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Kant

The Critique of Pure Reason 

 

[I] was then making plans for a work that might perhaps have the title, 'The Limits of Sense and Reason.' I planned to have it consist of two parts, a theoretical and a practical. The first part would have two sections, (1) general phenomenology and (2) metaphysics, but this only with regard to its method. (Kant's letter to Marcus Herz, 21 February 1772)

 

 

return to 'Kant general-notes page' 

 

 

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

 

 

Norman Kemp: Seldom, in the history of literature, has a work been more conscientiously and deliberately thought out, or more hastily thrown together, than the Critique of Pure Reason. The following is the account which Kant in a letter to Moses Mendelssohn (August 16, 1783) has given of its composition:

(Though the Critique is] the outcome of reflection which had
occupied me for a period of at least twelve years, I brought it to
completion in the greatest haste within some four to five months, giving the closest attention to the content, but with little thought of the exposition or of rendering it easy of comprehension by the reader—a decision which I have never regretted, since otherwise, had I any longer delayed, and sought to give it a more popular form, the work would probably never have been completed at all. This defect can, however, be gradually removed, now that the work exists in a rough form.

... It can now be proved that the Critique is not a unitary work, and that in the five months in which, as Kant tells us, it was 'brought to completion, it was not actually written but was pieced together by the combining of manuscripts written at various dates throughout the period 1772-1780'... [The Critique] is the record of Kant’s manifold attempts [checking and reconsidering] to formulate and to solve his many-sided problems.

 

 

Editor’s prefatory comment: The following link icons constitute the text of The Critique of Pure Reason.

 

Glossary

Kant's other works

The aims of The Critique

The Title

Table of Contents

Norman Kemp: "Detailed discussion of the Prefaces is not advisable. The problems which they raise can best be treated in the order in which they come up in the Critique itself."

Preface, First Edition (A), Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

Preface, Second Edition (B), Critique of Pure Reason (1787)

Professor Victor Gijsbers: The Problem of Knowledge: Key to Understanding Kant

Introduction (A)

Introduction (B)

a priori, a posteriori, analytic, synthetic

synthetic a priori knowledge: "central to Kant's entire philosophy"

I. Transcendental Doctrine Of Elements

First Part: Transcendental Aesthetic (A) 

First Part: Transcendental Aesthetic (B)

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Editor's summary comment 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Editor's last word: