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Title: Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, Norman Kemp Smith ISBN: 0-312-45010-9 Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's Pub. Date: October, 1969 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.45 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.92 (25 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: If it were easy, you'd read it in grade school
Comment: Let me start by addressing some misconceptions you'll see as you roam around these reviews.
First of all, there are a couple of low reviews that refer to Kant as being "anti-reason," "anti-truth," a socialist, a collectivist, etc. These are written by Objectivists - followers of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand has about the same relationship to serious philosophy as McDonalds does to good cooking. She hated Kant, but never quite seemed to understand him. No surprise - he's hard.
Which is the second point. This is not an easy book at all. That's why it's most often assigned to graduate students. Even undergrads can easily get a philosophy degree without ever touching this book. It's bloody hard. This is because, well, its ideas are radical and difficult, and because Kant is a careful philosopher.
It is not, and this is my third point, because Kant is a bad writer. Quite the opposite. He's a great writer. The fact of the matter is, though, that his subject matter is not exactly a page-turner. But, I mean, what do you expect. You're reading academic philosophy. There's a handful of academic books that are both worthwhile and fun to read, and that's just a fact of life. Kant, however, is quite clear - indeed, he does the service of going over his points more than once - a luxury you won't get when you advance to Hegel. Furthermore, believe it or not, there are jokes in Kant. The best of them is a footnote, in which he notes that "Deficiancy in judgment is that which is ordinarily referred to as stupidity, and for such a failing their is no remedy."
Unfortunately, it's all too common on Amazon to bash academic books because they're hard, obscure, or poorly written. The fact of the matter is that these books are not for everyone. They're for specialists and scholars, and are written in a language that is appropriately technical to that task. You don't go and bash medical and scientific books for being too hard for you. Give philosophy a break, and recognize this book as what it is - one of the most important contributions to a scholarly field ever.
Rating: 5
Summary: So you want to be a philosopher?
Comment: So you want to be a philosopher? There are three books a philosophy aprentice MUST read: Aristotle's Methapysic, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Hegel's Spirit Fenomenology. But absolutely, the most important is the Kant text. You are handling here a book that transformed philosopy, the book that fought decadent medieval methapysic and dared to propose the only way to make science. Ps. Kant is dificult, do not fall in despare.
Rating: 5
Summary: like it or not, you must read it
Comment: I think this translation is a bit more readable than the Meiklejohn, and it offers some excerpts from the 1st edition not in the Meiklejohn translation. This is due probably to a large degree because of Schopenhauer's criticism that the 2nd edition is not Kant's true thought, as he was trying to cover up the idealism of the 1st edition in the 2nd.
As for Kant's work, I have spent most of my time on the Transcendental Aesthetic, and while this section is often taken less seriously in England and American so I've heard, I think it is far better than the Transcendental Analytic. The arguments of the Aesthetic, while perhaps not proving all Kant thought they did, do show that space and time are at least fundamental to our ability to perceive objects, and some more recent scholars might say that this is all Kant set out to prove in the ist place.
I think that the Transcendental Dialectic is of probably the most significance for the history of philosophy, as Kant's thesis that talk about another realm leads nowhere has been influencial, especially in analytic philosophy. Furthermore, showing that the traditional proofs of God lead nowhere and that God is only valid as a postulate of practical reason has done much damage to theology, as Kant's postulates of practical reason have received little acceptance, and thus it seems difficult to understand how human thoughts can correspond to a transcendent God. I think the Dialectic is probably the most interesting part and is Kant at his best. The reader will be rewarded if only he can make it through the terrible Analytic first.
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