The Critique of Pure Reason

Description

One of the most influential books in philosophy and also in Kant’s oeuvre, The Critique of Pure Reason presents an extraordinary, sophisticated and thoroughly-grounded argument on the topic of metaphysical subjectivism.

What Kant proposes to do is not to provide a critique of systems of thought or pieces of writing, but a critique of the faculty of reasoning and argumentation as such. He builds his arguments against the ideas formulated by empiricist philosophers – philosophers that he admires, but does not agree with -, including David Hume and John Locke and by rationalist masters such as Leibnitz. Kant finds metaphysics to be the solution to the problem posed by Hume about the knowledge that the human being can possess about the relationship between cause and effect.

He puts forth the idea that knowledge can take two distinct forms: a priori knowledge is knowledge that exists prior to experience, while a posteriori knowledge is derived from experience. For Kant, a priori knowledge is essentially the expression of truth, exemplified through mathematics. What starts as a set of relatively simple and logical distinctions is gradually turned by Kant into a complex web of arguments with lots of very deep implications, such as the issues of free will and pre-determination, until it reaches the ultimate questions of human existence.

The Critique of Pure Reason is a work that has influenced modern philosophy in many ways and at many different levels, having set the direction for numerous modern thinkers, some of them criticizing Kant, others being adepts of his ideas, but none of them denying his importance. The list is long, Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Arthur Schopenhauer being just a few of the names.


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