A-HH4199 9W

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A short reading for a discussion of Immanuel Kant is not easy to select, especially for a discussion that will center on The Critique of Pure Reason. It is a large and difficult work, but one that repays careful study under appropriate conditions, conditions that do not pertain in a fast-moving course such as this one. A good way to study Kant is through increments of ascending scope — let us aim at a first increment. I will concentrate on explaining what I think Kant's fundamental intellectual enterprise involved and why it seems important to me. Historically, his importance took hold as the founder of critical philosophy. To get a taste of his work, and to reflect on what Kant may have meant by "critique" and "possibility" (as in "the possibility of experience"), his Prefaces to the 1781 and 1787 editions of The Critique of Pure Reason are a good place to start. It is also very useful whenever one approaches Kant through one of his works to try to get a sense for the organization and structure of the work as a whole. To initiate that (I don't think it can come to fruition on a first encounter), I include the table of contents to the whole Critique in the excerpt here.

• The Prefaces from Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason.