Critique of Pure Reason

1. Read the Prolegomena first, or at the same time. That book, which is both clear and SHORT, is Kant's own account of what the Critique was meant to accomplish and what prompted him to write it. If you read the Prolegomena and think he's barking up the wrong tree, put off the Critique... until you change your mind. (The last bit doesn't apply to people taking a class, of course.)

2. Kant's lecture notes on Logic can also be useful because they show how he believed philosophical thought should be organized and expressed. Regardless of whether you take his so-called "logical method" seriously, no one denies that *Kant took it very seriously*, and once you can recognize it in the Critique, many passages become much easier to follow.

3. Don't expect a profound spiritual or aesthetic experience. I value this book as the first really satisfying rational explanation of why the world makes sense (turns out it has to!), but I won't claim it's any good as a guide to meditation, as a substitute Bible, as poetry, or even as prose. Contrary to his reputation, Kant is an excellent writer, but he's not trying to take you to a higher level here, or even to entertain you. At all. See also point 6, below.

4. Choose your text with care. Abridgments are tempting, but every sentence of the original is there for a reason. Make sure your translation includes the texts of both the first and second editions (Meiklejohn doesn't). Of the two translations I've read, I can recommend Kemp Smith's often loose rendering (St. Martin's Press) over the scrupulous but stilted Wood-Guyer (Cambridge), and both over either alone; but I've heard good things about Pluhar's Hackett translation too.

5. Don't skip the Introduction. Key points are made there, and key terms defined. The first time I tried to read the Critique I skipped to the first chapter of the main text (Transcendental Aesthetic) and it was like running headfirst into a brick wall. (It *is* all right to ignore the Prefaces on a first reading.)

6. Whichever parts you read, read every word. It's possible to skim through one of Kant's arguments and get an accurate feeling for the meaning, but the details of the argument do matter, because he very often appeals to them later on -- and also because, unlike so many other writers on the same subjects, he is trying to *prove*, not to cajole or enchant. Emphasis is important too, so you must read for context: does he mean "*synthetic* unity of the manifold", "synthetic *unity* of the manifold", or "synthetic unity of the *manifold*"? It's not that the concepts are different, but the author is pointing out something different about the concept depending on where and how he uses the phrase. Take the phrases, sentences, paragraphs out of context and they all sound like the same kind of hollow, pretentious, narrow-minded nonsense. I have found that the best way to preserve the logical connections is to READ ALOUD.

7. Question everything you read. You'll usually find that the statement was justified earlier (or, in some cases, will be explained in the next paragraph). Not only is this the safest way to read a book of Western philosophy, but it is the best way to *restore* the logical connections of the text once you have lost track of them, which will often happen.

There's more I could say, but that's plenty to be going on with. Best of luck!


The Issue of Translation   April 11, 2008
King Elessar (Woodbury, MN)
15 out of 16 found this review helpful

Because of the very negative reviews of the Guyer/Wood translation on this page, I have been conflicted in determining which edition of Kant's first critique I should purchase. I recently saw the Max Muller translation re-released by Penguin, and was tempted to purchase that based on the recommendation by one of the reviewers here. Before I made a decision, however, I still wanted to do more research; this work is obviously of immense importance in the history of thought, making it crucial to acquire the best edition possible.

After much futile searching, I was informed that my university harbors a scholar of Kant and Schopenhauer who carries, at some level, international recognition. In fact, he is the translator of Schopenhauer's THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, published by Prentice/Longman, a translation I would encourage you to pick up. You can find his name if you search for it here at Amazon. To get to the point, I contacted him expressing my concern over which translation of Kant's critique would be best, and this is what he said:

"I have to confess that I have not paid any attention to the Muller translation, probably because it is never cited by scholars working on Kant. That doesn't mean it's not good, but I just can't comment on that.

I will say that, unless one is working at the deeper levels of Kant scholarship - where one would presume at least some familiarity with German and sensitivity to spots in the translation where there are at least likely to be possible questions of translation - it almost certainly won't make much of a difference which of the translations you use. They are all at least that good.

The three translations that are cited by Kant scholars are those of Norman Kemp Smith and Guyer/Wood, but also the translation by Werner S. Pluhar (published by Hackett Publishing Company). In my own view, balancing out the good and bad points, it would be very difficult to say which one should prefer as a translation. But the Guyer/Wood edition has the advantage of a wealth of supplementary information in footnotes and endnotes.

Possibly the best thing you can do, if you want to go as deeply as you can in the absence of some knowledge of German, would be to use the Guyer/Wood, and take advantage of the notes, plus one of the other translations (even Muller's). In other words, read each portion of the text in the two translations."

I hope this advice helps any of you who, like me, are confused on which translation to get. I've decided to go with Guyer/Wood and Muller simultaneously.


Monumental   September 24, 2001
Michael Danehy (Lock Haven, PA USA)
17 out of 20 found this review helpful

Dry, yes. Boring, to many readers, yes. Worthwhile, definitely.

Accept no substitutes. If you're interested in modern
philosophy, this will be required reading. For the
beginner I do recommend that one first look over
the works of Locke, Hume, Berkely, Descartes,
and Leibniz to obtain an understanding of
what specifically Kant is attempting to
accomplish; which is the doctrine that we
bring more to experience than empiricism
admits while not beyond the realm of
experience as the rationalists maintain.

This is the famous Copernican switch
from external objects as the source of
all knowledge to human beings as containing
the forms of knowledge that we bring to
objects. I recommend a careful reading
of the Critique so as to discourage false
impressions of it. Kant was not arguing
for subjectivism or that human beings
make up the world entirely with their
thoughts. There is a world that is
an organized nature in so far as
we know it, but "in itself" independant
of our minds, it isn't anything for us.
Because we all share the same reason,
we all share the same universe, and
so Kant's system is just as objective
and amicable to common sense as
any other.


A very lucid mind I disagree with   March 8, 2002
Svein Olav Nyberg (Grimstad, Norway)
27 out of 34 found this review helpful

I notice some readers complain because they find the book hard to read, and fault Kant for that. Would the same readers fault the mathematician Kurt Gödel if they found his works hard to read? This book is very well written in the same sense that an advanced mathematics text may be well written. Kant displays a very clear head dealing with difficult subject matters, and makes a systematic study out of it.

One may agree or one may disagree with Kant. One may find holes in his arguments or one may not. But regardless of this, a reader who takes the time required for the study of this book will find that Kant's arguments are very clear. I disagree with Kant on many points - as you would expect of a man who claims Max Stirner as his closest philosophical kin - but I would never find that disagreement a reason to disparage Kant's intelligence or his ability to write. Kant's book is nothing less than a monumental achievement philosophically, and in the time after him we can not philosophize without relating to his brilliant insights.

The core of Kant's insight is - in my eyes - that though all our knowledge arises WITH experience, it does not thereby follow that it all arises FROM experience. Read him, and you will get a Copernican shift of perspective which may lead you to some new thoughts - and though those new thoughts may arise as you read Kant, I can in no way guarantee that they will be implied by what you have read.


A foundation stone for modern philosophy   October 8, 2005
FrKurt Messick (Bloomington, IN USA)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is considered one of the giants of philosophy, of his age or any other. It is largely this book that provides the foundation of this assessment. Whether one loves Kant or hates him (philosophically, that is), one cannot really ignore him; even when one isn't directly dealing with Kantian ideas, chances are great that Kant is made an impact.

Kant was a professor of philosophy in the German city of Konigsberg, where he spent his entire life and career. Kant had a very organised and clockwork life - his habits were so regular that it was considered that the people of Konigsberg could set their clocks by his walks. The same regularity was part of his publication history, until 1770, when Kant had a ten-year hiatus in publishing. This was largely because he was working on this book, the 'Critique of Pure Reason'.

Kant as a professor of philosophy was familiar with the Rationalists, such as Descartes, who founded the Enlightenment and in many ways started the phenomenon of modern philosophy. He was also familiar with the Empiricist school (John Locke and David Hume are perhaps the best known names in this), which challenged the rationalist framework. Between Leibniz' monads and Hume's development of Empiricism to its logical (and self-destructive) conclusion, coupled with the Romantic ideals typified by Rousseau, the philosophical edifice of the Enlightenment seemed about to topple.

Kant rode to the rescue, so to speak. He developed an idea that was a synthesis of Empirical and Rationalist ideas. He developed the idea of a priori knowledge (that coming from pure reasoning) and a posterior knowledge (that coming from experience) and put them together into synthetic a priori statements as being possible. Knowledge, for Kant, comes from a synthesis of pure reason concepts and experience. Pure thought and sense experience were intertwined. However, there were definite limits to knowledge. Appearance/phenomenon was different from Reality/noumena - Kant held that the unknowable was the 'ding-an-sich', roughly translated as the 'thing-in-itself', for we can only know the appearance and categorial aspects of things.

Kant was involved heavily in scientific method, including logic and mathematical methods, to try to describe the various aspects of his development. This is part of what makes Kant difficult reading for even the most dedicated of philosophy students and readers. He spends a lot of pages on logical reasoning, including what makes for fallacious and faulty reasoning. He also does a good deal of development on the ideas of God, the soul, and the universe as a whole as being essentially beyond the realm of this new science of metaphysics - these are not things that can be known in terms of the spatiotemporal realm, and thus proofs and constructs about them in reason are bound to fail.

Kant does go on to attempt to prove the existence of God and the soul (and other things) from moral grounds, but that these cannot be proved in the scientific methodology of his metaphysics and logic. This book presents Kant's epistemology and a new concept of metaphysics that involves transcendental knowledge, a new category of concepts that aims to prove one proposition as the necessary presupposition of another. This becomes the difficulty for later philosophers, but it does become a matter that needs to be addressed by them.

As Kant writes at the end of the text, 'The critical path alone is still open. If the reader has had the courtesy and patience to accompany me along this path, he may now judge for himself whether, if he cares to lend his aid in making this path into a high-road, it may not be possible to achieve before the end of the present century what many centuries have not been able to accomplish; namely, to secure for human reason complete satisfacton in regard to that with which it has all along so eagerly occupied itself, though hitherto in vain.' This is heavy reading, but worthwhile for those who will make the journey with Kant.