and few have dared to read it. There are indeed Kant and the others among the philosophers. He is a problematic philosopher of the subtleties of his language and the blunders of his translators; however, contrary to what we have said above, everything has been stated. He never wanted to say more, to go further. Once the curtain is closed, mass is said. Good luck to those who have enough to get started.

[Charissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

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 the precision of having been brought up German. Poor fellow... he badly needed to run naked through the woods and eat a freshly killed goat around a fire, followed by a proper shag by a woman with enormous tracts of land.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason marks what is more or less a beginning of philosophy. It is no longer possible to go back behind his Copernican revolution, as if one could do philosophy without taking into account the subject or consciousness. This turn toward subjectivity is only tightened with the Wittgensteinian and Heideggarian turns toward language. Both naive empiricism (Hume, Locke, etc) and strict rationalism (Leibniz, Wolff, etc) are thoroughly overcome, synthesized if you will. Of course there remain Plato and Aristotle whom we will never be without, but they belong in a sense to an earlier dispensation of thought. And despite advances in the natural sciences, the world in which we live and have our being is Kantian, which is to say, still Euclidian and Newtonian. It is only from this subjective position that we embark upon scientific investigations into nature in general.

But of course we will always go back and read and philosophize with those greatest minds. Back to Leibniz and Spinoza (but not Wolff), Locke and Hume, Descartes and his crowd, Aquinas and Augustine along with those countless assembled together as ‘medieval’, without fail to Plato and Aristotle, to Parmenides and Heraclitus. And we will travel to China and India and discover there this same spirit of thought. But in so far as we understand philosophical progress, in so far as we understand philosophical thinking in its historical dimension, something happened with Kant’s critique which cannot be undone. Insofar as all systematic thinking endeavors to overcome a presupposed dualism (viz Descartes’ two substances), it is with Kant that we first see an opening, that “the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience.”

However one fails to say it, one cannot overemphasize the determinative role of Kant in the history of philosophy, and in the very possibility of philosophy, of thinking. Yes, there is something inadequate in Kant’s methodology. Hegel clears up some of this. Another beginning is made later with Husserl. But the overcoming of alienated thought begins here; the turn toward the thinking subject, which is the heart of philosophy, begins with Kant. As does its grounding as science, as knowledge.

But too a word about his ‘difficulty.‘ Thinking is difficult. Philosophy is difficult. Knowing is difficult. What we novice thinkers have to gain here -- and we must put aside this silly quip about how Kant can’t write -- is a mode of real thinking. As Marguerite Young said, Style is thinking. And Kant’s tortuous syntax reflects not only teaching philosophy to speak German (which Hegel was still endeavoring to accomplish) but because also the nature of Kant’s matter, the Sache, is difficult and does not give itself lightly. Alone Kant wrote and published four different versions of the transcendental deduction of the categories, not because he didn’t know how to express himself, but because the matter itself had never previously been attempted. And here too I find it advantageous, in so far as one lends oneself to learn to think, to follow a translation which most closely mirrors the mode of thought within the German language. There is at least some nugget of truth to Heidegger’s quip that Being speaks only German and Greek.

There is no easy first avenue into Kant’s work except that one has already accomplished his Copernican revolution. And to do so on one’s own is perhaps comparable to learning the calculus or elementary particle physics on one’s own. Philosophy is available to all, but it is also so easy to miss, to misrecognize philosophy as mere wisdom or opinion. But to take philosophy as real cognition, thought, knowledge, to find one’s way behind both the methods and results of religion and the natural sciences, is a real accomplishment. To find one’s way to fundamental principles from which all experience springs is no simple task.

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

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. 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.

[Maali · Rating 5 out of 5]

قد صدق من قال : بإمكانك أن تكون مع كانط أو أن تكون ضده لكنك لا تستطيع أن تتفلسف من دونه !
كتاب نقد العقل المحض ترجمة غانم هنا - الصادر عن المنظمة العربية للترجمة , في 840 ص, - للفيلسوف الالماني ايمانويل كانط ..
يعتبر هذا الكتاب الكتاب الأهم في الفلسفة الحديثة نظرا للتأثير الهائل الذي احدثه, ففي الفترة التي نشر فيها هذا الكتاب سنة 1781 كان الاعتقاد السائد بأن اهم حدث تاريخي في اخر 300 سنة هو الثورة الامريكية وتأسيس الولايات المتحدة - على الاقل لدى الشعب الامريكي - الا ان كثير من مؤرخي الفلسفة وتاريخ العلوم يذبون للقول بأن الحدث الاهم في اخر 300 سنة تفريبا كان نشر ايمانويل كانط لكتابه نقد العقل المحض, والذي لا يزال أثره ممتدا حتى يومنا هذا ! فعلى هذا الكتاب تأسست الكثير من المدارس الفلسفية والاتجاهات الفكرية كالظاهراتية - الفنومينولجية - والمثالية الالمانية والمثالية المتعالية وغيرها ..
ولو نظرنا الى الفترة التي سبقت نشر هذا الكتاب - الى وضع العلوم في القارة الاوروبية - لوجدنا بأن علم اللاهوت كان هو اهم العلوم في مقابل الفلسفة التي لم تكن تحظها بتلك المكانة,و مع اصدار كانط لهذا الكتاب فقد فقد علم اللاهوت تلك المكانة التي كان يحظى بها حتى انه اصبح علما ثانويا وبدأ سقوطه تدريجيا ليصل الى الحاله التي هو عليها اليوم, لا يعدو عن كونه علم اقل من ثانوي ! بالتالي فهذا الكتاب كان بمثابة نقطة تحول في تاريخ الفكر الانساني, ولذالك لم يكن من العجيب ان ينعت رجال الدين كلابهم باسم - كانط - نظرا لما احدثه من تغيير كبير على وضعهم - حيث بدأ فقدانهم لسلطته تدريجيا من سلطة مطلقة الى سلطة شكلية في ايامنا هذه -, فما الذي فعله كانط حتى يستحق مثل هذا النعت ؟ ان ابرز دور قاهم به هو انه جاء بيميتافيزيقا جديدة بين خلالها قصور العقل البشري - حينما تناول حدود المعرفة البشريه - عن التعامل مع الامور الماورائيه والتي لا يمكن اثباتها لا بالعقل المحض او حتى بالتجربة ولذالك فهي تأخذ فقط كمسلمات بدون اي دليل عقلي او امبريقي , حيث زعم كانط قائلا : انا ازعم ان اي سؤال ميتافيزقي سيخر في ذهنك فأن جوابه في هذا الكتاب ؟ لذالك ان اس فلسفة كانط كان قتل الادلة والبراهين التقليدية على وجود الله كالسببية وغيرها من الاستدلالات التقليدية ! ولذالك اطلق عليه البعض من امثال ويل ديورانت - قاتل الله - اي قاتل البراهين والاستدلالت التقليدية على وجود الله , ونلاحظ ان الالحاد بمفهومه الحديث انكار الله ظهر بشكل كبير بعد كانط - تلميذه المباشر شوبنهاور كان اول المجاهرين بهذا - , فقبل كانط كان لفظ الملحد يطلق على من ينكر النبوات او اي شيء من الشرائع المتاعرف عليها لا انكار وجود الله في ذاته فالرازي كان ملحدا ؟ لكنه لم يكن منكرا لله واقتصر انكاره على النبوات وهذا كان معنى الالحاد عموما اما بعد كانط فقد اصبح الالحاد يعبر عن مفهمومه الحديث وهو انكار الوجود - وجود الله - ..
اما عن تأثير ايمانويل كانط
لتبسيط الامور يمكننا القول بإن تاريخ الفلسفة برمته قبل كانط ينقسم بين مدرستين فكريتين رئيسيتين : العقلانية والتي يمكن ان ندرج تحتها اسماء مثل - بارمنديس افلاطون افلوطين وصولا الى ديكارت و لايبنتز الخ - من ناحية و المدرسة التجريبية - والتي يمكن ان ندرج تحتها اسماء مثل ارسطو و بيكون ولوك وغيرهم - من ناحية أخرى.
وبحسب بعض مؤرخي الفلسفة والعلوم فإن أهم توليفة فلسفية قد تم وضعها في تاريخ الفلسفة هي التوليفة التي جاء بها كانط حين اخذ كلا من المدرستين واقتبس من كل واحده منهما حيث انتقد بعض الجوانب في كل مدرسة واقتبس الامور الايجابية في كل جانب وترتب على ذلك نشوء نهج جديد للمعرفة .
وكي لا يقع في اعتقادنا ان تلك التوليفة كانت هي نهاية الفلسفة - وليس بالامكان ان يكون احسن مما كان - فإن الذي حصل ان اعمال كانط الفلسفية التي شكلت حدا فاصلا في تاريخ الفلسفة قد انبثقت عنها إما بشكل مباشر أو غير مباشر, كافة المدارس الفلسفية الحديثة التي تتناقش فيما بينها, فمنذ ايام كانط يمكننا تتبع جذور المثالية والماركسية والفلسفة الوضعية المنطقية والفلسفة الوجودية و الفينومينولوجيا - الظاهيراتية - و البراغماتية والمذهب النسبي , مما يعني عمليا ان جميع حركيات القرن التاسع عشر والقرن العشرين التي برزت منذ ايام كانط تعود جذورها الى بعض جوانب بعض ابعاد العمل الذي انشأه هذه الفيلسوف - وتحديدا في ثلاثيته النقدية الشهيرة -..

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
* من الصعب جدا اختصار هذا الكتاب العظيم في عدة اسطر لن توفيه حقه أبدا على أن الكتاب فضلا عن ذلك يحتاج للقرأه اكثر من مرة
* الكتاب يتكون من 840 ص وهو يضم كتاابين او نسختين من كتاب نقد العقل المحض النسخة الاولى التي نشرت سنة 1781 والنسخة الثانية التي نشرها كانط بعد 9 سنوات مضيفا عليها بعض التعديلات الجديدة .

[path · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It is humiliating for human reason that it accomplishes nothing in its pure use, and even requires discipline to check its extravagances and avoid the deceptions that come from them” (672)

What we know about the world can never be reached purely through reason or purely through experience but only through both. Experiences, made up of the manifold of sense data (appearances) from our waking lives, would be a chaotic jumble without concepts to organize and bound those appearances via schemas into objects about which we can have axiomatic predispositions and engage with through logically-derived maxims of action. Without the acid test of experience, however, pure reason is a problem as well. Dealing only with transcendental ideas leaves nothing for falsification except logical contradiction, which, when transcendent of experience and the limitations of time and space, spins off into the infinite and its ensuring rational paradoxes (e.g., if all things have a cause what caused the first cause?). Pure reason also leaves the problem of the transcendental “I” that wrongly elevates the singularity of the rational individual to the plurality of all reason.

It is the mark of an elegant idea if it can be summarized substantively and succinctly. Whether I have done that kind of justice to Kant’s thesis is for you to judge, but any failing is my own. For despite this volume’s lack of brevity, it is consistent and persistent in its presentation of this main argument. Kant can be blamed, I think, for using 50 words where 10 would do, and for repeating arguments often and at length, and for inventing many new terms that lack distinct intuitive meaning but clearly have systematic relationships to each other. However, the overall intellectual experience is worthwhile if not entirely or consistently enjoyable.

There is hardly a discussion of rationality or phenomenology today that does not reference some or many of Kant’s ideas. Readers might also be surprised to see how many of Kant’s ideas find their way into mainstream understanding of cognition and experience. This book is an undertaking, however, and I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone even if I think that the experience was rewarding. For those interested in an introduction to these ideas, Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics is plenty sufficient.

I can’t summarize the argument, as vast as it is, so I want to talk about why I think this argument still matters and why engaging with it is worthwhile. The appeal is in recognizing, as Kant does, that appearances are all that we have available to us as the grounds upon which to know anything. I’ll take a little shortcut here to say that it’s our “experience” of the world that matters and not just our experience but the “manifold of experiences” or all experiences of phenomena that make up the things in themselves (i.e., the noumena). It a plurality of experiences that reveal to us more of the conditions of possibility that allow for those experiences to be. When we cultivate experience or limit or deny experiences (our own or other’s) we close off routes to knowledge. Engagement with pure reason and its transcendental concepts instead of engaging with experience and with others who experience easily results in replacing knowing with dogmatism, and dogmatism is subject to all the biases of pure reason even if it feels like truth. Systematic disengagement from experience, whether by willful self-isolation in our media bubbles, or by other means, degrades understanding rather than enhances it. And denying the legitimacy of the experiences of other thinking and experiencing people flattens the manifold of experience and also degrades understanding.

When dealing with metaphysics, as Kant sets out to do, it is hard to appreciate the value of a branch of thought that seems to concern itself with the transcendental at the expense of (even in spite of) pragmatics, but these arguments do nothing short of secure the foundations of intellectual enterprises (e.g., mathematics, natural science) that form the basis of rational, utilitarian inquiry and intellectual processes. He makes a case that those endeavors must work metaphysically but also that metaphysics means not a thing outside of the methodological and systematic organization and interpretation of experience that these fields support. The whole book is a careful, elaborate description of how experiences aggregate into understanding, which, under the guidance of reason, organizes and sets expectations and intentions toward the world that guide our experiences. Knowing is a cyclical and self-checking process that must be guided by methodological discipline.

[Orhan Pelinkovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1787), or his critique of the power and limitations of our mind, Kant attempts to rewrite metaphysics.

Although, Kant's metaphysics is similar to his predecessors, as it discusses and examines knowledge beyond one's experience, questions what is true knowledge, and how best to acquire it independently of all experiences.

However, Kant's metaphysics is founded on his transcendental philosophy in which space and time are one, infinite, and indestructible, but a priori. He argues that we as individuals are born with an innate concept of space and time that act as spectacles through which medium we observe and experience the world around us. Hence, our sensory observations of the surroundings are distorted by this in-born idea of space and time. So, the way we perceive the world is just a spectacle-view of reality itself; an impression of reality, but not necessarily the actual reality. Therefore, we cannot know that this primordial idea of space and time, which has been ingrained in the minds from the earliest humans, are in reality as we perceive them to be. Perhaps if we were to remove these "spectacles" just for a moment, the reality within us and outside of us would crystalize, and we would have a glimpse of the real and fundamental truth.

Kant goes on to further explore ideas that can be arrived at independently from our experiences which he calls synthetic a priori knowledge. There is a lot of intimidating vocabulary in the book such as this last phrase, but I think his questions and conclusions make valid points.

[kaelan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both frightfully obscure and logically scrupulous, Kant functions sort of like a philosophical litmus test. Many a metaphysical charlatan (Lacan, Žižek, et. al.) has aped his mystifying prose-style without any attempt to match his rigour. And meanwhile, the most provincial of the analytic camp, unduly equating "abstruseness" with "bullshit," write him off as a mere historical oddity.

But the truth of the matter is that the Critique—Kant's magnum opus—constitutes one of the most inventive, meticulous and edifying works of philosophical mind-fuckery ever to be writ.

In a nutshell, the Critique finds Kant arguing for the doctrine of transcendental idealism, which asserts that our knowledge of the world only extends to the phenomenal (how things appear to us), rather than the noumenal (how things exist irrespective of us). Indeed, mustn't all possible knowledge and experience first pass through the lens of our own subjectivity? (Not that everyone will agree with this claim.)

That being said, Kant's view has more than its fair share of problems. For instance, the "Transcendental Aesthetic," in which he argues that all (human) experience is spatially and temporally conditioned, seems rather problematic—especially in the face of modern scientific conceptions of space and time. Even so, it would still need to be determined which of Kant's subsequent claims suffer as a result.

But perhaps the largest issue facing transcendental idealism is exegetical in nature.

Upon its initial publication, many readers of the Critique took it to express a particularly sophisticated version of Berkeley's so-called "mystic idealism," which led Kant to include a rather pointed rebuttal in subsequent pressings. And even though Kant takes obvious plains to differentiate logic from psychology (the Critique proceeds along the former grounds), some modern scientists have read Kant's categories as anticipating certain neurological circuits.

However, one of the most important debates in Kantian scholarship has been between the dual object and dual aspect interpretations of the Critique. According to the former, Kant believed noumena and phenomena to be two related but ultimately separate types of entity, whereas the latter holds that phenomena simply constitute the perceptible "aspect" of noumena.

Thus, it's not even clear what Kant's view truly is—at least in its particulars. So perhaps it'd be best to withhold any judgment regarding its ultimate truth or falsity...

Yet if the Critique is so difficult, and its arguments so terribly obscure, why should we even bother with it in the first place? Whilst perusing this book—a process which took up the better part of two years—I assembled a list of reasons for why Critique deserves its elevated position within the history of Western philosophy. Here's what I came up with:

(1) For taking the "negative" empiricism of Hume, which is as frightening as it is cogent, and combining it with an explanation for why the world still seems to make at least an iota of sense—i.e., finding a middle road between empiricism and rationalism.

(2) For constructing a devastating critique of speculative metaphysics. (Sorry, Leibnitz.)

(3) For replacing metaphysical arguments from speculative reason with metaphysical arguments from practical reason. That is, even if a metaphysical proposition is impossible to prove, it doesn't follow that we should not believe in it.

(3.1) For instance, either (a) free will exists or (b) we live in a thoroughly deterministic universe. Let's say we live in a thoroughly deterministic universe, in which case all of our beliefs will be accordingly determined, and hence we would simply and inexorably believe one of these propositions or the other. But now suppose that we truly enjoy the power of choice. If we have free will but fail to recognize this fact, we'll likely also fail to take responsibility for our actions. Therefore, we should—according to the dictates of practical reason—believe in the existence of free will, even if we can't come up with any airtight theoretical proof.

(4) For recognizing that all possible experience necessarily conforms to certain cognitive categories.

(5) For inventing the transcendental argument, in which the existence of some entity is deduced according to the preconditions for possible experience.

(6) For developing the doctrine of transcendental idealism.

(7) For formulating some pretty ingenious arguments against the then prominent theological proofs; and on the way, possibly laying the groundwork for second-order logic.

(8) For offering a (metalogical) account for why logic seems to be such a useful tool of inquiry, philosophical or otherwise.

A word of warning to the potential reader: this behemoth requires quite a lot of background knowledge—the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley and especially Hume; the rationalism of Leibniz; and even a dash of Newton (à propos the absolutist conception of space) and Aristotle (à propos the search for ontological categories) thrown in for good measure. But for those serious about philosophy, the Critique—Guyer and Wood's top-notch translation in particular—makes for an indispensable read.

[Théo d'Or]

1781 - Königsberg - Prusse Orientale

In front of Kant's house. 33° outside...
Under the heat of the sun, a carriage stops. A gentleman gets down, and approaches the door of the building, with slow steps. He puts his finger on the doorbell, and rings. Once.. Twice...Nothing. ( Here it must be stated that Kant had an absolutely practical ring. The bell button was actually a parrot's testicle, which once touched, made the parrot wail terribly. )
He push for a long time, ( until the parrot fainted ) , and finally a valet opens the door.
( In everything that follows, the characters maintain an imperturbable calm, equal and full of dignity. )

Gentleman (haughtily) : - Is your master at home ?

Valet ( much more haughtily ) : - Yes sir, but he ordered me to say , if anyone is looking for him, that he has gone out .

G. - You tell him I'm here.
V. - I can't, sir.
G. - Why ?
V. - The room is locked.
G. - Then knock, to open...
V. - Well... he took the key with him, when he left.
G. - Then... he left ?
V. - No, sir, he didn't .
G. ( wiping his sweaty forehead ) : - Mate... are you an idiot ?
V. ( very proud ) : - No, sir.
G. - So, you said he's not home.
V. - No, sir, he is at home.
G. - Didn't you say he left ?
V. - No, sir , he didn't left.
G. - Then, he's home. Tell him I'm here.
V. - Your name , sir ?
G. - What you care ?
V. - To tell him....
G. - Tell him, when he's back, that he was wanted by....
V. - By whom, sir ?
G. - By me.
V. - Your name, sir ?
G. - That's enough. He knows me, we're friends.
V. - Very well, sir.
G. - Tell him that we must meet, mandatory.
V. - Where ?
G. - He knows.
V.- When ?
G. - When he could.
V. - Very well, sir.
G. - Ah, and if he sees our friend, tell him that nothing has been solved.
V. - Very well, sir.
G. - One more thing...What time does Mr. Kant arrive at dinner ?
V. - Mr.Kant, sir ?
G - Your master...
V. - My master is Mr. Immanuel, sir.
G. - Impossible.. What number is here ?
V. - 11 b. My master didn't want 13, he said it brings bad luck.
G. - Then it's not here....
V. - It Is here, sir .
G. ( very thoughtful ) : - Mate... you know what ? You have a very pure reason... but an absolutely idiotic one....
V. - Thank you, sir.

[Alann Hollevoet · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite part was when they kissed

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My third reading of this book - with the first one when I was 19-20. This book changed me a lot. First, it convinced me that reading secondary literature about any significant thinker (instead of just making the effort to confront the original) is a waste of time and even worse. Second, it showed me for the first time how a fundamental thinker builds radically and vertically, and in opposition to a flat way like all other philosophers. Far more interesting than the content here is to witness how Kant was able to build something coherent out of thin air that sustains and makes everything else intelligible. In this respect, the things that still stand up to this day from this book are Kant’s struggles and hesitations, along with all those areas and concepts that he acknowledged as still partially opaque to him: the fundamental role of imagination, the unknown but necessarily common ground of both intuition and reason, the schematism, the origins of ideas and their prescriptive character for reason, the abyssal and fundamental aspect of time, and so on. It feels like this entire project was driven by Kant’s struggle with God - the conviction of the impossibility to prove God’s existence due to the limits of reason vs. Kant’s strong belief in the existence and necessity of God. It was also very interesting for me to read this at the same time as Nietzsche; as Nietzsche turned more and more aggressively against Kant and saw him as one of his main adversaries that needed to be taken down.


2020 original review:
Kant's insights are brilliant, the exposition of his transcendental idealism is extremely elaborate and systematic, but re-reading this book was quite a boring experience.
Working within the framework of subject-object (i.e. the two types of substances a la Descartes), Kant declares that the objects are things-in-themselves (i.e. noumena) and unknown as such. The experience is reduced to phenomena that we humans perceive. All that is important resides inside the human mind and is represented by the a prior structures of intuition (space and time), understanding, and reason. The a prior structures, as necessary and universal, are responsible for any possible, valid, and objective knowledge. The experience is the content of knowledge, while the a prior structures of the mind are the forms of knowledge; consequently cannot have any valid knowledge without one of the two.
Knowledge is analytic or synthetic. The first is obtained by analyzing a concept and is not very useful. The second is obtained by attaching a new predicate to a subject in a proposition. The predicate, given by experience, is attached as necessarily to the subject within the a prior structures of our mind. This synthetic a prior knowledge is universal, objective, new, and the only important and relevant knowledge.
Space and time are forms of pure a prior intuitions. They both exist only in our minds and make any experience possible. Everything exterior is given in space and everything interior is given in time. We cannot perceive something as out of space or out of time; that is any phenomena is possible only because of our innate space and time intuitions and consequently appear to us necessarily in space and time.
Mathematics is a special type of knowledge because its object of study - space and time - are pure a prior intuitions. Consequently we can do mathematics without reference to any concrete and external experience. However, we need to be wary in expecting the same success and path from other sciences – including philosophy/metaphysics.
There are a prior principles of reason in our mind; and unless we investigate them, acknowledge their tendencies, and limit their proper sphere of action – they can run wild and discredit the legit uses of reason and of any speculative knowledge. Most important, we need to stay within the bounds of experience. When we step outside the bounds imposed by our experience, we fall within the antinomies of pure reason (for example, that the space and time are either finite or infinite) and we are stuck there without any valid resolution. The questions and proofs concerning the existence of God, soul, free will, causality and so on are also outside these bounds of reason, not legit questions, and without any definitive answers in affirmative or negative. However, ideas like God and soul provide us with an a prior structure of pure reason – that of the unity of our representations and because of this are extremely useful. As such, speculative theology is nothing else but pure reason running wild. On the other hand, there is the practical reason and practical theology, and there the existence of God, soul, free will, causality, and so on are necessary and as such they all exist.
Kant's transcendental idealism, by collapsing most of what is important inside the human mind, was quite a revolution at that time and probably still is today. It allowed him to successfully bridge the gap between empiricists and rationalists. It explained the success of mathematics and postulated the a prior systemic judgments as the only valid and objective knowledge (due to their necessity and universality). He delimited the sphere of valid application of reason and denounced any application beyond these limits.
On the other hand, Kant firmly stayed within the framework initiated by Descartes of subjects and objects, did not question and consequently took for granted the existence of substances (res extensa and res cogitans). He postulated the existence of things-in-themselves even if we cannot say anything about them (except as phenomena of our experiences). As such, everything in knowledge is about the representations in our minds. His theory is unhistorical - as if it applies to all cultures and all times. He demoted God from existence in the sphere of pure reason, re-introduced God as a necessary and important principle in unifying our representations, and then postulated God's existence in the sphere of practical reason.
The categorical imperative looms all over the book. He continuously asks for moderation and restraint. The extensive exposition of the transcendental idealism is extremely elaborate and impersonal. He is quite a conservative, and as such, reassures any respectable bourgeois that things are as they should be and make sure they are arranged in a neat order. There is no smile or joy in reading this book.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Parsing this carefully is exhilarating. At least it was for me. It made me feel like my brain was growing. You may disagree with the system, but the argument is a marvel. Required reading.

[Warren Fournier · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do have to thank this book for distracting me during a time of incredible tooth pain from an abberant uncrackable peppercorn that clandestinely found a way into my braunschweiger sandwich. But Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" ultimately could have been the death of me. Is it worth it? Read on, ye seekers of metaphysical truth.

Now, I am not a philosopher. I find works such as Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" fascinating because I am amazed at how such great minds think about our world. Because I am no expert, my explanation of books such as these may be limited and flawed. But I will endeavor to explain what I got out of the "Critique" so as to stimulate your own curiosity about whether or not to read it for yourself.

I think part of what makes Kant difficult to understand is that he uses language that is unusual to our typical meanings of words. Here are some crucial examples I found necessary to comprehend while trying to unravel the mysteries of this book:

1) When he says "intuition," he is referring to an immediate representation of a singular thing--he is not using "intuition" in the way we might normally think of it.
2) A "concept" is a generalized representation. So if you intuit a single red thing, and then run across other red things, you note their linking similarities to create a concept of redness.
3) Intuition and conception constitute the elements of all our knowledge. Intuitions without conceptions can't generate a cognition.
4) The object of the intuition he calls "phenomenon," and that of the phenomenon that corresponds with the sensation is called "matter."
5) "Analytic" statements mean that the concept in the predicate is contained in the subject. It's defining the subject, and you can't negate the predicate without causing a contradiction. The classic example he uses of an analytic statement is "a bachelor is an unmarried man."
6) Conversely, "synthetic" statements DO add information to the subject. So saying that the bachelor is a white guy or a black guy is synthetic, because their race or ethnicity has nothing to do with the concept of a bachelor.
7) Analytic statements typically were only associated with "a priori" knowledge (knowledge independent of our experience). Synthetic statements were associated with "a posteriori" knowledge (knowledge learned through experience). We'll only know if the bachelor is a black guy or a white guy by seeing for ourselves. Before Kant, the generally accepted pairings were analytic/a priori and synthetic/a posteriori, but not synthetic/a priori.
8) The most crucial definition to understanding this work is in regards to his use of the word "pure," as in "Pure Reason." Here, "pure" means that no sensation is in relation to a representation of an object. A thing that is sensed is empirical, not pure. Pure is speculative, a priori, from the intellect. Therefore, he is exploring the limits of pure reason free from any sense organs.

Once I got these ideas and definitions in my head, the book became a little easier to follow. Not a lot, but better. So then what is this book about?

At it's core, "The Critique of Pure Reason" is looking at the instrument of our perception. It's not so much concerned with what is reality, but the mode in which we perceive reality and can have any experience or thought at all.

First the book introduces us to a fundamental question. The British philosopher Hume said that nothing useful is gained from pure reason, and this troubled Kant, because the whole conceit behind metaphysics was (and is) that it explores the nature of reality through pure reason. Does that mean the "science" of metaphysics is just mumbo jumbo? It sure seems even now that metaphysicians can't agree on anything. So what kind of knowledge can we even get from such a study? Does metaphysical knowledge even exist?

Kant then sets out to find the answer. What follows is essentially a gigantic proof that metaphysical knowledge does exist, and that it is "synthetic a priori" knowledge. And that makes sense. Metaphysics is supposed to study that which is universal and necessary. So it's a priori. Check. But metaphysics is not supposed to just be mumbo jumbo. It's supposed to add to our knowledge. That means it is synthetic too.

In fact, it is synthetic a priori truths that allows us to construct the things we experience every day. We have innate ideas, these a priori concepts of understanding (which he calls Categories) and synthetic a prior knowledge. Then we need our brains with it's organs of sensibility to be able to receive impressions to understand in the first place. But our senses of hearing, vision, smell, touch, and taste all represent impressions in terms of space and time. Space and time are therefore the a priori forms of sensibility, and the are very universal and necessary components of the lenses through which we experience the world. This means that pure reason can in fact bring us truth, but this truth is only knowable by the instrument of our perceiving minds. The basic message of the critique is that when philosophers thought they were doing ontology, or describing the actual nature of things, they were wrong, because all we can do is analyze the way we UNDERSTAND things. This has incredible implications about space and time, which cannot exist in and of themselves but do exist within us, within our eyeglasses, for us to experience the world.

Kant calls this "transcendental idealism," because it transcends the two previous schools of philosophy: rationalism (only analytic a priori reasoning brings us truth) and empiricism (only a posteriori judgments of experience bring us any knowledge of the world). Our brains process things in terms of our intuitions of space and time, without which we can't use the universal and necessary science of mathematics for example, which is also synthetic and a priori. A triangle is defined as having three sides, but there are other properties that are not inherent in the definition, such as that all angles within the triangle must add up to 180 degrees. This is synthetic because it tells us something new, but it's universal in that we can't conceive of another place in the universe where the angles of a triangle do not add up to 180 degrees. Our number sense comes from our brains perceiving things in movements of time, just as geometry comes from our intuition of space. Space and time are not concepts like "bachelor." They are a priori intuitions, because they are infinite, yet also infinitely divisible. You may be able to infinitely divide up a concept like bachelor into white dudes, black dudes, happy dudes, lonely dudes, etc. But a bachelor is a single, limited concept. Space and time are not limited. Now, whether space and time are actually things is not knowable, because we are hard wired with them--they are contact lenses we can't take off.

It sure does seem like our brains came with some pre-loaded a priori software. In my everyday interaction with my little kids, I am reminded of how many words I've had to teach them. But when did I or anyone really explain to them "this," or "each," or "all," or "one"? It is mind-blowing stuff, and this is why Kant is famous, if not controversial, today. Kant himself was not modest about the work he did here, calling it a "Copernican revolution."

Believe me, I didn't understand all 400-some-odd pages of proofs. It is hard to not be lulled into a daydream by the incredibly dry and academic style of this work, though Kant occasionally shows he is capable of writing beautiful prose with the best of them. Perhaps I should have first read Kant's "Prolegomena," published two years earlier, as I understand this was written to ease readers into the "Critique," and ultimately provides a nice summary of what he was trying to accomplish here. But I dove right into the "Critique" anyway, thinking that there was no other way to do justice to work upon which Kant dedicated fourteen years of his life. There are plenty of summaries of this book out there in a variety of media, but if you don't want to take Kant at face-value, then you really need to analyze how he comes to his conclusions to really appreciate the genius at play. Besides, as Kant says in Book II of his Transcendental Analytic of the "Critique," the power of our understanding is weakened without examples and practice of judgment.

Of course, taking the full "Critique" has it's pitfalls. It's the kind of endeavor that makes you start smoking cigarettes again. And before you know it, you've consumed an entire carafe of coffee before you've finished the introduction. It cost me multiple hours studying just a few pages in a sitting. I made the mistake of trying to read this in bed before going to sleep, and insomnia was my reward. I started going down rabbit holes I never imagined. When I came across a judgement in one of his proofs that made no sense to me, or which seemed to contradict an earlier statement, or with which I flatly disagreed, I started looking up what other scholars thought about his idea to see if I was crazy or stupid. One morning, while driving to work, I was thinking angrily about one of his proofs, and ran a red light. And after all was said and done, I'll never fully retain a pittance of what I gleamed from this meaty time without years of further study, something to which I'm not sure I could ever commit. I'll leave a random example of one of these proofs that bothered me in the comments below, and I certainly welcome any enlightening discourse.

So is it worth it? It depends on what are your expectations. I went into the "Critique" hoping to train by brain to think more critically and logically, to sharpen my skills of thinking outside the literal box, to understand the fundamentals of my own profession of psychiatry, and to get an appreciation of thought at an atomic level. Transcendental idealism has been a great influence on modern psychology. Instead of operating under the assumption of behaviors stemming from moral failures, possession by demons, and bad blood, we must examine the spectacles through which a person views the world. As a psychiatrist who has studied the works of say, Heinz Kohut, I certainly can see the connection to Kant's style and thought. I would say that therefore I came away from this book well contented. Truth be told, I actually had a lot of fun.

So does this mean I will be tackling one of Kant's "sequels," like "The Critique of Practical Reason" anytime soon? Whew. I don't know. Maybe some other time. But Kant's seminal work receives my highest recommendation, even if you are not a philosopher or are studying to be one.

I must warn you, though, that if you are looking for enlightenment, or proof of the existence of God, look elsewhere. Kant even says that, as an endeavor to enlarge your sphere of understanding in regard to pure a priori cognition, "philosophy is worse than useless." I don't know if I'd be quite so harsh, but at the very least, it's not worth the smoking habit, the insomnia, or the traffic jam.

[Wided Nems · Rating 5 out of 5]

في كتابه نقد العقل الخالص , يحاول ايمانويل كانت أن يحسم الصراع الفلسفي المطروح في نظرية الابستيمولوجيا عن مصدر المدركات _من خلال البرهنة على مدى تكامل الحدوس الحسيّة والأفاهيم العقلية المحضة في عملية البناء المعرفي , متجاوزًا كل التفسيرات الدوغمائية السابقة عند العقلانيين أو الحسيين على حد سواء
وإذا كان ايمانويل كانت يبرهن على العلاقة التفاعلية بين الملكتين الحسية الامبيرية والافاهيم الفاهمية المحضة , فإنه يجيبنا عن الإشكال : كيف نصل إلى المعرفة؟ ليتجاوزه إلى تساؤل جوهري آخر يحتاج إلى الحسم في إشكالاته هو : ماذا يمكننا أن نعرف ؟ أو ماهي حدود معارفنا ؟ فإذا كانت معرفة ظاهرات الأشياء_فينومينا_ ممكنة , فإن العقل المحض في مقابل ذلك عاجز عن ادراك كنهها_نومينا
nauméne _أي الشيء في ذاته ,

وهذا التسليم بحدود معيّنة للعقل للخالص يعجز في النهاية عن تجاوزها , هو في ذات الوقت خطوة أساسية في اتجاه ميتافيزيقيا قادرة على أن تقوم كعلم! _على حد تعبير كانت_, من خلال تقويض المزاعم التي تدّعي بثقة أن في إمكانها إثبات قضايا ميتافيزيقية أنطولوجية هي في الواقع تتجاوز حدود العقل , ومن ثم غير ممكنة الإثبات أو النفي مادامت تركن إلى حجج عقلية محضة _خارج حقل التجربة

"يمكن عدّ نقد العقل المحض بمثابة المحكمة الحقيقية لكل نزاعاته , لأنه ليس معنيّا في النزاعات من حيث تدور على الموضوعات مباشرة بل أنه مهيأ لتعيين حقوق العقل بعامة ..وهكذا ترغمنا نزاعات العقل التي لا تنتهي على أن نبحث أخيرا عن السكينة والطمأنينة في نقدٍ للعقل نفسه"

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

People universally say this book is one of the most difficult (if not most difficult) of the philosophy books, and they love taking pieces out of context to show how Kant is wrong. After having listen to this masterpiece, they are misleading on both points.

First, do not listen to the overview and summary until you have listened to the whole book. Start the book at chapter 18. I made the mistake of listening to the book linearly from the beginning, and got overwhelmed by the overview and summary. I went back and re-listened to them and found them edifying. The exact opposite from how I felt when I heard them before reading the book.

Kant wants to establish absolute knowledge as real. Up to his point in time (1781), there was a dichotomy regarding knowledge, empirical v. rational (Hume v Locke). Kant does his best to bridge that gap. He'll get detailed in developing categories that we use for our conceptions (quality, quantity, relations, and modal (real v. imaginary) and he'll cross that with unity, plurality, and totality). This is an area where it got difficult to follow since he was definitely referring to tables that I had to keep recreating in my head. He's doing all this because he want's to show that concepts (ideas) can come about and will be true. Oh yeah, he's going to give us the pure category of space and time which reside within our brains. My point of saying all of this, is to just show that he is not that hard to follow.

A little more context, our perceptions give reality (i.e. the thing in itself must be constructed by our senses). Or in other words, there is the immediate v. the mediate. The thing in itself verse the filter of the brain. The thing we perceive v. reality. But, Kant is setting the reader up for his tearing down of most of philosophy. I would strongly recommend listening (or watching) the Dan Robinson 8 hour lecture series he gave at Oxford for a general audience of students and guest freely available through Itunes or on Open Culture.

After Kant lays the ground work he starts dismantling of the standard proofs for the existence of God, and the immortal soul, and the immaterial soul. He uses the standard theistic proofs: Ontological (i.e. Saint Anslem's 'since you can think of a perfect being there must be a perfect being'), Teleological (i.e. by design, he calls it 'physical theology'), and the Cosmological argument (i.e. first cause). He does finer arguments for the atheist cause than I have read in any modern atheist handbook. In the end, he 'proves' God by appealing to practical reason (contrasted with pure reason) and the certainty of man's (and woman's) morality toward well being in general.

A big part of why he wrote the book lies elsewhere. He'll say that the nature of science is to use the inductive method, to go from the particular to the general, and from the general to create a set of principals. These principals are what he calls 'apoditic' (i.e., beyond dispute). That is what gives us our necessary (and certain) truths. Truths are not contingent (and probable) but become necessary (and certain). He'll say that our understanding come about through our intuitions (both empirical and non-empirical) which determine events and lead to our concepts.

Don't be so fast to dismiss what he has to say. He's writing at the very end of the Age of Enlightenment, and Newton and his Principia are believed to be absolutely true and necessary truths. Newton says "I will feign no hypothesis'. He says that in reference to not being able to say what gravity really is, but he also believes he made no other hypotheses and statements not completely backed by data. I have many times argued with Physicist that truth is not absolute, and they will always come back "oh yeah, what about force equals mass times acceleration", and I will respond, "yes, but Einstein came up with the relativistic correction, and so that is not true", and if I haven't completely bored them I will go on to explain how F=ma is a tautology, and if they haven't yet left me due to disinterest like most people who will read this review, I will even show how in mathematics no one can define what a set is with out being circular (i.e., tautological, a word that Kant uses frequently in this book. So know that it just means the conclusion is included in the premise).

Kant will divide knowledge into synthetic and analytical. Synthetic (and the trick I used, since it begins with 'S' think senses) requires empirical knowledge gathered from the senses. Analytical, think mathematical truths. At its heart math is the study of changeless relations. Relations, are one of the four concepts that make up the twelve categories. Kant believes that mathematics is entwined with the real world. A triangle only makes sense since it can be visualized. He needs that in order to fully bridge his gap between the rational and the empirical. As for the truth regarding the nature of a triangle, your guess is as good as mine.

The reason I like this book so much I can state by paraphrasing something Kant said. He talks about Hume at length and does show him the utmost respect (I would even think that Hume would have liked this book), and says "that it's not so much that I can win the argument by reason, but that my reason I have employed is useful and the same methods can be used by others". Kant is up front by criticizing dogmatic arguments as boorish and self serving. He'll say that the loudest is not necessarily the most right, and the problem with the ignorant is they never know they are ignorant.

There are many pearls of wisdom with in this shell and it only has to be opened up and read in order to profit from it.

[Jenny Park · Rating 4 out of 5]

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... it's worth a read, esp if you are the soul searching type..

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life achievement unlocked. +10,000XP

[Michael Kress · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read a 224-page abridged version first, so I got to double down on some of the most important parts and get a deeper understanding of this laborious read. I spent a lot of time reading pre- and post-Kantian philosophy, as well as two short books by Kant himself, in order to prep for this. If you are new to philosophy and metaphysics, don't just dive right into this. Check out some of the major figures who are easier to understand than Kant. You're probably going to need to look up a lot of words. This is where a Kindle comes in handy; when you have to look up three or four (Kantian) words per page, it's nice to be able to pull it up right there. And don't skimp on the definitions; if you don't understand the words, you won't understand the philosophy. This book has improved and increased my vocabulary. Critique has not only helped me understand philosophy, but also metaphysical fiction and science. Because of this newfound knowledge, my re-reading of Descartes's Discourse on Method has been exponentially more rewarding than the first time. Critique is the most difficult book I've read, and part of what made it so fun was the challenge. Unlike many post-Kantian philosophers, he did not incorporate Eastern philosophy, so this is like the culmination of Western philosophy before the two regions merged. Although he was not involved in scientific research, his views on space and time are obviously influential on today's physicists. Kant was not only a great philosopher but also a great writer, and used skill in bringing the theme of this treatise around to its title. As a reader, I had an epiphany of "Pure Reason."

[HappyHarron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lit as fuck

[أحمد · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Lander Demonie · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's about the friends we made along the way - zelfs als die weg gemaakt is uit legoblokken, en je je schoenen thuis vergeten bent.

Wat als goeie filosofie kan gelden, is het brengen van verheldering in je eigen denken en de relatie van dat denken tot de wereld. Wat Kant doet, is uitleggen wat er nodig is om tot zo'n relatie te komen, en hoe we, vanuit de natuur van de rede, komen tot punten waar we onmogelijk toegang tot hebben op een kennistheoretisch vlak, maar die net daarom iets zeggen over onze rede en de relatie tussen die rede en de diversiteit in de natuur.

Voor iedereen die zich vragen stelt - leesleeslees! Al is het maar om tot inzicht te komen in waarom je vragen stelt. Antwoorden worden niet echt gegeven.

[Tyler · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 book instead elicits confusion. Its most notable outcome lies in establishing as apparent fact that an ever more complex system-building was the solution to the challenges of the day.

Such entanglement in itself casts doubt on whether Kant succeeded in the task he set himself. Parsimony eschews needless complexity in order to avoid claiming more than is necessary and overdetermining an explantion. Galileo's predecessors, for instance, had kept adding epicyles upon epicyles to tottering hypotheses, never pausing to think what all that tinkering meant. So should it not have struck Kant at some point -- perhaps after the thirtieth clause-juggling, neuron-frizzing, eye-popping parenthetical remark -- that just maybe a better answer to Hume's smouldering skepticism could be found than by throwing gasoline on the embers?

The insights gleaned from this book are many, but the pieces do not build up to a functional explanation of the world. Trying to work through Being and Nothingness, for example, is tough, but at least the whole of it falls within the scope of human understanding. The same cannot be said for Critique of Pure Reason.

[Crito · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's recommended to have at least read Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, and Hume before reading this. And since reading this is a skeleton key of sorts to all philosophy since Kant, he's in this really interesting point between two eras of philosophy. Some of what makes him hard to follow at first is that which defines his approach to philosophy, which is intensely meticulous and methodical, yet laid out plainly. And after you start appreciating his ideas and style, you start getting not only how brilliant he is, but also how humble and sincere he is. Sure he'll rip someone's philosophy to shreds it's but in the interest of the advancement of reason, and he'll even treat layman's ideas with as much seriousness as he treats fellow philosophers. He's in it just to do his part and that's admirable (and arguably necessary) in a philosopher. I read the Müller translation and despite the fact that it's a dated translation, it doesn't read like it at all. I don't know German and I'm no Kant expert but I feel like it's a good translation.