What do you think?
Rate this book
Cambridge Philosophy Classics
Kant's Analytic
Mr Bennett, as was to be expected, has written a 1st-rate book on Kant's Analytic. It's vivid, entertaining & extremely instructive. It will be found of absorbing interest both by those who already know the Critique & by those-if there are any such-who have a developed interest in philosophy, yet no direct acquaintance with Kant. These last it will surely drive to the text &, as surely, will drive them to approach it in a truly philosophical spirit. Bennett's Kant isn't a giant immersed, or frozen, in time. He's a great contemporary-a little out of touch, admittedly, with recent developments in mathematics & physics-but one with whom we can all argue, against him, at his side, or obliquely to him. So Bennett does argue, continuously, fiercely & fruitfully; & summons to join in the argument, at appropriate moments, those older contemporaries, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley & Hume, & those younger contemporaries, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Ayler, Quine, Quinton, Warnock etc. This is splendid, & a necessary corrective to that extraordinary isolation in which Kant tends to be islanded, partly indeed, by his own unique qualities, but partly by oceans of the wrong kind of respect. Bennett, continuously engaging his great antagonist, shows the right kind.
- GenresPhilosophy
267 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
7 people are currently reading
109 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 6, 2017
Je Suis Charlie
10 January 2015
Okay Kant may not be satire, nor is he French, but as I was finishing off this academic analysis of the second half of his A Critique of Pure Reason I could not help but think that there is some connection between his writings from two-hundred years ago and the tragic events in Paris over the last week. I guess in many ways it has a lot to do with freedom of speech and with the idea of censorship, which may not be what Kant was necessarily writing about, but he does explore the idea of freedom, especially freedom to be able to think outside of the dogmatic circles of his day. In another way many of us here are writers (and while we may not be paid for the writing that we do, those of us who write reviews, blog posts, or even academic essays are still writers) and as such the brutal murder at Charlie Hebdo no doubt struck a chord – it did so with myself.
However, moving on I should say a few things about this particular book. Bennett outlines the reason for writing this book to make the second half of Critique of Pure Reason more accessible to many of us. Personally I didn't really think that he was all that successful in that regards because, to me, it seemed to be little more than another dry academic text to go along with the plethora of other academic texts on the subject. In a way I felt that maybe I would get a lot more out of reading Kant as opposed to reading a book about him.
It is interesting though to examine the philosophy of the earlier period because it seems that the discipline was much broader than it is today. I remember going to a meeting of the philosophy club at one of the universities in Adelaide and most of the discussion seemed to be how philosophy relates to ethics. While it is true that ethics is an important part of philosophy, it is not the only aspect and to ignore the other aspects really does not do it justice.
In Kant's days, and earlier, philosophy and science were in the same thing, and it is only recently that the two disciplines have gone their separate ways. For instance Aristotle wrote about a lot of things, including literary criticism, science, ethics, and even constitutional law. However these days when we think of a philosopher many of us get the picture of some guy with his head in the clouds who has no understanding of the real world in which we live.
What was really surprising was the amount of maths that Bennett was using in his work, though I must admit that this did end up losing me (which is probably why the original work would have been a better read). However, he does talk about the dialectic in areas such as the concept of infinity (how can there be a synthesis of the finite and the infinite?). Infinity is also quite interesting because in some ways it can really create a lot of headaches. We, in many ways, are not capable of truly understanding the infinite especially when our minds are only able to understand the finite. I remember asking my Dad once about how we knew that numbers were infinite, and he told me to think of the biggest number possible and then add one. In the same way numbers are infinite in more ways because by going down the negative it is infinite, and by looking at fractions it is also infinite.
The other thing that I noted was that there was a lot of discussion of the nature of God. This is not surprising because much of philosophy is trying to understand the world in which we live and also the nature of reality as we perceive it. The title of Kant's work does give us a clue as to the direction that he was heading because in a way he is writing against the earlier philosophers such as David Hume, Rene Descartes, and John Locke, who saw the world through a purely rational mindset. Kant does not necessarily seem to believe that it is all that helpful to view the world in such a way because we seem to be trying to encapsulate our understanding within a sphere that can only be measured rationally. The rational mind suggests that because we cannot prove the existence of God then God must not exist, however that logic is flawed in the sense that just because we cannot prove something does not mean that the proof does not exist, nor is the lack of a proof a proof in and of itself.
However, this book was a little disappointing because even though it was an interesting read, Bennett did not seem to be going anywhere, and when I came to the last sentence of the last paragraph I was left thinking 'gee, is that all there is?' In fact, there was no conclusion, at all, which sort of left me scratching my head because if Bennett is an academic I always thought that their academic treatise's were supposed to have conclusions.
I have written a post about the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the limitations of Freedom of Speech in my blog.
10 January 2015
Okay Kant may not be satire, nor is he French, but as I was finishing off this academic analysis of the second half of his A Critique of Pure Reason I could not help but think that there is some connection between his writings from two-hundred years ago and the tragic events in Paris over the last week. I guess in many ways it has a lot to do with freedom of speech and with the idea of censorship, which may not be what Kant was necessarily writing about, but he does explore the idea of freedom, especially freedom to be able to think outside of the dogmatic circles of his day. In another way many of us here are writers (and while we may not be paid for the writing that we do, those of us who write reviews, blog posts, or even academic essays are still writers) and as such the brutal murder at Charlie Hebdo no doubt struck a chord – it did so with myself.
However, moving on I should say a few things about this particular book. Bennett outlines the reason for writing this book to make the second half of Critique of Pure Reason more accessible to many of us. Personally I didn't really think that he was all that successful in that regards because, to me, it seemed to be little more than another dry academic text to go along with the plethora of other academic texts on the subject. In a way I felt that maybe I would get a lot more out of reading Kant as opposed to reading a book about him.
It is interesting though to examine the philosophy of the earlier period because it seems that the discipline was much broader than it is today. I remember going to a meeting of the philosophy club at one of the universities in Adelaide and most of the discussion seemed to be how philosophy relates to ethics. While it is true that ethics is an important part of philosophy, it is not the only aspect and to ignore the other aspects really does not do it justice.
In Kant's days, and earlier, philosophy and science were in the same thing, and it is only recently that the two disciplines have gone their separate ways. For instance Aristotle wrote about a lot of things, including literary criticism, science, ethics, and even constitutional law. However these days when we think of a philosopher many of us get the picture of some guy with his head in the clouds who has no understanding of the real world in which we live.
What was really surprising was the amount of maths that Bennett was using in his work, though I must admit that this did end up losing me (which is probably why the original work would have been a better read). However, he does talk about the dialectic in areas such as the concept of infinity (how can there be a synthesis of the finite and the infinite?). Infinity is also quite interesting because in some ways it can really create a lot of headaches. We, in many ways, are not capable of truly understanding the infinite especially when our minds are only able to understand the finite. I remember asking my Dad once about how we knew that numbers were infinite, and he told me to think of the biggest number possible and then add one. In the same way numbers are infinite in more ways because by going down the negative it is infinite, and by looking at fractions it is also infinite.
The other thing that I noted was that there was a lot of discussion of the nature of God. This is not surprising because much of philosophy is trying to understand the world in which we live and also the nature of reality as we perceive it. The title of Kant's work does give us a clue as to the direction that he was heading because in a way he is writing against the earlier philosophers such as David Hume, Rene Descartes, and John Locke, who saw the world through a purely rational mindset. Kant does not necessarily seem to believe that it is all that helpful to view the world in such a way because we seem to be trying to encapsulate our understanding within a sphere that can only be measured rationally. The rational mind suggests that because we cannot prove the existence of God then God must not exist, however that logic is flawed in the sense that just because we cannot prove something does not mean that the proof does not exist, nor is the lack of a proof a proof in and of itself.
However, this book was a little disappointing because even though it was an interesting read, Bennett did not seem to be going anywhere, and when I came to the last sentence of the last paragraph I was left thinking 'gee, is that all there is?' In fact, there was no conclusion, at all, which sort of left me scratching my head because if Bennett is an academic I always thought that their academic treatise's were supposed to have conclusions.
I have written a post about the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the limitations of Freedom of Speech in my blog.
September 29, 2011
This Kant scholar approaches the Critique of Pure Reason like a housekeeper walking into a room wrecked by last night’s party. It’s going to take effort to put this mess in order, but the tart-tongued Bennett knows how. “Here, even more than usual,” he says, “respect for Kant’s genius requires an irreverent approach to his text.”
The author finds much of the Critique a “botch.” Some lines of reasoning are just wrong. Bennet deplores Kant’s “dreadful” appeals to geometry in trying to subordinate time to space. Parts of Kant’s work stand in dire need of clarity. The schema of necessity he finds indistinguishable from that of substance. Substance itself has two meanings. The concept of an object is likewise ambiguous. Representation, too, could refer to intuitions or concepts. And the entire Refutation of Idealism is, quite simply, a “wretched piece of exposition.”
There’s more. Kant shifts his “preposterous” terminology indifferently. He uses sense, imagination and apperception in one place, then shifts a few pages later to apprehension, reproduction and recognition, then later still to perception/association/apperception. Finally, Kant appears to subsume all three concepts under imagination. Thus, a statement such as “The unity of apperception in relation to the synthesis of imagination is the understanding” seems to say anything and nothing.
You'd think Bennett doesn’t much like Kant, but the author finds a lot to admire. The Critique was the first to distinguish between sensory states and concepts. Kant’s discussion of objects marks an historic advance in philosophy. Kant’s linkage of concepts to their instances is described as revolutionary. The stress the Critique puts on necessity brings that concept to its modern form. Kant convincingly shows that self-consciousness, far from being a mystery, requires judgments about the past. Bennett calls a 30-page stretch of the Critique concerning the analogies one of the great passages in philosophy.
This book helped me understand Kant better. I saw that Kant’s rebuttal of Hume is flawed not by Kant’s notion of necessity, but by the way he extrudes his argument through layers of categories, schema and problem-laden terminology. It also made me think more about the Critique: How does Kant’s treatment of concepts play out at the propositional level? If we understand the concepts of a proposition, do we then understand the proposition itself?
Bennett's book deals with the part of the Critique called the Analytic, and a companion book deals with the Dialectic. Nevertheless, the first of three chapters includes the Aesthetic as well. Bennett divides his analysis into 54 sections, and at the front of the book is a seven page summary that recaps the main points of each section, making this an easy reference. For anyone who has read Kant, Bennett’s book is an immensely helpful bit of housecleaning.
The author finds much of the Critique a “botch.” Some lines of reasoning are just wrong. Bennet deplores Kant’s “dreadful” appeals to geometry in trying to subordinate time to space. Parts of Kant’s work stand in dire need of clarity. The schema of necessity he finds indistinguishable from that of substance. Substance itself has two meanings. The concept of an object is likewise ambiguous. Representation, too, could refer to intuitions or concepts. And the entire Refutation of Idealism is, quite simply, a “wretched piece of exposition.”
There’s more. Kant shifts his “preposterous” terminology indifferently. He uses sense, imagination and apperception in one place, then shifts a few pages later to apprehension, reproduction and recognition, then later still to perception/association/apperception. Finally, Kant appears to subsume all three concepts under imagination. Thus, a statement such as “The unity of apperception in relation to the synthesis of imagination is the understanding” seems to say anything and nothing.
You'd think Bennett doesn’t much like Kant, but the author finds a lot to admire. The Critique was the first to distinguish between sensory states and concepts. Kant’s discussion of objects marks an historic advance in philosophy. Kant’s linkage of concepts to their instances is described as revolutionary. The stress the Critique puts on necessity brings that concept to its modern form. Kant convincingly shows that self-consciousness, far from being a mystery, requires judgments about the past. Bennett calls a 30-page stretch of the Critique concerning the analogies one of the great passages in philosophy.
This book helped me understand Kant better. I saw that Kant’s rebuttal of Hume is flawed not by Kant’s notion of necessity, but by the way he extrudes his argument through layers of categories, schema and problem-laden terminology. It also made me think more about the Critique: How does Kant’s treatment of concepts play out at the propositional level? If we understand the concepts of a proposition, do we then understand the proposition itself?
Bennett's book deals with the part of the Critique called the Analytic, and a companion book deals with the Dialectic. Nevertheless, the first of three chapters includes the Aesthetic as well. Bennett divides his analysis into 54 sections, and at the front of the book is a seven page summary that recaps the main points of each section, making this an easy reference. For anyone who has read Kant, Bennett’s book is an immensely helpful bit of housecleaning.
November 1, 2020
Having read most of Kant, most of the stuff that's still read at least, I started delving into the secondary material, starting with Bennett. I was not impressed in the literal sense of not recalling much in particular about this book beyond recalling that it treated only of the first part of the First Critique. So far as the secondary literature goes, what I still recall as illuminating were two biographies of Kant and, most especially, Norman Kemp Smith's commentary on the 'Critique of Pure Reason'.
November 4, 2021
Bennett writes, “I have no feelings about the man Immanuel Kant; and in my exploration of his work I have no room for notions like those of charity, sympathy, deference, or hostility.”
I picked this book up for reasons other than what is Bennett’s free-wheeling adaptation of the first Critique, but it didn’t necessarily disappoint with regard to its self-defined purpose. Bennett is a passionate thinker and writer dealing with controversial and hyper-scholastic ideas in a human voice. Some explanations of basic concepts in C1 I will certainly come back to for their explanatory efficacy, particularly the explanation of Kant’s categories of judgements: quantity, quality, relation, modality. Also, his description of the a priori synthesis of apperception was notably affective.
I’ve been warned that Bennett erred a bit to the psychologistic reading that Kant scholarship has disavowed. I have to read his Kant’s Dialectic first (since it’s here) but perhaps I’ll have more to say about Bennett’s interpretation after finding more charitable and reverent accounts.
I picked this book up for reasons other than what is Bennett’s free-wheeling adaptation of the first Critique, but it didn’t necessarily disappoint with regard to its self-defined purpose. Bennett is a passionate thinker and writer dealing with controversial and hyper-scholastic ideas in a human voice. Some explanations of basic concepts in C1 I will certainly come back to for their explanatory efficacy, particularly the explanation of Kant’s categories of judgements: quantity, quality, relation, modality. Also, his description of the a priori synthesis of apperception was notably affective.
I’ve been warned that Bennett erred a bit to the psychologistic reading that Kant scholarship has disavowed. I have to read his Kant’s Dialectic first (since it’s here) but perhaps I’ll have more to say about Bennett’s interpretation after finding more charitable and reverent accounts.
February 7, 2018
He's very critical of Kant and doesn't simply kneel and worship him.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews