Basic Writings

by Immanuel Kant, F. Max Müller (Translator), Thomas K. Abbott (Translator)

Introduction by Allen W. Wood
With translations by F. Max Müller and Thomas K. Abbott

The writings of Immanuel Kant became the cornerstone of all subsequent philosophical inquiry. They articulate the relationship between the human mind and all that it encounters and remain the most important influence on our concept of knowledge. As renowned Kant scholar Allen W. Wood writes in his Introduction, Kant “virtually laid the foundation for the way people in the last two centuries have confronted such widely differing subjects as the experience of beauty and the meaning of human history.” Edited and compiled by Dr. Wood, Basic Writings of Kant stands as a comprehensive summary of Kant’s contributions to modern thought, and gathers together the most respected translations of Kant’s key moral and political writings.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Classics, 18th Century, Read For School, History

512 pages, Paperback

First published July 10, 2001

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

[David M · Rating 5 out of 5]

We still live very much in the age of criticism. Kant as the first fully modern philosophy. Today everyone seems to love Spinoza, but there's also a sense in which no one really takes him seriously. While some of his conclusions may look ultra-contemporary and up-to-date, his method is antiquated. These days no one thinks it's possible to deduce the mind of God or the nature of the universe from pure axioms of reason. Rationalism in the strong sense went extinct a long time ago. Empiricism may have seemed like a plausible alternative, but then before too long Hume came along to show its self-destruction. By contrast Kant's whole problematic is still with us.

Kant inaugurates the modern discourse of philosophy - philosophy as universal yet impotent tribunal, knowledge of knowledge, investigation of the limits of intelligibility.

I'd say it's a mixed legacy. With Kant we forfeit immediacy. What is becomes irreparably severed from what we know.



*
Freedom as "obeying no law but that which [one] also gives" (pp 191)

Freedom as enslavement to oneself. Kant as the precursor to Freud.

Is it possible to conceive of freedom which would entail following no laws at all, not even one's own? would it still be right to call this "freedom"?

[Zane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to not only read this book (in one month's time) for the hardest class I've ever taken in college, but also memorize in detail every aspect of Kant's transcendental and moral philosophies. I have fucking erudite knowledge of Kant now, so if any of ya'll ever have a question about the a priori synthesis...

[Caleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to understand today's philosophical context, and by extension our political and social context, then you have to read Kant.
If you want to improve your own thinking, go somewhere else. Perhaps read works by a person who actually left the town of their birth at some point, and so aren't blissfully ignorant of the world. Or, even just read the works of a philosopher who's life is consistent with their own philosophy, somewhat unlike this billiard enthusiast.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Basic af

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely blown away by this. I initially tried reading Kant in German, but gave up the attempt and moved to this volume as a fall back. This is a collection of Kant's most stirring and profound thought. I had to slowly reread so many passages in the three Critiques that I lost count. Oddly enough, what struck me on this reading was how profoundly Gene Roddenberry was influenced by Kant. The United Federation of Planets, the Prime Directive, etc. all with their very Kantian universalism and rationalism. Having absorbed this reading, I can now ponder whether humanity should try to move beyond a Kantian ethics toward one more informed by Darwinian insights...

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, and probably worth reading, but definitely not entertaining.

[Limar Bernardo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard book to get through 😭

[Lucy · Rating 1 out of 5]

i still hate philosophy

[Mark Lisac · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably 5 stars for actual philosophers but I found it more like 3 stars on account of its difficult readability. One of Kant's learned contemporaries described Critique of Pure Reason as "a tough nut to crack." So it is. Even with the condensed version in this collection, taking 10 pages a day is likely the best approach. I wasn't patient enough to do that. That work tends to read like a taxonomy — a division of ideas into arbitrarily named orders and classes and genera, et cetera. One can only admire Kant for having the comprehensive vision to write this stuff and academics for having the ability to understand and translate it. The shorter essays are much clearer and provide a lot of food for thought.
Overall, the collection leaves a sense of Kant as an optimist about humanity but a clear enough thinker to know his optimism may be futile. He concludes in Critique of Pure Reason (I didn't read the "critiques" of practical reason and of judgment) that his fundamental principles are beyond the ability of human reason to prove. His idealism and aspirations for humanity are summed up at the end of his essay Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, in which he visualizes a sort of church in which all people "enter with one another into a voluntary, universal, and enduring union of hearts." Perhaps the most pungent statement in all his convoluted and often nearly opaque sentences, some of them five or eight lines long, is his well known admission that nothing straight was ever formed from the crooked timber of humanity. Still, there is something admirable about his massive work.

[Eye Summers · Rating 4 out of 5]

you get a heads up in the Introduction: "Kant usually wrote in the dry, cumbersome scholastic jargon he learned in an 18th-century German university..." & "readers have been frustrated to the point of exasperation by prose that seems gratuitously uninviting or even deliberately repellent."

and that pretty much sums it up. regardless of why one is led to read Kant, his works can oftentimes be a turgid chore to read. I found myself either struggling to make sense of it and/or listlessly half-reading. I was genuinely thankful when I finished. It was a mistake to make this my primary Commute book. It took me months to read.

I ended up curious about wanting to read more about Kant, after reading "Fanged Noumena," which incessantly references Kant for a large portion of that book. So naturally I picked up the "Basic Writings of Kant." And it is a fairly decent, entry-level collection for someone curious to start without having taken graduate level courses in Philosophy. But to really begin to grasp Kant, it is really advised to take baby steps (magazine articles, Youtube videos, a wise Mentor stepped in High Philosophy et cetera) to get a basic understanding of Kantian thought. maybe ??? or maybe just don't read Kant at all...?

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my slog through the great western philosophers, I have been dreading reaching Kant. I had to read a small slice of his writing as an undergraduate and was completely unable to decipher what he was talking about. The idea of reading a whole book of this famously difficult prose was a chore that I knew would tax me.

And yet! Just as I earlier returned to Hume to find my prior ideas flipped on their head, so too I now return to Kant and find that, while it is indeed a difficult text, it is not nearly so incomprehensible as I once thought. This version of the text has a useful introduction, and a person can work their way through it without feeling utterly lost.

For the legions of casual Kant readers such myself, this text serves the purpose admirably. My one complaint, and it is a frequent one, is that I do wish there more helpful footnotes in the text itself for those of us that will not have the benefit of a professor to explain this to us at a later point.

[Oskari · Rating 5 out of 5]

without a doubt, the most challenging read I've done, it required a great deal of my focus in order to absorb many of the concepts within it and even so, I felt some of them went over my head and were above my understanding, however, that empowered me to seek further studies and there were many others that were so amazingly enlightening.

[Erfan Abedi]

I've terminated my reading of this book effective immediately in order to read the full text. xD

[Leilani Tañeza]

She go categorical on my imperative til my maxims become universal law

[Alex Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good anthology of Kant's philosophy and a great primer for both experts on Kant and neophytes alike. The introduction by Allen Wood is also very good. I do, however, take issue with some of it:

1. The translations are very old and make Kant more difficult than one would hope - this makes Critique of Practical Reason unreadable in parts.
2. Key segments are left out of some of the selections - for instance, Kant's moral theology and and arguments for the existence of God are omitted from the text.
3. An index would be nice.

However, despite these problems, Dr. Wood, one of the leading Kant scholars, has put together an excellent collection of work covers quite a bit of the thought of the most important philosopher since Plato.

[David]

Unfortunately, my indigent state prohibits me from purchasing the full versions of the CPR, the Metaphysics of Morals, etc., so I'll have to stick with this collection of excerpts. The translation is okay, I suppose, but it's no match for the (for example) well-annotated Cambridge editions of his writings that include information about the original German (usually by means of brackets). The selections seem to be pretty good. Nothing major is left out, but then again, I'm not a Kant scholar, so my opinion is worth very little on the matter.

[Dax · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well so I read Kant. Yay. But I have to say I have to agree with modern philosophy that seems to be saying that Kant used / invented lots of long words to say a bunch of stuff that didn't amount to much more than a bit of rhetoric. But it helped extract Europe from the thought of the Middle Ages, so (perhaps) it's worth a read in that regard alone.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I mainly read the work "Fundamentals of the Metaphysicals of Morals", which is in this book. I enjoyed his writing style and while I do not agree with his system of practical and categorical imperatives, I think his ideas are important to be explored and considered, if only to realize the extensive influence Kant's theorems had on the philosophies of the last several centuries.

[Dave · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ummm....yeah...I'll condense it when...well when I get an idea of what's going on.

[Tyrran]

I'm currently foraging through second-hand book stores trying to find this one.

[George]

uh ya right