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Title: Kant: A Biography by Manfred Kuehn ISBN: 0-521-52406-7 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 19 August, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.22 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A clear view on one of the greatest masters
Comment: Superb, biography !!! In which the writer seems to heading for a definitive biography on one of the greatest masters that ever touched a Philosophical matter. Kant has earned the reputation as a very complicated thinker. I have read a few of his works and I can do nothing else than agree in this.
After I read this book I really seemed to understand his philosophy much beter. I feel I have a good idea about what were his major concerns and what was it that he tried to solve and prove. I have a good idea now about what the Critique Of Pure Reason is, such as other works as the other 2 Critiques & Groundworks.
If you want to read the works of Kant himself, make sure you pick this one up first and learn it by heart. Its as best as any introduction can get on his work, A truly homage to a great master.
There are besides that plenty of details about his personal life. His love for Frederik The Great, plenty of stuff from his students, how they thought about him, and what kept him occupied in his free hours. And there we get a very different Kant than the one that went into history for so far.
Rating: 4
Summary: This is modern, but it doesn't rock.
Comment: This book is an interesting guide to what we now know about Kant's life, and a scholarly summary of what he might have meant in his own time and place. Kant was the philosopher selected by Nietzsche for section 193 of THE GAY SCIENCE: "Kant's joke. Kant wanted to prove in a way that would dumfound the common man that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of the popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for popularity." (THE PORTABLE NIETZSCHE, p. 96). In TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS, Nietzsche named Kant in his explanation of "How the `true world' finally became a fable:" (THE PORTABLE NIETZSCHE, pp. 485-6). "Any distinction between a `true' and an `apparent' world ~ whether in the Christian manner or in the manner of Kant (in the end, an underhanded Christian) ~ is only a suggestion of decadence, a symptom of the decline of life." (THE PORTABLE NIETZSCHE, p. 484). What set Nietzsche apart from the scholars of his own day, at least as long as he was considered sane, was his willingness to display a sly contempt for the kind of clarity which any functioning society demands, which suggests that Nietzsche had some different ideas. If anyone who wrote philosophically at the level of Kant could still be understood well enough to be called "an underhanded Christian," it is ironic that a more modern philosopher would consider Kant "an embodiment on a large scale of what is wrong with philosophy" for the opposite reason: "Suppose he had not insisted on certainty, necessity, and completeness!" (Walter Kaufmann, DISCOVERING THE MIND, VOLUME ONE, GOETHE, KANT, AND HEGEL, p. 195).
One of the things that makes philosophy interesting is the range of ideas which it offers to anyone who is trying to think of something to say about his enemies. Fichte was a contemporary of Kant, in trouble with the authorities from 1997 to 1800 when he was suspected of being an atheist because he thought a moral world order provided a more godly deity than the underhanded Christians of his day were used to. This was very close to the end of Kant's life, and Kant's circle of friends consoled themselves with ideas like: "The name `Fichte' means pine, and bad proofs were sometimes called `proofs of pine.' Furthermore, to `lead someone behind the pines' could mean to be deceptive. Some of Kant's acquaintances agreed." (Manfred Kuehn, KANT, A BIOGRAPHY, p. 391).
I was most interested in examining this book because it considers an early work, included in Kant's THEORETICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1755-1770, on Emanuel Swedenborg, DREAMS OF A SPIRIT-SEER ILLUSTRATED BY DREAMS OF METAPHYSICS. The existence of the work itself, like Freud's summary ON DREAMS (1901), drawn from Freud's on INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS (1900), shows a strong affinity for the kind of thinking about Christianity which is much closer to a modern understanding than most people would expect from the contemporaries of Kant and Swedenborg. Kant might be much more modern than Swedenborg because he willingly states a conclusion, as "a matter of policy, in this as in other cases, to fit the pattern of one's plans to one's powers, and if one cannot obtain the great, to restrict oneself to the mediocre." (p. 174). Anyone who would consider this book mediocre ought to reflect on the scholarly norms that preclude this kind of writing from exhibiting the outrageous emotional tricks which are usually displayed in rock 'n' roll, movies, state lotteries, election campaigns, or exciting books. It is the scholars who live in a separate world, and Kant will always be a great example of how it can be done.
Rating: 5
Summary: An Excellent Biography
Comment: Kuehn has taken on a handful with this project, yet the outcome is superb. This is a careful and scholarly text. Contrary to what one of the reviewers commented here, I think the book was an interesting and entertaining read. I highly recommend this biography to anyone with even the slightest interest in Kant (or his contribution to Enlightenment Philosophy). And it would make a great text for an Introduction to Kant course (just as Monk's bio on Wittgenstein is often used in intro courses).
We sometimes think of Kant as having lived a boring and dull life--that he was in fact as mundane and interesting a person as the schedule he kept (shop owners in the marketplace would often set their clocks to his daily walks). But the picture of Kant that Kuehn provides us with here is radically different. Sure, Kant lead a regular and ordered life, but Kuehn breathes accurate life into pedestrian images of Kant that we may have learned in school (or in textbooks).
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Title: Hegel by Terry Pinkard ISBN: 0521003873 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 18 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Cambridge Companion to Kant by Paul Guyer ISBN: 0521367689 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 31 January, 1992 List Price(USD): $33.00 |
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Title: Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, Paul Guyer, Allen W. Wood ISBN: 0521657296 Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: February, 1999 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
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Title: Kant: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Roger Scruton ISBN: 0192801996 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: December, 2001 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes by Richard Watson ISBN: 1567921841 Publisher: David R Godine Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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