Critique of Pure Reason (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) »

The Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most important philosophical texts ever written. Like Copernicus, Kant dared to question the ordinary perspective from which we habitually view the world.

Kant's moderate form of skepticism is known as "transcendental idealism," and its primary tenet is that we cannot know things as they are in themselves because we only know things as they appear to us. His thesis had a monumental influence on the culture of the last two centuries, giving rise to cultural movements and theoretical approaches including: German Idealism, Romanticism, Modernism, Marxism, Existentialism, Psychoanalysis, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and even Quantum Physics.

About the Author:
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) has been caricatured as a stiff German professor, whose Stoic habits were so predictable that the people of Königsberg, his hometown, could set their clocks by his daily walks. Kant's life is best described as a heroic struggle to discover order within chaos or, better, an effort to fix human thought and behavior within it proper limits. He lived and worked during the Enlightenment, a time when political, religious, and intellectual freedom erupted across the Western world

Kenneth R. Winkle

Eric Watkins has done a fine job of abridging the Critique to a manageable size while preserving those sections most often assigned in a survey course, including enough of the Analytic to provide a continuous argument. Students will get a good sense of the whole from the parts he includes. I recommend it enthusiastically.