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Collected Works
This carefully crafted ebook: “Collected Works of Immanuel Kant: Complete Critiques, Philosophical Works and Essays (Including Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation)” is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents.
Table of Contents:
Introduction:
IMMANUEL KANT by Robert Adamson
KANT’S INAUGURAL DISSERTATION OF 1770
Three Critiques:
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON
THE CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON
THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT
Critical Works:
PRELOGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE METAPHYSICS
FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF THE METAPHYSIC OF MORALS
THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS
Philosophy of Law; or, The Science of Right
The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics
Pre-Critical Works and Essays:
DREAMS OF A SPIRIT-SEER
IDEA OF A UNIVERSAL HISTORY ON A COSMOPOLITICAL PLAN
Preface to THE METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS OF NATURAL SCIENCE
PERPETUAL PEACE: A Philosophical Essay
OF THE INJUSTICE OF COUNTERFEITING BOOKS
Criticism:
CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY by Arthur Schopenhauer
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher, who, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is "the central figure of modern philosophy." Kant argued that fundamental concepts of the human mind structure human experience, that reason is the source of morality, that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment, that space and time are forms of our understanding, and that the world as it is "in-itself" is unknowable. Kant took himself to have effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy, akin to Copernicus' reversal of the age-old belief that the sun revolved around the earth.
2450 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1900
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About the author
Immanuel Kant
3,123 books4,460 followersImmanuel 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 10, 2021
I did read this book cover-to-cover. This book was a cleverly curated compiled canon of Kant’s creations and Kant commentary consumed consciencely cover-to-cover by me, it represents the best of what Kant wrote overall and what was written about him as of about 1920.
Kant’s first critique did not happen in a vacuum and two things are necessary for the modern reader to understand it: 1) the background Kant existed in and 2) the reality he created for himself. This book puts the second in perspective by showing Kant’s evolution overtime, and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials by Manfred Kühn, Eric Watkins provides some insight for the first necessity.
Sprinkled throughout this book within the introductions of most of the Kant presented works there was good commentary which provided insight into Kant’s milieu.
I thought there was one book that really didn’t fit this book and that was An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant and it really seemed to dance around Kant’s contributions to Christian Thought, but it was interesting in itself for how Christian Thought considered itself in a 1915ish time period.
Kant and his influences so far have outlasted all of his critics and those critics are in the graveyard with their perpetual peace or soon will be while Kant stays with us. Kant is not indecipherable while as amply demonstrated by the commentaries in these collected works, though he does have major inconsistencies in his writings.
There’s a real strength to reading a series of curated books like this one. The reader is forced to not dwell on the truths from any one book since by the time they understand that book, they’ve gone on to the next book in the series, and so by the time the reader is done with the collected works they have a feeling to what the life-time project of the person under considerations was really about instead of a text book recitation of chapter summaries which make sense only at an intellectual level, and Kant’s project included putting feeling into the intellectual by discovering what lies behind the thing-in-itself even if the thing-in-itself within us can be elusive to ourselves. It takes Fichte with his transcendental Ego to make the real self for itself, but that’s a comment for another book.
Obviously, a book like this one with all of its complexity I did not read while sitting down in a chair, but I listened to it through a synthetically generated computer voice while riding a bicycle on isolated desert trails while watching out for rattle snakes (the bane for desert bike riders are rattle snakes, yuck!), and that made the feelings that came from Kant’s life-time project all the more real to me.
We live in a great age, that a book like this well compiled book is just a key-stroke away. Don’t let anyone tell you Kant is overrated. He is not. Or if they do, have them read these collected works and then debate the matter with them.
Kant’s first critique did not happen in a vacuum and two things are necessary for the modern reader to understand it: 1) the background Kant existed in and 2) the reality he created for himself. This book puts the second in perspective by showing Kant’s evolution overtime, and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials by Manfred Kühn, Eric Watkins provides some insight for the first necessity.
Sprinkled throughout this book within the introductions of most of the Kant presented works there was good commentary which provided insight into Kant’s milieu.
I thought there was one book that really didn’t fit this book and that was An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant and it really seemed to dance around Kant’s contributions to Christian Thought, but it was interesting in itself for how Christian Thought considered itself in a 1915ish time period.
Kant and his influences so far have outlasted all of his critics and those critics are in the graveyard with their perpetual peace or soon will be while Kant stays with us. Kant is not indecipherable while as amply demonstrated by the commentaries in these collected works, though he does have major inconsistencies in his writings.
There’s a real strength to reading a series of curated books like this one. The reader is forced to not dwell on the truths from any one book since by the time they understand that book, they’ve gone on to the next book in the series, and so by the time the reader is done with the collected works they have a feeling to what the life-time project of the person under considerations was really about instead of a text book recitation of chapter summaries which make sense only at an intellectual level, and Kant’s project included putting feeling into the intellectual by discovering what lies behind the thing-in-itself even if the thing-in-itself within us can be elusive to ourselves. It takes Fichte with his transcendental Ego to make the real self for itself, but that’s a comment for another book.
Obviously, a book like this one with all of its complexity I did not read while sitting down in a chair, but I listened to it through a synthetically generated computer voice while riding a bicycle on isolated desert trails while watching out for rattle snakes (the bane for desert bike riders are rattle snakes, yuck!), and that made the feelings that came from Kant’s life-time project all the more real to me.
We live in a great age, that a book like this well compiled book is just a key-stroke away. Don’t let anyone tell you Kant is overrated. He is not. Or if they do, have them read these collected works and then debate the matter with them.
i-want-money
May 16, 2015Kinda sweet ::
http://www.manchester.edu/kant/helps/...
http://www.manchester.edu/kant/helps/...
reference-notes
August 30, 2025“We can know things only relative to ourselves. Knowledge is restricted to the sensible effects of things on us, and these appearances or phenomena are, as it were, predigested. Contrary to the usual assumption, the mind never experiences what is "out there" apart from the mind in some clear, undistorted mirroring of objective "reality." Rather, "reality" for man is necessarily one of his own making, and the world in itself must remain something one can only think about, never know. … As thought without sensation is empty, so is sensation without thought blind. Only in conjunction can understanding and sensibility supply objectively valid knowledge of things.
“The epistemological consequences of Kant's Copernican revolution were not without disturbing features. Kant had rejoined the knower to the known, but not the knower to any objective reality, to the object in itself. Knower and known were united, as it were, in a solipsistic prison. Man knows, as indeed Aquinas and Aristotle had said, because he judges things through the medium of a priori principles; but man cannot know whether these internal principles possess any ultimate relevance to the real world, or to any absolute truth or being outside the human mind.
There was now no divine warrant for the mind's cognitive categories, such as Aquinas's lumen intellectus agentis, the light of the active intellect. Man could not determine whether his knowledge had some fundamental relation to a universal reality or whether it was merely a human reality.
Only the subjective necessity of such knowledge was certain. For the modern mind, the inevitable outcome of a critical rationalism and a critical empiricism was a Kantian subjectivism limited to the phenomenal world: Man had no necessary insight into the transcendent, nor into the world as such. Man could know things only as they appeared to him, not as they were in themselves. In retrospect, the long-term consequences of both the Copernican and the Kantian revolutions were fundamentally ambiguous, at once liberating and diminishing. Both revolutions awakened man to a new, more adventurous reality, yet both also radically displaced man—one from the center of the cosmos, the other from genuine cognition of that cosmos. Cosmological alienation was thereby compounded by epistemological alienation.
“Kant argued that his limitation of science's competence to the phenomenal, his recognition of man's ignorance concerning things in themselves, opened up the possibility of faith. … The inner experience of duty, the impulse to selfless moral virtue, permitted Kant to transcend the otherwise daunting limitations of the modern mind's world picture, which had reduced the knowable world to one of appearance and mechanistic necessity. Kant was thereby able to rescue religion from scientific determinism, just as he had rescued science from radical skepticism.
“From Hume and Kant through Darwin, Marx, Freud and beyond, an unsettling conclusion was becoming inescapable: Human thought was determined, structured, and very probably distorted by a multitude of overlapping factors— innate but nonabsolute mental categories, habit, history, culture, social class, biology, language, imagination, emotion, the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious. In the end, the human mind could not be relied upon as an accurate judge of reality. … For Kant's recognition of the human mind's subjective ordering of reality, and thus, finally, the relative and unrooted nature of human knowledge, has been extended and deepened by a host of subsequent developments, from anthropology, linguistics, sociology of knowledge, and quantum physics to cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, semiotics, and philosophy of science; from Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud to Heisenberg, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, and Foucault. The consensus is decisive: The world is in some essential sense a construct. Human knowledge is radically interpretive. There are no perspective-independent facts. Every act of perception and cognition is contingent, mediated, situated, contextual, theory-soaked. Human language cannot establish its ground in an independent reality. Meaning is rendered by the mind and cannot be assumed to inhere in the object, in the world beyond the mind, for that world can never be contacted without having already been saturated by the mind's own nature. That world cannot even be justifiably postulated. Radical uncertainty prevails, for in the end what one knows and experiences is to an indeterminate extent a projection.
Thus the cosmological estrangement of modern consciousness initiated by Copernicus and the ontological estrangement initiated by Descartes were completed by the epistemological estrangement initiated by Kant: a threefold mutually enforced prison of modern alienation.”
Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind
“The epistemological consequences of Kant's Copernican revolution were not without disturbing features. Kant had rejoined the knower to the known, but not the knower to any objective reality, to the object in itself. Knower and known were united, as it were, in a solipsistic prison. Man knows, as indeed Aquinas and Aristotle had said, because he judges things through the medium of a priori principles; but man cannot know whether these internal principles possess any ultimate relevance to the real world, or to any absolute truth or being outside the human mind.
There was now no divine warrant for the mind's cognitive categories, such as Aquinas's lumen intellectus agentis, the light of the active intellect. Man could not determine whether his knowledge had some fundamental relation to a universal reality or whether it was merely a human reality.
Only the subjective necessity of such knowledge was certain. For the modern mind, the inevitable outcome of a critical rationalism and a critical empiricism was a Kantian subjectivism limited to the phenomenal world: Man had no necessary insight into the transcendent, nor into the world as such. Man could know things only as they appeared to him, not as they were in themselves. In retrospect, the long-term consequences of both the Copernican and the Kantian revolutions were fundamentally ambiguous, at once liberating and diminishing. Both revolutions awakened man to a new, more adventurous reality, yet both also radically displaced man—one from the center of the cosmos, the other from genuine cognition of that cosmos. Cosmological alienation was thereby compounded by epistemological alienation.
“Kant argued that his limitation of science's competence to the phenomenal, his recognition of man's ignorance concerning things in themselves, opened up the possibility of faith. … The inner experience of duty, the impulse to selfless moral virtue, permitted Kant to transcend the otherwise daunting limitations of the modern mind's world picture, which had reduced the knowable world to one of appearance and mechanistic necessity. Kant was thereby able to rescue religion from scientific determinism, just as he had rescued science from radical skepticism.
“From Hume and Kant through Darwin, Marx, Freud and beyond, an unsettling conclusion was becoming inescapable: Human thought was determined, structured, and very probably distorted by a multitude of overlapping factors— innate but nonabsolute mental categories, habit, history, culture, social class, biology, language, imagination, emotion, the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious. In the end, the human mind could not be relied upon as an accurate judge of reality. … For Kant's recognition of the human mind's subjective ordering of reality, and thus, finally, the relative and unrooted nature of human knowledge, has been extended and deepened by a host of subsequent developments, from anthropology, linguistics, sociology of knowledge, and quantum physics to cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, semiotics, and philosophy of science; from Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud to Heisenberg, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, and Foucault. The consensus is decisive: The world is in some essential sense a construct. Human knowledge is radically interpretive. There are no perspective-independent facts. Every act of perception and cognition is contingent, mediated, situated, contextual, theory-soaked. Human language cannot establish its ground in an independent reality. Meaning is rendered by the mind and cannot be assumed to inhere in the object, in the world beyond the mind, for that world can never be contacted without having already been saturated by the mind's own nature. That world cannot even be justifiably postulated. Radical uncertainty prevails, for in the end what one knows and experiences is to an indeterminate extent a projection.
Thus the cosmological estrangement of modern consciousness initiated by Copernicus and the ontological estrangement initiated by Descartes were completed by the epistemological estrangement initiated by Kant: a threefold mutually enforced prison of modern alienation.”
Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind
January 16, 2020
Great ideas, hard to understand
I’m not sure how much I got from this. I only read about half of the first book, A Critique of Pure Reason. I think I get the gist, or some of it. We can’t know what’s real. We get most of our understanding through observations, which are just representations of reality. Some knowledge comes from our reason only. We can know a bit about how we observe. In particular, space and time are part of our way of understanding what we observe.
It’s really hard to read.
I’m not sure how much I got from this. I only read about half of the first book, A Critique of Pure Reason. I think I get the gist, or some of it. We can’t know what’s real. We get most of our understanding through observations, which are just representations of reality. Some knowledge comes from our reason only. We can know a bit about how we observe. In particular, space and time are part of our way of understanding what we observe.
It’s really hard to read.
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October 26, 2024Ch 36 P22 What a pity it is with such worshippers! No messenger has ever come to them unless they made fun of him.
April 11, 2015
Notice ahead of time, Kant is a terribly boring writer, and I do mean terribly boring. Perhaps if I could read German it would be more exciting. However, Kant is by far the best writer I have found in classical philosophy dealing with matters of transcendence. If you want to understand morality from the point of view of perhaps a refined Platonism, then Kant is your man. He finds some bedrock principles on which to base morality and pokes some holes in what would be a prevailing materialistic paradigm on which many "well-educated" people now rest.
May 12, 2010
..boring..
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews