Critique of Pure Reason
May 2024 · Minerva Heritage Press
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517
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About this ebook
A new translation of Immanuel Kant's famous "Critique of Pure Reason" (Second Edition) from the original German manuscript first published in 1787. This new edition contains an afterword by the translator, a timeline of Kant's life and works, and a helpful index of Kant's key concepts and intellectual rivals. This translation is designed for readability, rendering Kant's enigmatic German into the simplest equivalent possible, and removing the academic footnotes to make this critically important historical text as accessible as possible to the modern reader. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason lays the foundation of his Systematic Metaphysics published across a dozen works with the singular aim of 'fixing' the field by reconciling Rationalism, Idealism, and Empiricism to move Metaphysics into a full form of Science, much, in the same manner, the Greeks did to Logic or The Renaissance logicians to the hard sciences. Kant sparked a metaphysical revolution which he understands as akin to the Copernican revolution. The question of how the iterations of the transcendent 'I' through time and space can 'know' anything (make synthetic a priori judgments) with any level of certainty takes the proscenium in the Critique. David Hume's fundamental error in Kant's view is that he assumes a Rationality which is Techne without Telos, a description only of what is, not what should be. To this end, he uses a Greek conception of Rationality as logos within a Platonic Ontology, splitting reality into two subdivisions between form and sense- perception, between Numinal and a phenomenological world. As physics is pure science, metaphysics is pure philosophy; "Pure knowledge of reason from mere concepts is called pure philosophy, or metaphysics... Metaphysics, then, both of nature and of morals, and especially the critique of reason venturing out on its own wings, which precedes it in a propaedeutic way, are actually the only things that we can call philosophy in the true sense of the word".
About the author
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher whose work in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics shaped the course of Western philosophy. In his landmark work, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposed "transcendental idealism," asserting that human knowledge is limited by the mind's structures, which mediate our understanding of reality. This "Copernican revolution" in philosophy argued that we can only know phenomena (appearances) and not noumena (things-in-themselves). In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant introduced the "categorical imperative," a foundational principle in ethics that calls for actions to be universally applicable. Kant's focus on autonomy, moral duty, and rationality laid the groundwork for modern ethical and political thought, and his ideas continue to influence fields such as philosophy, law, and cognitive science, positioning him as a central figure in the Enlightenment.
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