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In this outstanding introduction, Paul Guyer uses Kant’s central conception of autonomy as the key to all the major aspects and issues of Kant’s thought. Beginning with a helpful overview of Kant’s life and times, Guyer introduces Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology, carefully explaining his arguments about the nature of space, time and experience in his most influential but difficult work, The Critique of Pure Reason . He offers an explanation and critique of Kant’s famous theory of transcendental idealism and shows how much of Kant’s philosophy is independent of this controversial doctrine. He then examines Kant’s moral philosophy, his celebrated ‘Categorical imperative’ and his theories of duty, freedom of will and political rights. Finally, he covers Kant’s aesthetics, in particular his arguments about the nature of beauty and the sublime, and their relation to human freedom and happiness. He also considers Kant’s view that the development of human autonomy is the only goal that we can conceive for both natural and human history.
456 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
30 people are currently reading
478 people want to read
About the author
Paul Guyer
94 books31 followersPaul Guyer is an American philosopher. He is a leading scholar of Immanuel Kant and of aesthetics and has served as Jonathan Nelson Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Brown University since 2012.
Guyer has written nine books on Kant and Kantian themes, and has edited and translated a number of Kant's works into English. In addition to his work on Kant, Guyer has published on many other figures in the history of philosophy, including Locke, Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and others. Guyer's Kant and The Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press) is widely considered to be one of the most significant works in Kant scholarship. Recent works by Guyer include Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume (Princeton University Press), and The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge University Press).
His other areas of specialty include the history of philosophy and aesthetics. His three-volume work A History of Modern Aesthetics was published by Cambridge University Press in February 2014. Guyer was President of the American Society for Aesthetics in 2011–13. Guyer was also President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2011-12.
Guyer has written nine books on Kant and Kantian themes, and has edited and translated a number of Kant's works into English. In addition to his work on Kant, Guyer has published on many other figures in the history of philosophy, including Locke, Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and others. Guyer's Kant and The Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press) is widely considered to be one of the most significant works in Kant scholarship. Recent works by Guyer include Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume (Princeton University Press), and The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge University Press).
His other areas of specialty include the history of philosophy and aesthetics. His three-volume work A History of Modern Aesthetics was published by Cambridge University Press in February 2014. Guyer was President of the American Society for Aesthetics in 2011–13. Guyer was also President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2011-12.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 17, 2021
if you like this review, i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com
071018 this is a much later addition (6 years): i have not revisited this book, just read the review again. it is hard to believe it is (only) six years but then i have read many thinkers and thought many thoughts since, and though this might be thought simple, this book is sort of my introduction to ‘thinking for myself’, that is, though i had read some philosophy before i had incorporated it as received knowledge, had not thought about the thought, had not tried to critically place or contrast, had not allowed myself to listen in to the history of philosophical conversations, and this book Kant changed all that. part of my previous critical timidity was reasonable doubt i knew enough or had read enough and that thinkers while not beyond me- i have always been unreasonably confident of my intellect- were talking, thinking, referring, to an entire realm of understanding i did not know. this book did not suddenly educate me all but brought me to understand that this is a process and curiosity and joy of thought that requires no particular knowledge to at least begin... so kant has remained in my background, in secure enlightenment openness, and has led me towards mostly ‘continental’ thinkers as they elaborate and critique everything of ‘a priori synthetic judgement’... so he may be difficult to read but not to read of, to the extent that matters, and the ideas and the joy of thought are immortal...
270512 first review: there is a history behind my reading this book that goes back a few years. there is a history behind my appreciation of kant that goes back about 27 years to undergraduate university...
i was possibly too young to really love kant back then, but i remember my survey course text. i do not even remember if i actually read it then, if i went to those classes. i was a mixed up kid. i do remember whenever i did read it, reaching the radical skepticism suggested by hume, feeling suddenly lost, depressed, convinced that my faith in science was misplaced. the idea was that when we see one billiard ball striking another and that one moves, we are seeing transfer of momentum. but where is this 'momentum'? how can we say it moves this? i was so convinced by this argument, i was ready to give up. then i read kant, read about intuitions, sensibilities, categories- about phenomena and noumena- and was so happy. everything i have read in philosophy since, has been in some way trying to recoup that intellectual joy of understanding...
i was ready to be disappointed with Kant, i tried reading his critiques but they never worked for me. i had over the years become fascinated by so-called continental philosophers, and though kant was a big name it was more descartes and hegel they refer to. then, about two years ago, i decided to educate myself about some of the history of philosophy.i have always read asynchronously- as if the ideas were independent of society and culture of the time, as if i could step outside time, as if i could judge them this way. so i had not really read much more than survey, the ancients, the moderns, leading up to the contemporary. everyone seems to refer to older texts which refer to even older texts... it seemed i would have to read too many. then i decided kant would be far enough past because he seemed to deliberately try and sum up everything previous...
so i bought Kant. somehow i always found others to read. last year i had read about 231 pages when for some reason i stopped. i had so many other books i wanted to read, even other philosophers. when i decided to read him this time, after struggling through heidegger, i decided to start from the beginning again. this was a good idea. this time i seemed to understand. this time i was rightly amazed. this time i could see why he could be thought 'the' enlightenment philosopher. this time i love kant...
why? after recounting some bio, this book directly enters kant's natural philosophy- his 'copernican revolution'-the pure forms of sensible intuition, contributions of understanding, metaphysical deduction, transcendental deduction, principles of empirical judement, refuting idealism...leading through all this preparatory thought to his critique of metaphysics...
if it is true any philosopher, like any author, has one true obsession and everything else is built on that- i would nominate kant's as the idea of synthetic a priori judgement, of transcendental idealism, that we apprehend the world through a priori understandings- such as the successive impression of order and contiguity we call causal- that are facts of our minds in receiving the world, and before anything in the world itself. it is a fact of our being human, being rational beings. this is lynchpin for everything else. ideas of pure reason, metaphysics of self, world, god, toward the idea of systematic knowledge of the world...
and kant goes on, in part two of this book focusing on freedom. there is the famous categorical imperative and how it is derived and argued for according to universal law, natural law, humanity as an end in itself. kant tries to connect freedom to possibilities of radical evil, if we are to allow true good. kant contrasts the determinacy of the natural world to the moral necessity of freedom for the human world, insisting on necessary postulate of god and immortality of the soul, on the idea of sufficient reason, of intelligence organizing the world and humans, of the rise of republican states and the doctrine of human rights...
and kant goes on even more. he rationally examines all our duties, how in the end it is the categorical imperative to never make another a means rather than end, that buttress all his ideas of duties. and how these duties extend from common respect for all others, not some religious or group identity. we have duties to ourselves, to others, duties inherent and acquired. this is not argued by each of us having a soul or some other religious obligation, this is argued, this is thought, that we are human and all humans have duties to all humans...
even when i disagree with him, think him dated, i must admit kant might not have known all the answers but he certainly knew many questions. and the idea of ultimate comprehensibility of the universe, the idea of scientific knowledge, the idea of all kant's ideas has regulated and inspired the western world-view for centuries. so maybe it is all kant i love, and only incidentally this book. but then this is the first book that i have read and understood kant. no jargon, no difficult ideas in difficult language, and all, all, all of it holds together.
i almost feel like trying the critiques again...
071018 this is a much later addition (6 years): i have not revisited this book, just read the review again. it is hard to believe it is (only) six years but then i have read many thinkers and thought many thoughts since, and though this might be thought simple, this book is sort of my introduction to ‘thinking for myself’, that is, though i had read some philosophy before i had incorporated it as received knowledge, had not thought about the thought, had not tried to critically place or contrast, had not allowed myself to listen in to the history of philosophical conversations, and this book Kant changed all that. part of my previous critical timidity was reasonable doubt i knew enough or had read enough and that thinkers while not beyond me- i have always been unreasonably confident of my intellect- were talking, thinking, referring, to an entire realm of understanding i did not know. this book did not suddenly educate me all but brought me to understand that this is a process and curiosity and joy of thought that requires no particular knowledge to at least begin... so kant has remained in my background, in secure enlightenment openness, and has led me towards mostly ‘continental’ thinkers as they elaborate and critique everything of ‘a priori synthetic judgement’... so he may be difficult to read but not to read of, to the extent that matters, and the ideas and the joy of thought are immortal...
270512 first review: there is a history behind my reading this book that goes back a few years. there is a history behind my appreciation of kant that goes back about 27 years to undergraduate university...
i was possibly too young to really love kant back then, but i remember my survey course text. i do not even remember if i actually read it then, if i went to those classes. i was a mixed up kid. i do remember whenever i did read it, reaching the radical skepticism suggested by hume, feeling suddenly lost, depressed, convinced that my faith in science was misplaced. the idea was that when we see one billiard ball striking another and that one moves, we are seeing transfer of momentum. but where is this 'momentum'? how can we say it moves this? i was so convinced by this argument, i was ready to give up. then i read kant, read about intuitions, sensibilities, categories- about phenomena and noumena- and was so happy. everything i have read in philosophy since, has been in some way trying to recoup that intellectual joy of understanding...
i was ready to be disappointed with Kant, i tried reading his critiques but they never worked for me. i had over the years become fascinated by so-called continental philosophers, and though kant was a big name it was more descartes and hegel they refer to. then, about two years ago, i decided to educate myself about some of the history of philosophy.i have always read asynchronously- as if the ideas were independent of society and culture of the time, as if i could step outside time, as if i could judge them this way. so i had not really read much more than survey, the ancients, the moderns, leading up to the contemporary. everyone seems to refer to older texts which refer to even older texts... it seemed i would have to read too many. then i decided kant would be far enough past because he seemed to deliberately try and sum up everything previous...
so i bought Kant. somehow i always found others to read. last year i had read about 231 pages when for some reason i stopped. i had so many other books i wanted to read, even other philosophers. when i decided to read him this time, after struggling through heidegger, i decided to start from the beginning again. this was a good idea. this time i seemed to understand. this time i was rightly amazed. this time i could see why he could be thought 'the' enlightenment philosopher. this time i love kant...
why? after recounting some bio, this book directly enters kant's natural philosophy- his 'copernican revolution'-the pure forms of sensible intuition, contributions of understanding, metaphysical deduction, transcendental deduction, principles of empirical judement, refuting idealism...leading through all this preparatory thought to his critique of metaphysics...
if it is true any philosopher, like any author, has one true obsession and everything else is built on that- i would nominate kant's as the idea of synthetic a priori judgement, of transcendental idealism, that we apprehend the world through a priori understandings- such as the successive impression of order and contiguity we call causal- that are facts of our minds in receiving the world, and before anything in the world itself. it is a fact of our being human, being rational beings. this is lynchpin for everything else. ideas of pure reason, metaphysics of self, world, god, toward the idea of systematic knowledge of the world...
and kant goes on, in part two of this book focusing on freedom. there is the famous categorical imperative and how it is derived and argued for according to universal law, natural law, humanity as an end in itself. kant tries to connect freedom to possibilities of radical evil, if we are to allow true good. kant contrasts the determinacy of the natural world to the moral necessity of freedom for the human world, insisting on necessary postulate of god and immortality of the soul, on the idea of sufficient reason, of intelligence organizing the world and humans, of the rise of republican states and the doctrine of human rights...
and kant goes on even more. he rationally examines all our duties, how in the end it is the categorical imperative to never make another a means rather than end, that buttress all his ideas of duties. and how these duties extend from common respect for all others, not some religious or group identity. we have duties to ourselves, to others, duties inherent and acquired. this is not argued by each of us having a soul or some other religious obligation, this is argued, this is thought, that we are human and all humans have duties to all humans...
even when i disagree with him, think him dated, i must admit kant might not have known all the answers but he certainly knew many questions. and the idea of ultimate comprehensibility of the universe, the idea of scientific knowledge, the idea of all kant's ideas has regulated and inspired the western world-view for centuries. so maybe it is all kant i love, and only incidentally this book. but then this is the first book that i have read and understood kant. no jargon, no difficult ideas in difficult language, and all, all, all of it holds together.
i almost feel like trying the critiques again...
September 1, 2012
This is quite explicitly Guyer's take on Kant, which is in many ways admirable. However, it ends up falling between two stools; too critical and partisan to make for a good general introduction, but too bound by its introductory format to provide a convincing original interpretation.
April 13, 2023
Απαραίτητο!
June 16, 2023
I'm most writing this to remind myself down the road that I did attempt to read this thing and what I thought of it. I'm trying to go through a plethora of books on Kant to see if I can't assimilate some kind of picture of his thought and discover the truly good books on his philosophy.
Unfortunately, this was not one of them. I should qualify that statement though. I can see this book finding a purpose for those who already profess to have a knowledge of Kant and, instead of re-reading his work, want a useful summary of it. My main problem is that the book is too safe. It uses the useless jargon of Kant while barely deigning to try to explain it. It feels like chatGPT, Guyer has somehow learned to talk the language without giving us any way of learning how to translate it into something useful. I am kind of sick of texts on Kant that talk "transcendental" this and "apperceptive" that and "intuition" here and "synthesis" there-- all without every attempting to explain these terms using concrete examples. So, i'm going to add this book to the list that does exactly this, explains Kant without explaining anything. It's vague enough for opinionated Kant scholars to think this is a great rendition of Kant. Perhaps I will come back it to it someday and change my mind, but for someone who doesn't already have a decent understanding of Kant its not recommended.
Unfortunately, this was not one of them. I should qualify that statement though. I can see this book finding a purpose for those who already profess to have a knowledge of Kant and, instead of re-reading his work, want a useful summary of it. My main problem is that the book is too safe. It uses the useless jargon of Kant while barely deigning to try to explain it. It feels like chatGPT, Guyer has somehow learned to talk the language without giving us any way of learning how to translate it into something useful. I am kind of sick of texts on Kant that talk "transcendental" this and "apperceptive" that and "intuition" here and "synthesis" there-- all without every attempting to explain these terms using concrete examples. So, i'm going to add this book to the list that does exactly this, explains Kant without explaining anything. It's vague enough for opinionated Kant scholars to think this is a great rendition of Kant. Perhaps I will come back it to it someday and change my mind, but for someone who doesn't already have a decent understanding of Kant its not recommended.
September 26, 2025
Tant terrible que resulta fascinant, o viceversa. El gir copernicà kantià està molt bé, sí sí, però el cert és que es troba prefigurat, preenunciat, a la punta de la llengua, durant segles i segles, des del relativisme de Protàgores, de fet, en què s’observen la sèrie de pistes a seguir —o la subjectivitat com a determinant necessari del sensible. Tremendament difícil, d’altra banda, la seva estructuració epistemològica. I la moral, alhora aberrant i atractiva: Kant, el gran antropocèntric, fa de l’home el legislador de la natura i del món que ha de construir, a través de la moral, sobre la natura. I Déu, és clar, com a garant últim de la possibilitat de realització d’aquest moral hipertròfica que, al seu caràcter inevitablement intern i que produeix els deures ètics o de virtut, se li afegeix una justificació de la coerció estatal —i l’imperatiu mateix de la construcció i fabricació d’Estats. En fi, tota una personalitat.
January 21, 2022
This is a tricky one. The book was definitely interesting at large.
But it didn't make a good intro to Kant at all times. Some chapters were more introductory than others, and it shows through sometimes the very lengthy and appreciable explanations of what is meant in a particular paragraph. But Guyer tends to also wander off in his own critique of Kant, this makes some pages not appropriate for an introduction and it can be tricky to see where Kant ends and Guyer's interpretation begins. We must also address the whole book is based around Guyer's interpretation of Kant which isn't necessarily valid, lots of scholars such as Allison had a more benevolent view of Kant.
But I must give that it was still a good intro, not an excellent one, and the formatting/editing of the text was wonderful.
But it didn't make a good intro to Kant at all times. Some chapters were more introductory than others, and it shows through sometimes the very lengthy and appreciable explanations of what is meant in a particular paragraph. But Guyer tends to also wander off in his own critique of Kant, this makes some pages not appropriate for an introduction and it can be tricky to see where Kant ends and Guyer's interpretation begins. We must also address the whole book is based around Guyer's interpretation of Kant which isn't necessarily valid, lots of scholars such as Allison had a more benevolent view of Kant.
But I must give that it was still a good intro, not an excellent one, and the formatting/editing of the text was wonderful.
November 4, 2024
Paul Guyer gives his take on the Kantian philosophy. Very much influenced by a certain empiricist, analytical philosophy tradition of scholarship on Kant. I don't always agree with that perspective, but I appreciate that there is an honest effort made here to grapple with Kant's arguments on their own terms, in contrast to many who simply historically revise Kant in to a version that conveniently fits with their own pet philosophy that they want to promote.
The centrality of time consciousness to our experience and the moderate metaphysical realist perspective are both aspects that can be gleaned from Kant that are of potentially lasting philosophical value in my opinion, and Paul Guyer picks up on both of these things and explores them in plenty of detail.
The centrality of time consciousness to our experience and the moderate metaphysical realist perspective are both aspects that can be gleaned from Kant that are of potentially lasting philosophical value in my opinion, and Paul Guyer picks up on both of these things and explores them in plenty of detail.
September 27, 2020
I don't have a lot of Kant books to compare it to, but this did an excellent job of working through a large and (in my experience up to this point) impenetrably dense body of work, and drawing out the major themes that I had read about, but not fully gotten a handle on.
There is some discussion, necessarily, about parts of his thinking that haven't stood up that well into modern times, but I appreciated that it mostly concentrated on what I was hoping to take away from this--ie. Kant's thought itself-- and didn't stray too much into "what's wrong with Kant."
There is some discussion, necessarily, about parts of his thinking that haven't stood up that well into modern times, but I appreciated that it mostly concentrated on what I was hoping to take away from this--ie. Kant's thought itself-- and didn't stray too much into "what's wrong with Kant."
December 24, 2022
Reading this was a good refresher to get Kantian philosophy back into my mind. I really don't resonate with Kant’s ethics, so I just skipped over that part because I find it really not fun to read about. However, the section on the Transcendental Aesthetic and The System of All Principles were really good and helped me understand Kant's arguments, especially the stuff from the postulates of empirical thinking in general and the analogies of experience. This stuff is very heavy with a lot of nuance, and flew over my head with my first attempt at understanding the First Critique.
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October 5, 2019An amazingly helpful road map.
February 28, 2021
This book is so crisp, so well written, besides the content. Breezing through Kant. Never pedantic but always precise. A pleasure to read.
August 6, 2025
Very well written and structured advanced level introduction to Kant's complex writings
Want to read
March 4, 2012i have been trying to tackle kant off and on for years now. this book, though i am only in the introduction, appears to be very complete and thorough. it offers explanation and discussion with copious quotes from kant. while not a philosophy prof if i were teaching a class on kant this would be a text. better yet, if i were in a class on kant i would read this book, even if i had to sneak it in on the side.
June 7, 2025
Dense but worth it
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews