Critique of Pure Reason (Penguin Classics)

You can evidently tell from the title of my review that I liked the book. The Critique of Pure reason is a pretty important work screaming to be read by any curious person. The reason I like the book is because it is one of, if not the 1st book, to address the concept of human cognition. In this context, Kant discusses the possible, the necessary, time, and a few other very significant details of our human, corporeal existence. Yes the book is long and tedious but shows Kant's genius in developing a framework of human cognition (previously called 'the understanding' by some classical writers). If Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' doesn't begin to demonstrate, objectively, how the clever cognitve apparatus known as the brain weaves its fantastical web, then you were reading it upside down.
Among the many ideas put forward in this opus what stood out as the main thesis to me was the distinction between a real idea and a transcendental one; hence Kant's transcendental idealism. Humans have ideas of course, we have experiences, this is how we live in this world, by our ideas and experiences. Other thinkers, like Locke, would have our ideas be the results of our experiences. Not quite sayeth Kant. Some ideas are completely exclusive of experience. These are the tranascendental ideas, ideas that transcend experience. They're really not worth much, they might be, you can't (no pun intended) tell. Although transcendental ideas can arise independently of experience, they can only be verified by experience. Such an idea, the distinction between ideas proper and transcendental ones is the key idea here. The ultimate verification of either type of idea by some experience is why Kant is known as the father of the scientific method. Verifying ideas by experience is another term for what we now call experimentation. Not that Kant invented experimentation, but that he codified it (well really others did too, like Francis Bacon, but Kant gets the laurel).
Ideas help us to interpret the world, transcendental ones are apt to lead us off on paths we don't really want to go down, and for good reason. Cognitively, we might deduce far into the future and conclude that events meet somehwere up there on the horizon. Or we could reverse this process, looking back into the past, like we do with the 'big bang' concept. From where we are in the present, looking far into the future or far into the past, what we appear to see may look like a unity. Well maybe and maybe not. The meeting of events way off up or back there are simply impossible to confirm by experience. In such a case we are left to rely on circumstantial evidence, as with the big bang. For example, there is no overwhelming evidence that what astronomers call the universe actually represents the universe as it is. There are bits of evidence, like ubiquitous microwave background radiation and predominant red-shifting, but the idea of what the universe is in actuality is a transcendental idea; there is simply no empirical way to confirm the existence of such a thing as the universe. Within such cognitive phenomena Kant is our sage.
What is really true or false in this world? If you still think the idea of objective reality is feasible then this treatise by the father of the scientific method must not be missed. Don't be fooled by the ethical implorings of Kant's 'The Critique of Practical Reason.' That's an entirely different book. 'The Critique of Pure Reason' is an atheist's dream. After Kant thoroughly exposes the idea of the absolute being as transcendental pish-posh, he does attempt to backpedal some by imploring the faithful to remain vigilant, but too late; he has already pounded the stake into the withering heart of a deity who Nietzsche [my paraphrase] would later lament the passing of. One can never hope to aspire to even a modicum of philosophical being, indeed it's hard to imagine even beginning to think critically, til they've read this work. Buy it, suffer through it (then read Schopenhauer), and maybe, just maybe, you'll have a chance.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is considered one of the giants of philosophy, of his age or any other. It is largely this book that provides the foundation of this assessment. Whether one loves Kant or hates him (philosophically, that is), one cannot really ignore him; even when one isn't directly dealing with Kantian ideas, chances are great that Kant is made an impact.

Kant was a professor of philosophy in the German city of Konigsberg, where he spent his entire life and career. Kant had a very organised and clockwork life - his habits were so regular that it was considered that the people of Konigsberg could set their clocks by his walks. The same regularity was part of his publication history, until 1770, when Kant had a ten-year hiatus in publishing. This was largely because he was working on this book, the 'Critique of Pure Reason'.

Kant as a professor of philosophy was familiar with the Rationalists, such as Descartes, who founded the Enlightenment and in many ways started the phenomenon of modern philosophy. He was also familiar with the Empiricist school (John Locke and David Hume are perhaps the best known names in this), which challenged the rationalist framework. Between Leibniz' monads and Hume's development of Empiricism to its logical (and self-destructive) conclusion, coupled with the Romantic ideals typified by Rousseau, the philosophical edifice of the Enlightenment seemed about to topple.

Kant rode to the rescue, so to speak. He developed an idea that was a synthesis of Empirical and Rationalist ideas. He developed the idea of a priori knowledge (that coming from pure reasoning) and a posterior knowledge (that coming from experience) and put them together into synthetic a priori statements as being possible. Knowledge, for Kant, comes from a synthesis of pure reason concepts and experience. Pure thought and sense experience were intertwined. However, there were definite limits to knowledge. Appearance/phenomenon was different from Reality/noumena - Kant held that the unknowable was the 'ding-an-sich', roughly translated as the 'thing-in-itself', for we can only know the appearance and categorial aspects of things.

Kant was involved heavily in scientific method, including logic and mathematical methods, to try to describe the various aspects of his development. This is part of what makes Kant difficult reading for even the most dedicated of philosophy students and readers. He spends a lot of pages on logical reasoning, including what makes for fallacious and faulty reasoning. He also does a good deal of development on the ideas of God, the soul, and the universe as a whole as being essentially beyond the realm of this new science of metaphysics - these are not things that can be known in terms of the spatiotemporal realm, and thus proofs and constructs about them in reason are bound to fail.

Kant does go on to attempt to prove the existence of God and the soul (and other things) from moral grounds, but that these cannot be proved in the scientific methodology of his metaphysics and logic. This book presents Kant's epistemology and a new concept of metaphysics that involves transcendental knowledge, a new category of concepts that aims to prove one proposition as the necessary presupposition of another. This becomes the difficulty for later philosophers, but it does become a matter that needs to be addressed by them.

As Kant writes at the end of the text, 'The critical path alone is still open. If the reader has had the courtesy and patience to accompany me along this path, he may now judge for himself whether, if he cares to lend his aid in making this path into a high-road, it may not be possible to achieve before the end of the present century what many centuries have not been able to accomplish; namely, to secure for human reason complete satisfacton in regard to that with which it has all along so eagerly occupied itself, though hitherto in vain.' This is heavy reading, but worthwhile for those who will make the journey with Kant.

Kant begins with the simple statement that all knowledge is based upon experience. It is the last easily understood sentence in the book. Philosophy had established two types of knowledge: analytical and synthetic. A valid analytical statement is always absolutely true, thus is "known". The statement "The sum of two right angles in the Euclidian system is equal to a straight line" is an analytical statement. It is "true" in that the statement is derived from Euclidian propositions and agrees with the propositions from which it is derived. It says nothing about the actual nature of the world. The statement "The cat is on the table" is a synthetic statement. The word synthetic used means a synthesis of known and knower. The synthetic statement is open to dispute. It may be the product of deception, imagination or any number of other factors which make it beyond absolute knowledge. Kant's book is an attempt to establish that there is or is not some connection in some manner in which any synthetic knowledge can be known with the certainty that an analytical statement can be "known". Synthetic statements include all scientific knowledge, such as the second law of thermodynamics. The second law necessitates existencce of physical material which obeys it. In order to be "knowable" the knowledge must be a priori as a necessary condition. The closest that Kant comes to establishing this connection is via the type of knowledge called synthetic a priori, which is to say a joining of the known and knower without experience of the known by the knower. The closest he comes to establishing that this type of knowledge is real is the knowledge of TIME, which he asserts is not itself experienced but whose reality can be asserted via the experience of events which have sequence. A.N. Whitehead uses the example of space as synthetic a priori, in that space known within a given distance can be known a prior that it extends far beyond possible experience. A priori is necessary for certainty, but not sufficient. Neither TIME nor SPACE establishes that anything synthetic can be known with the total certainty that an analytical statement can be "known". As he puts it, "Existence is not a true predicate." It should be obvious that Kant considers any knowledge which is not absolutely certain to be something less than knowledge. It is interesting that the later German philosopher Schopenhauer would consider no-one a man who had not read and understood the "Critique of Pure Reason". It was on my high school reading list, and I tried to read it then, but interested people who are not advanced students of logic and philosophy would doubtless be better off reading an abridged version.

"The Critique" is a continuation of the tradition of attempts to prove the existence of God, which was seen by some as being "necessary" and therefore true in a sense that the existence of the natural world is not "necessary". That view was followed up by Descartes' famous assertion "I think, therefore I am." Kant rejected both these views with his famous assertion "Existance is not a true predicate." Later, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell modified Descartes' statement to "There is thought, therefore there is existance."
Russell lived after Kant, so Kant's reaction is unknown. Kant uses logic to come to oppposite conclusions, contradictions. In "A Brief History of Time" Steven Hawking shows that some of these contrary statements are in fact identical statements because Kant was using the classical view that time is constant, while the contradictions can be explained by Einstein's thory that time is actually a dependent function, passing at different rates from different viewpoints depending upon velocity. Perhaps some of the theory of relativity could have been extrapolated from the "Critique of Pure Reason", but Kant did not make the connection. Perhaps it influenced some scientists around the turn of the 20th century before the Michaelson-Morley experiment or even before Maxwell. Who knows. Today Kant's influence is principally through his ethical thought, which shows up in some Jewish commentaries on the Bible as well as in the larger community.
His conclusions that synthetic propositions cannot be known with the certainty that analytical propositions can be "known" is simply taken as an everyday part of life today.

I have only finished reading the book for the second time about a week ago. I read the opening seventy pages or so perhaps four times to get a clear grasp of what Kant was saying. Even now I am not able to debate on specific details of how he arrives at his conclusions, but I can more or less grasp the conclusions themselves. This isn't something I do regularly, this is something very few writers merit at all. The reason you will end up rereading large sections in minute detail is twofold. The first part is that Kant's philosophy is very complex. This in and of itself isn't such a bad thing, after all he is reconciling empiricism with rationalism and does a superb job of doing so. He was highly effective in closing most of the philosophical schism that had arisen over the issue. The one major complaint I have, and the second reason the book is so difficult, is that Kant is rather trigger-happy with the archaic terms and the use of academic jargon in his work. You won't be able to dive right into this, though I will say that after about page 250-300 the work gets much, much easier to understand.

Having said that, there are huge redeeming features in the book. One is that despite his painfully dull writing style, his points are concise and he often repeats and rephrases them in addition to using countless examples. In that respect, this beating of dead horses is akin to reading Aristotle, but unlike Aristotle you won't grasp what is being said right off the bat. So even a layman like I am can understand this work if they are dedicated enough.

The aim of this Critique is stated in the title. It is a critique of pure reason. One of Kant's main aims in this book is to establish what we can know. He criticizes pure rationalism as not answering any of its own questions and in fact producing nothing but unanswerable paradoxes and he criticizes pure empiricism as being unable to support its claims. He works toward a synthesis of the two philosophies by examining what we can know and concludes that rational thought is perfectly acceptable as long as it remains withinthe confines of possible experience. As such, questions about God or about the universe being infinite or finite are unanswerable as we cannot experience these things.

Additionally, take what he says about space and time with a grain of salt. His writings on these subjects made up my one major qualm with his philosophy.

Still, this is considered to be possibly the greatest work of philosophy in the modern age, and it deserves to be read. Fortunately he isn't one of those type of people who can just be quoted out of context.

My final suggestion, ultimately, is that you start with something else. The Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics was Kant's own attempt to condense and simplify his philosophy, and although I (arguably) made the mistake of delving head first into this book not everyone should approach his work without a friendly suggestion to pick up a thinner and simpler treatise first.

First, to state the obvious: it is difficult, maybe even impossible, to truly grasp where philosophy as a discipline stands today [on both sides of the Atlantic] and how it got there without at least a basic understanding of what Kant presents in _The Critique of Pure Reason_.
For students who may find the going tough, I would recommend first familiarizing yourself with his _Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics_. Despite the perhaps more daunting title, it presents much of the underlying structures of the _Critique_ in a more succinct and clearer form. Once that basic understanding is gained, the _Critique_ becomes clearer.... and, yes, even exciting and inrtiguing. This book was what decided me in my major [Philosophy], it had that much of an impact on me.

First of all, it is important to remember that this review refers to the Cambridge Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, so it is unfair to go into any in-depth discussion regarding Kemp Smith's translation. The Cambridge Edition was translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, two Kantian scholars that translate the material from a grammatical rather than literal perspective. This fact alone means that the buyer of this edition must work harder to reach the meaning of Kant's ideas. I have read Kemp Smith's translation, it is much easier to read than this Cambridge Edition, but my favorite translation is by F. Max Muiller. Considering all this, I recommend the Cambridge Edition only to hard core Kant scholars, but for the first time reader of Kant try the Kemp Smith or F. Max Muller translations for an easier read. All this aside, Kant's ideas regarding human experience and understanding are quite unique and must be taken with a grain of salt. Any true student of philosophy should attempt the reading and understanding of THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON but should not consider it the say-all and end-all of metaphysics. It is important to remember what Kant states in his much shorter and much more accesable book, PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE METAPHYSICS, metaphysics is not an exact science like mathematics, rather metaphysics is more or less an art of reasoning regarding the nature of reality. Thus each individual, by the nature of their unique perspective of reality, will approach metaphysics from a different angle and get their own meaning from the abstract concepts that make-up this very interesting branch of philosophy. Because of this I recommend the truelly interested student of philosophy to also read Hume, Husserl and Locke. The crux of this book is the Coperincan shifting of reality from the outside world, as an absolute phenomenon to be experienced, to the inside world, as a mental feature that influences experince. Thus, reality becomes, when treated by Kant, not an object of experience, but rather a factor of experience. This shift of reality is the foundation of all of modern psychology and allows the person that truelly comprehends this concept to treat reality as a personal feature of life rather than as a absolute feature of the physical world. With this shift of reality from the outside world to the inside world comes an increased resposibilty regarding one's actions, and this is the bottom line of Kant's whole life's work and achivement. The reader of this monumental book must not get hung up on the transcedetalism of the ideas, but like Kant, must use these ideas regarding the nature of reality as a stepping stone to their own morality and ethics. After all, Kant was not a dirty hippie but was a great scholar and moralist.

I notice some readers complain because they find the book hard to read, and fault Kant for that. Would the same readers fault the mathematician Kurt Gödel if they found his works hard to read? This book is very well written in the same sense that an advanced mathematics text may be well written. Kant displays a very clear head dealing with difficult subject matters, and makes a systematic study out of it.
One may agree or one may disagree with Kant. One may find holes in his arguments or one may not. But regardless of this, a reader who takes the time required for the study of this book will find that Kant's arguments are very clear. I disagree with Kant on many points - as you would expect of a man who claims Max Stirner as his closest philosophical kin - but I would never find that disagreement a reason to disparage Kant's intelligence or his ability to write. Kant's book is nothing less than a monumental achievement philosophically, and in the time after him we can not philosophize without relating to his brilliant insights.
The core of Kant's insight is - in my eyes - that though all our knowledge arises WITH experience, it does not thereby follow that it all arises FROM experience. Read him, and you will get a Copernican shift of perspective which may lead you to some new thoughts - and though those new thoughts may arise as you read Kant, I can in no way guarantee that they will be implied by what you have read.

in response to the reviewer who stated that Kant is an "affront to everything good about philosophy" and that his works are less than worthy because of the majority's overwhelming lack of an ability to comprehend him, well who says everything has to be written in layman's terms in order to be valuable? it's unfortunate, yes, that many, such as yourself, will never experience that moment of sheer awe as it all dawns on you; that moment when every aspect of each sentance (granted that a single sentance may indeed be 4 pages long) suddenly come together in your mind at which point the whole concept which Kant is trying to impart hits you like a skillet to the head. for those of us who do have the patience and the intellect to reach beyond the idiosynchracies and nuances of his writings enough to understand them, whether in agreement with him or not, there simply is nothing else out there that can provide that level of depth to one's grasp on any concepts regarding the structure of thought and being. you want to turn mature material into something that's 'fun for the whole family' and i'm sorry but some things should be left to the adult-only crowd. if for nothing else then simply so they may remain intact and as intended. you can not simplify what Kant and others like him divulge. by trying to do so you remove what it is that makes them worth considering in the first place.
great that Plato's philosophies are easy for anyone to understand, i'm happy for you that he is... but that just means he's got a lot more people quoting him here and there and frankly, that's where words are too oft spoken but their meanings lost. quotes become clichès and no one ever bothers to philosphize the point being made and the meaning behind a clichè.
and say that it were easy to read for all... say that his works were stripped of their complexity and simplified to all levels of literacy for the limited mind - what, then, would you have us read? what would you have the "elite few" who do have the capacity to understand his original works read in order to find the same challenge to our psyche and our mental make-up that we get from reading works such as these.? so it may be for the elite few but don't those elite few deserve material written at their own level of thinking to read? if your own logistics are not up to par with those of men like Kant then it is no fault of his and no reason for you to knock him.
leave the criticism of such great minds to those who have the capacity to conceive them and keep your reviews to that which you know rather than that which you have absolutely no idea.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is considered one of the giants of philosophy, of his age or any other. It is largely this book that provides the foundation of this assessment. Whether one loves Kant or hates him (philosophically, that is), one cannot really ignore him; even when one isn't directly dealing with Kantian ideas, chances are great that Kant is made an impact.

Kant was a professor of philosophy in the German city of Konigsberg, where he spent his entire life and career. Kant had a very organised and clockwork life - his habits were so regular that it was considered that the people of Konigsberg could set their clocks by his walks. The same regularity was part of his publication history, until 1770, when Kant had a ten-year hiatus in publishing. This was largely because he was working on this book, the 'Critique of Pure Reason'.

Kant as a professor of philosophy was familiar with the Rationalists, such as Descartes, who founded the Enlightenment and in many ways started the phenomenon of modern philosophy. He was also familiar with the Empiricist school (John Locke and David Hume are perhaps the best known names in this), which challenged the rationalist framework. Between Leibniz' monads and Hume's development of Empiricism to its logical (and self-destructive) conclusion, coupled with the Romantic ideals typified by Rousseau, the philosophical edifice of the Enlightenment seemed about to topple.

Kant rode to the rescue, so to speak. He developed an idea that was a synthesis of Empirical and Rationalist ideas. He developed the idea of a priori knowledge (that coming from pure reasoning) and a posterior knowledge (that coming from experience) and put them together into synthetic a priori statements as being possible. Knowledge, for Kant, comes from a synthesis of pure reason concepts and experience. Pure thought and sense experience were intertwined. However, there were definite limits to knowledge. Appearance/phenomenon was different from Reality/noumena - Kant held that the unknowable was the 'ding-an-sich', roughly translated as the 'thing-in-itself', for we can only know the appearance and categorial aspects of things.

Kant was involved heavily in scientific method, including logic and mathematical methods, to try to describe the various aspects of his development. This is part of what makes Kant difficult reading for even the most dedicated of philosophy students and readers. He spends a lot of pages on logical reasoning, including what makes for fallacious and faulty reasoning. He also does a good deal of development on the ideas of God, the soul, and the universe as a whole as being essentially beyond the realm of this new science of metaphysics - these are not things that can be known in terms of the spatiotemporal realm, and thus proofs and constructs about them in reason are bound to fail.

Kant does go on to attempt to prove the existence of God and the soul (and other things) from moral grounds, but that these cannot be proved in the scientific methodology of his metaphysics and logic. This book presents Kant's epistemology and a new concept of metaphysics that involves transcendental knowledge, a new category of concepts that aims to prove one proposition as the necessary presupposition of another. This becomes the difficulty for later philosophers, but it does become a matter that needs to be addressed by them.

As Kant writes at the end of the text, 'The critical path alone is still open. If the reader has had the courtesy and patience to accompany me along this path, he may now judge for himself whether, if he cares to lend his aid in making this path into a high-road, it may not be possible to achieve before the end of the present century what many centuries have not been able to accomplish; namely, to secure for human reason complete satisfacton in regard to that with which it has all along so eagerly occupied itself, though hitherto in vain.' This is heavy reading, but worthwhile for those who will make the journey with Kant.

Dry, yes. Boring, to many readers, yes. Worthwhile, definitely.
Accept no substitutes. If you're interested in modern
philosophy, this will be required reading. For the
beginner I do recommend that one first look over
the works of Locke, Hume, Berkely, Descartes,
and Leibniz to obtain an understanding of
what specifically Kant is attempting to
accomplish; which is the doctrine that we
bring more to experience than empiricism
admits while not beyond the realm of
experience as the rationalists maintain.
This is the famous Copernican switch
from external objects as the source of
all knowledge to human beings as containing
the forms of knowledge that we bring to
objects. I recommend a careful reading
of the Critique so as to discourage false
impressions of it. Kant was not arguing
for subjectivism or that human beings
make up the world entirely with their
thoughts. There is a world that is
an organized nature in so far as
we know it, but "in itself" independant
of our minds, it isn't anything for us.
Because we all share the same reason,
we all share the same universe, and
so Kant's system is just as objective
and amicable to common sense as
any other.

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, 1781, 1787; translated by Max Muller, revised by Marcus Weigelt, Penguin, 2007, 784 ff.

To try to encapsulate even the essence of this great work in a review of a few hundred words is an almost impossible task (the book is over 700 pages long). For a man who rarely if ever journeyed beyond the confines of his city of birth, Konigsberg, this is a remarkable work and the first of three Critiques that he wrote (the others on Practical Reason and on Judgement).

Kant presents us at the outset with the human dilemma: that we are burdened with questions we cannot ignore but which, even transcending all our powers, we are also not able to answer. He points out that, in an earlier age, metaphysics was regarded as the `queen of the sciences' amongst philosophers but that now, with the advance of scientific rationalism, discussion of metaphysics encourages only scorn.

It was Kant's purpose in this treatise to explore the limits of metaphysics. It is in this work that Kant fused the ideas of the British empiricists (all knowledge is derived from the senses) and the Continental rationalists (mind is the only safe source of knowledge). Kant argued that we need both empiricism and rationalism to make sense of the world. The 'transcendental deduction' that philosophers agonize about (I am not a 'professional' philosopher), as I understand it, is that we also cannot do without a third source of knowledge that we might call intuition (or faith?). Kant argues that there are certain principles allowing us access to knowledge that we must accept 'a priori' - without experience of the world. The principle of causality (or, in philosophical terms, The Principle of Sufficient Reason)is one such example.

Although this is an excellent translation (I have never read the original works), because of the size of the work and the complexity of the subject matter, this is really a book for undergraduate philosophy students or, at least, readers familiar with philosophical argument and the necessary staying power to get through the material. I agree with the reviewer who criticized the use of two different Kant originals (1st edn 1781; 2nd edn 1787) in the translations presented here, even though they are distinguished by being in Roman and italic type, respectively. This does tend to break up the flow of the text and is probably only of interest to philosophy undergraduates. However, the translation reads easily - at least, as easily as a text of this complex nature could read. In this edition there is a useful 76-page Introduction that puts Kant and the work in context, there are 24 pages of Notes at the end and a detailed Index to help readers track down particular subjects.

Howard Jones is the author of The Thoughtful Guide to God and The World as Spirit.

The Vision of Kant (Spirit of Philosophy)
Kant: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
The Philosophy of Kant

This is a fine English translation of Kant's seminal philosophical work. However, be warned, this work is *much funnier* in the original German. Regrettably, many of Kant's infamous puns and one-liners just don't translate. As such, this influential work -- which, to any native speaking German, would be a pleasure to browse through at a beachside café -- becomes a dense and challenging work that English readers may wish to avoid in favor of lighter fare, such as Bertrand Russell's effervescent masterwork, Principia Mathematica.

Kant's Critique is without any doubt a classic. It's a good example of laborious and sustained philosophical reflection, though I do not believe a single word of it. The Critique is interesting, I think, not so much as an argument as it is interesting as a crucial turn in the history of philosophy. For, Kant is the only thinker to seriously re-capture the important distinction which Chrysippus the Stoic drew between "inner logos" and "outer logos". Kant's main thrust in this book is amazingly Stoic. What Sextus Empiricus (ca. 3rd century A.D.) said of Stoic logic summarizes perfectly Kantian epistemology:"the [concepts of] whole and part are 'in' us, and what is external, underlying, and sensible is neither a whole nor a part, but it is the thing of which we predicate our conciousness"(SVF,II,80). Kant deserves credit for being the first non-Stoic thinker to construct a theory of knowledge without appealling to God as mediator between the outer world and us (as Augustine or Berkeley did) or without denying knowledge of the outside world as objective(Hume). However, I deplore the fact that some people out there think that to study philosophy is to 'know' the great systems. One fellow who reviewed the Critique said that to be a philosopher one has to study Aristotle's Metaphysics, Hegel's Phenomenology, and the Critique. But, my friend, as the French author Charles Peguy once said: philosophy does not go to classrooms." Philosophy is a life, a quest, a personal endeavor. It's not primarily an academic thing. I don't mean to say that academic philosophy is bad. I myself am a philo major. But I do say that, given that in studying philosophy you cannot possibly get knowledge (for, as Karl Jaspers rightly observes, in philosophy questions are more important than answers),the point of engaging in philosophical reflection is to change our way of living, to refine our emotions, to purify our thoughts, to elevate our tastes, and to feel true love for our fellow human beings who are parts of the same "Kosmos" as us, and share the same human condition as us. That's why I personally tend to view works such as Marcus Aurelius's Meditations as what should be most rightly labeled "philosophy" books. Anyhow, don't use this as a pretext to eschew the study of the Critique. It is a great work, and surely is the most ground-breaking work of the modern period. So, read it!

It is often dense and it is consistently challenging. But this may be the key to Kant and time spent with him is never wasted. Kemp Smith's commentary is available in paper and is extremely helpful. Working through Kant's philosophy can be exhilarating and sharing a bit of his view of the philosophical topography is something no one should deny themselves.

The Critique is often dense and it is consistently challenging. But this is the key to Kant and time spent with him is never wasted. Kemp Smith's commentary is available in paper and is extremely helpful. Working through Kant's philosophy can actually be exhilarating and sharing his view of the philosophical topography is something no one should deny themselves.

This review is directed both at the quality of the product and the publication. I totally agree with B. Klockars "Booklars"'s review in which he expresses his perplexity as to why the reviews offered are primarily concerned with Kant's work rather than with the quality of the individual product (binding, typographical accuracy etc.).

I. I am using this edition by Dover which I borrowed from the NYPL. I should admit the quality of the binding is rather bad and some pages may soon become loose even though the book has not been in much use apparently.

II. I am primarily using the Russian translation by N. Lossky and using the English version as a secondary aid. The very first time I consulted the English language edition I found an inconsistency with the Russian text. Upon comparing both versions with the German original, I can present the following:

On page 30 under title "Conclusions from the above conception" (itself part of Section II. - Of Time) the text in this particular book reads "...From this it is clear also that the representation of time is itself an intuition, because all its relations can be expressed in an internal intuition." The CORRECT text and meaning should be "...can be expressed in an external intuition." See the original text:

"SCHLÜSSE AUS DIESEN BEGRIFFEN

b) Die Zeit ist nichts anderes, als die Form des inneren Sinnes, d. i. des Anschauens unserer selbst und unseres inneren Zustandes... Hieraus erhellt auch, daß die Vorstellung der Zeit selbst Anschauung sei, weil alle ihre Verhältnisse sich an einer äußeren Anschauung ausdrücken lassen."

Not a very good sign...

Despite the earth-shaking importance of Kant for the world of thought, I am in complete disagreement with the idea that a style of writing is obscure because it deals with deep or complex subjects. Einstein once said that he could explain relativity to an uneducated barmaid-- and was famous for the clarity with which he educated nonscientists. One could cite many examples in the philosophical world as well (Camus, William James, etc.)...writing this bad isn't so for technical reasons, but for stylistic and egotistic ones. You're better off reading someone else's commentary on Kant.

Let me start by addressing some misconceptions you'll see as you roam around these reviews.
First of all, there are a couple of low reviews that refer to Kant as being "anti-reason," "anti-truth," a socialist, a collectivist, etc. These are written by Objectivists - followers of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand has about the same relationship to serious philosophy as McDonalds does to good cooking. She hated Kant, but never quite seemed to understand him. No surprise - he's hard.
Which is the second point. This is not an easy book at all. That's why it's most often assigned to graduate students. Even undergrads can easily get a philosophy degree without ever touching this book. It's bloody hard. This is because, well, its ideas are radical and difficult, and because Kant is a careful philosopher.
It is not, and this is my third point, because Kant is a bad writer. Quite the opposite. He's a great writer. The fact of the matter is, though, that his subject matter is not exactly a page-turner. But, I mean, what do you expect. You're reading academic philosophy. There's a handful of academic books that are both worthwhile and fun to read, and that's just a fact of life. Kant, however, is quite clear - indeed, he does the service of going over his points more than once - a luxury you won't get when you advance to Hegel. Furthermore, believe it or not, there are jokes in Kant. The best of them is a footnote, in which he notes that "Deficiancy in judgment is that which is ordinarily referred to as stupidity, and for such a failing their is no remedy."
Unfortunately, it's all too common on the store to bash academic books because they're hard, obscure, or poorly written. The fact of the matter is that these books are not for everyone. They're for specialists and scholars, and are written in a language that is appropriately technical to that task. You don't go and bash medical and scientific books for being too hard for you. Give philosophy a break, and recognize this book as what it is - one of the most important contributions to a scholarly field ever.

Standard book of german philosophy. It has a historic value and a contemporary relevance, because it enforces rigorous rethinking about the status of perceived objects. Time and space are, according to Kant, on the side of the perceiving subject, and not independently real. But what remains, if we remove space/time from the objects? Such considerations may twist the brain, but are quite amusing and may sharpen ones mental faculties.

Pluhar's translation is wonderful. The extensive annotation makes the whole work perfectly clear, offering alternative translations and pointing out the technical German vocabulary (so essential to understanding Kant). The work flows beautifully, and though the material was dense, I could hardly put it down at times. If you're just starting Kant, do not start here. I'd suggest the excellent series by W.T. Jones called A History of Western Philosophy (specifically volume four). Read and reread it. Understand the basics about Kant, then, when you have the proper grounding, go on to the Critique. It will reward careful study.

"Immanual Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable." In what? did he drink?
This book, the first critique, is genius; there's no disputing that. But how valuable is this particular edition or translation. This is perhaps the only case where, I think, Hackett didn't hack it.
There are an abundance of footnotes, there are references to Kemp Smith, there are references to the Meiklejohn, there are just damn too many references.
This edition may serve the Kant scholar well, but not the student. The words used to replace the "confusing ones" used by Kemp Smith are no less confusing.
But Kant is Kant, and he will remain stable even after a long night of translating alcohol.

Having studied philosophy way back when, I looked forward to the Penguin edition of the 1st Critique. Max Muller's translation still has its advocates today, and I liked the idea of a no-pressure, Penguin Classix version that I could just sit down and read for the fun of it.

That got me about to the Transcendental Deduction, as you would expect.

Which leaves me with the question, whom is this edition for? If you're setting out to study the book, a ponderous translation like Pluhar or Guyer/Wood seems preferable, where there's a footnote to tell you exactly when a word's being translated differently for context, and other such stuff that starts seeming important when you're trying to pin Kant down.

And if you're not trying to do that, if you're not going to *study* the book ... then what are you going to do with it, exactly? Because this is not a reader-friendly book, no matter how fluent the (revised) translation and how ample the font.

I've resorted to a commentary or two, and may resume the struggle soon; but I think Penguin would've done better to reissue the Prolegomena than to release a non-scholarly KdrV.

... (Sept. 1, 2009) Time having lapsed, I don't want to seem very critical of the Weigert version; much of the problem with Kant is just Kant, and no translation is going to whisk that away (if it did, it would be a poor one). I guess I'm wishing that Weigert's project had been done for a publisher like Hackett, which would have allowed for a bit more academic approach.

Re: K O'Connell above: if you don't find the Deduction difficult, then you haven't read it. I am unaware of any Kant scholar who thinks the Deduction is *not* difficult.

I'd like to reiterate two famous quotations regarding Kant and this book. "God said that if Kant had not existed, someone would have had to invent him," and Critique of Pure Reason is considered to make Kant "the greatest of modern philosophers." This book is notorious for impenetrable obscurity. There are two reasons for a book to be obscure. One is the obscurity of expression and the other is the expression of obscurity. The latter is hardly to blame, and it's almost unavoidable, as is the case with this book. Unlike most philosophy books, the difficulty in reading this book actually underestimates the profundity of the content. One of the philosophy professors said it takes 5 years of strenuous reading for an average person to understand the whole content in his/her own way. So read this book only if you have lots of time and are not annoyed to read a passage over and over again.

I am an avid reader of philosophical books and without any doubt i consider Immanuel Kant as the greatest mind who has ever written on such abstract subjects.This work is a real copernican revolution,putting forth the structure of our cognitive systems and the way we perceive the world around us.At least it changed my own worldview,making me recognize that i am the creator of my thoughts and not a simple observer.For this reason i consider it one of the most important books i have ever read.

My review refers only to the binding of this book. The text itself I rate highly, with a few quibbles. But after a few months of moderate usage, the poor backing has caused the book to break into four pieces, with the pages flying out like a looseleaf. This trash binding is meant for a Romance novel, not a scholarly work. Perhaps the marketing target is undergraduates who will toss it away after a semester. Cambridge, serious readers and translators deserve better.

For those who read the editorial review, know that the "paperback version" is actually an entirely different translation, and while it is abridged, this version is not.

So, for those who read the editorial review and were concerned that this translation was abridged, don't worry, it isn't.

However, for those of you who read the editorial review, which sings the praises of the editor, and think that you're getting a version of innordinately high quality in this book, you're not. the translation is very awkward at points. it still gets the point accross, just sometimes with little attention paid to grammar.

Those who are, or who are planning to be, students of Kant should know that professionals regard the Meiklejohn translation of the Critique of Pure Reason as substandard. Translations must compromise, but this one compromises too much. In places it shows serious misunderstandings of Kant's intent. The "classic" standard is Norman Kemp Smith's translation, and the new standard is the Cambridge Edition translation by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Even undergraduates should be given excerpts from these latter texts.

Old Immanuel was quite fond of run-on sentences, it really lessens the impact of the work...unless you take into consideration the self-congratulatory feelings that arise when you actually interpret one of his concepts. Then again, I'm only 15 and I have yet to take a philosophy course.

The greatest philosophical text ever. 6 stars. Jason Miller is obviously one of the Ayn Rand followers who attack Kant without having ever read the book; it is certainly not anti-reason, anti-thought or anti-life, but I doubt anyone who belongs to the cult of so called "Objectivists" could understand that. This is the book which reshaped philosophy as we know it: Schopenhauer, Hegel and all others still exist in Kant's wake, and this is the most important book of his philosophy.

Kant has abandoned reason, whatever his supporters may say, for he starts on the premise that the law of Tautology does not apply between metaphysics and epistimology, that they only apply within their own spheres. As a result of this, he has come to the conclusion that there are two types of knowledge, with no relation. First there is knowledge of the world, which can not be validated rationally, then there is logical knowledge, which can not be validated by experience.
You can call that logic, but that would be a mistake.
Based on Kant's epistimological mistake, he then revives the doctrine of the mind/body dichotomy that had been dying since the rennaisance, and ventures into the field of ethics with, what is the logical conclusion of his earlier errors "What you do for yourself is not moral, what you do for others is moral."
Having found that this does not work in practice, he then dismisses the ethical AND the logical as both incompatable with each other and incompatable with the world, and that is his critique of reason.
The quest of philosophy is not to raise questions, but to find answers. Even if those answers are never found, and Kant would say that they could not be, we should ignore Kant's advice and continue to try. Philosophy is not Analysis Alone, and Aristotle would be dismayed at the company in which he is put if compared to Kant on that point.
The logical conclusions of Kant's writings are evident in the various schools of philosophy, such as existentialism, surrealism, and linguistic analysis. How do we know we exist? What do we mean when we say that? Don't bother to analyze, just deal what is in front of you.
A skilled Aristotelian is the best audience for this book, because then this book could get the savage review it deserves.

Lots of folks complain that Kant is hard to understand blah-blah. Here is a quick and simple explanation for the layman. Philosophers can slot in their preferred jargon as and where appropriate.
Everything you need to know was said by Plato.
There is a realm of Reality
(aka God, Divine realm, Truth, Noumenal realm, Essence, Absolutenss, Objectivity, Metaphysical realm, Brahman, Din, Spirit, Tao etc)
and there is a realm of Perception
(i.e. this world that we live in, aka phenomenal realm, physical realm, existential realm, relativity, subjective realm, maya, duniya, humanity, etc)
The latter is a shadow or reflection of the former.
The latter is completely dependent upon the former for its existence.
We humans have a soul which connects us to the Divine realm and a body which locates us in the physical realm.
We are rationally obliged to take care of our bodies and morally obliged to look after our souls.
As far as the realm of perception goes, we need to deal with it in a practical way, with common sense, humour and a lack of dogmatism.
As far as the Divine realm goes, we can only access it via a combination of hard-headed reason, humility, faith, morality, love and courage. Our access is limited by our God-given design -we can only access it up to a point. The Absolute true nature of reality 'as it is' is unknowable to human beings. We can approach it but never reach it.
Interestingly, it is not required by us to 'know' it. Once it is experienced even to a small degree, one realises that the Divine Realm is a realm of infinite love and bliss and concepts derived from within the realm of Perception such as 'philosophy', 'knowledge', 'mind' are not necessary or essential to grasp, feel, taste, experience or understand this realm.
After Plato, Bishop Berkeley restated these great concepts for the benefit of Western humanity in 1713, in philosophical language that was appropriate to his time, place and circumstances. Immanuel Kant restated them again in his time in language that was deliberately less theological than Berkeley, keeping in mind the audience he was addressing. In the meantime Hume had provided an invaluable service to both these philosophers by demonstrating that nothing is knowable with absolute certainty, in the philosophical sense of the word, in the realm of perception.
Gravely and unfortunately, many influential people in the West have since taken Hume and Kant to mean that we live in an anthropocentric, relativistic world, in which there are no valid overarching meanings left to live by. Properly religious people (i.e not cultists, fanatics, bigoted and closed minded fundametalists or soft-headed 'spiritualists'), would find such views and extrapolations to be most misguided. Interestingly and tellingly most modern people dismiss Bishop Berkeley's views out of hand, because he states the truth a bit too baldly for cynical and knowing modern appetites to digest.
Berkeley, Hume and Kant were wonderfully well-balanced, sane, rational, good-natured, hard-thinking, clear, morally upright and decent individuals. Their philosophies are designed to provide the maximum allowable and necessary intellectual framework you need to function as a human being in this world of ineffable mystery, a world created by God. They are an aid to living, not an end in themselves to be debated over endlessly or used as abstractions to tie your self up in knots.
Of course, you won't like or accept any of the above if you either don't believe in or if you refuse to believe in the Divine Realm - something which applies to some of the famous names in philosophy as well, especially many of the modern Anglo-Saxon philosophers.
Relax and Give Yourself A Chance - you can't and don't need to know everything - leave that to God.

It has been said that upon reading the first page of the Critique, that it could be likened to walking into a well lit room. Though the reading is rather laborious, it is well worth the time since there are few other in-depth accounts of the process of human reason which delve into the subject with such insight and contemplation.

Although the Norman Kemp-Smith version is a far superior one, the genius of Kant still comes through. This is literally the most important book ever written, wildly misunderstood and extremely difficult. I would recommend a good analytical philosophy course in order to make sense of it.

I am surprised that so many reviewers have responded favorably to Kant's famous "Critique"; for there is nothing easier than to dislike it. The book is, as Kant himself admitted, "dry, obscure, opposed to all ordinary notions, and moreover long-winded." It advances a number of doctrines which would seem to belong to different schools of thought. Indeed, Kant seems to be trying to be all things to all people; and in doing so, he risks alienating all points of view. He presents himself as a "transcendental idealist." But when this caused an uproar among the partisans of common sense, he quickly added several proofs of realism to the second edition. Kant also argues against metaphysical speculation; and yet the Critique itself appears extremely speculative, and his later work indulges in some metaphysical speculations about immortality, freedom, and God that seem to contradict one of the basic theses of the Critique.
The purpose of Kant's Critique is to determine how synthetic judgments a priori are possible. His answer, briefly (unfortunately, it is not so brief in the book), is that they are possible by virtue of certain "pure concepts of the understanding." Nietzsche savagely ridiculed Kant's argument in "Beyond Good and Evil." Kant's solution, according to Nietzsche, amounted to claiming that synthetic judgments a priori are possible "by virtue of a faculty." "But is that an answer?" Nietzsche questioned. "Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? 'By virtue of a faculty,' namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere." Nietzsche's criticisms seem to me unanswerable. Kant's famous categories (i.e., the "faculty" in question) are dreadfully pedantic and recondite. Although his basic notion that presuppositions are involved in all empirical judgments is basically sound, I seriously doubt that these presuppositions are in any way as rigid as Kant makes them out to be. I suspect they are much more flexible and change as our conceptions of reality deepen. Nor is there any justification in regarding them as necessarily true. They may in fact contain errors--which is precisely why they need to be flexible. (Karl Popper has made much the same point.)
Another criticism that could be leveled at Kant involves his extraordinary doctrine of the ideality of time and space. This "most terrible negation," as the philosopher George Santayana called it, would, if followed consistently, render all multiple and successive experiences as purely mental and imaginary. But as Santayana pointed out, if this were the case, "Everything conceivable would have collapsed into the act of conceiving it, and this act itself would have lost its terms and its purpose, and evaporated into nothing." Fortunately for Kant, he was only an idealist north-north west. When the wind blew southerly, he could distinguish real time from our experience of time, as his comforting postulate of immorality demonstrates quite clearly.

It amazes me how many of the previous reviewers failed to review the quality of the book (translation, print, etc), but rather insisted on offering sophomoric critiques of Kant's arguments. No one cares what YOU think about Kant. If one day YOU make even a fraction of a contribution to the field of philosophy as Kant has, then and ONLY then, may your opinion be considered important to the discussion. Any idiot can have an opinion. It is the task of scholars to first UNDERSTAND. Save the opinions of Kant's arguments for your dissertation.

Now for my review:

I gave 4 Stars mainly for what I felt were a few discrepancies or at least ambiguities when compared to the German text. As for English translations, I personally prefer the translation by James Creed Meredith. Nevertheless, it is always helpful to have several translations for comparison.

Kant's major work is so often misunderstood and misquoted because of the sheer profoundity of his thought. He proved the fact that by our perception of the world, we change it. This is something that has been abundantly verified by the revolutionary breakthroughs of the twentieth century in quantam mechanics. See the Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav for a pop culture introduction to this concept. He's kind of a dirty hippie, but he makes for an easy read. Nietczhe was brilliant, no one denies it, but he never really understood the point Kant was making.

Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that all of Western philosophy was a mere footnote to Plato. Now one can never overestimate Plato's importance,but I think Kant is his equal in the range of questions he considered and the subtlety of his reasoning. Unfortunately,Kant's prose style leaves much to be desired.

With each page my heartrate accelerated and I lost breath. I don't read much philosophy, although I did like 'Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.' My friend recommended this to me after I had expressed some doubts as to the validity of my statements on a DMV form. I crawled into my airport locker, not expecting much, but BANG!
Instantly I was catatpulted into a world of guns, suits, and scandanavian women, metaphysically speaking. This book has a reputation for being dull. But, like any good mystery, it captivates and forces you to read on just to find out what happens at the end. And, boy, are you in for a surprise! Who stole the glacier? Will Hegel succeed in his plan to ressurect the Vikings? And what Adalbert and his bra collection? (metaphysically speaking, of course) Good for holidays, vacations, and airplanes, I loved this read. More punches than the Prolegomena, and more slaps than Faust.

I read the long but fruitful review about the results of different translations of this text. So I went to my in-law who is German and she read a few paragraphs from the German. When I showed her the parallel text in English by Guyer and Wood, she was appalled at how inaccurate it was. She said the German was beautiful prose whereas the translation was aweful and didn't reflect the style of the German at all. She thought that the NK Smith was good English, but that it wasn't very accurate either. Unfortunately, I didn't get her opinion on the other translations.

The only reason I can think of for Cambridge using the utterly untalented efforts of Guyer and Wood is because of their privileged chairs in their respective University. Once again, power and privileged has done the public disservice in the academic world.

I don't believe that Immanuel Kant wrote "The Critique of Pure Reason".
It's a small quibble with publishers, actually.
The title of Kant's work was "Kritik der reinen Vernunft".
The generally accepted translation of that is: "Critique of Pure Reason".
There is no "The" in its title. If the title were found in text, one might correctly write, ...the "Critique of Pure Reason".... The quotation marks (or italics) provide the necessary distinction to avoid any confusion in the name. There is no excuse for re-titling the work to make it fit an English-eared convention. This seems too sloppy to profit from and too often echoed to allow to stand without remark.

PS Why aren't these reviews directed at the individual publication/product, as that to me is the issue. Should a poorly bound and printed book of The Painting of Picasso be reviewed on the strength of the painter's merits? I do not think so.
I have no helpful critique to offer on Kant's work, of which, this publication has hardly provided the best impression.

I don't believe that Immanuel Kant wrote "The Critique of Pure Reason".
It's a small quibble with publishers, actually.
The title of Kant's work was "Kritik der reinen Vernunft".
The generally accepted translation of that is: "Critique of Pure Reason".
There is no "The" in its title. If the title were found in text, one might correctly write, ...the "Critique of Pure Reason".... The quotation marks (or italics) provide the necessary distinction to avoid any confusion in the name. There is no excuse for re-titling the work to make it fit an English-eared convention. This seems too sloppy to profit from and too often echoed to allow to stand without remark.

PS Why aren't these reviews directed at the individual publication/product, as that to me is the issue. Should a poorly bound and printed book of The Painting of Picasso be reviewed on the strength of the painter's merits? I do not think so.
I have no helpful critique to offer on Kant's work, of which, this publication has hardly provided the best impression.

This Critique is long, difficult, and dry; however, at the same time it is brilliant. Many who rate this book below 4 stars just simply do not have the education or intellect to understand it. I recommend studying early modern philosophy from Descartes to Hume; then, you may be able to comprehend Kant's deep thinking. To this day, I display this book proudly as a trophy, and a thought bible.

This edition does not include any critical apparatus. This makes it virtually useless as a scholarly tool. The pagination from the Akademie is not referenced, and seems to exclude all distinction between the versions of the 1st. (1781) and 2nd. (1787) editions.
Perhaps it will serve only those who expect a mere aesthetic pleasure from reading difficult and abstruse philosophy.

This is just an observation about one word. On page B1 of the Felix Meiner edition (1976), Kant wrote the word Erfahrungserkenntnis. Couldn't one translate this as "experiential knowledge"? Yet Mueller put empirical experience, and Weigelt changed that to empirical knowledge.

Maybe there is an explanation for the "english" put on this word!

Ah, those years of philosophy, I recall them well. It was in the 1950's that I began my tutelage in the subject. I was at a university of Germany, studying under a progeniture of Immanuel Kant himself, I think it was his great grandchild, who was a professor of philology. I remember meeting a lovely and buxom woman named Helga, or Svelsbara; she was Norwegian and weighed a good 200+ lbs. Aside from loving philosophy, she was a weightlifter and had an interest in Philately, more specifically she owned an extensive collection of postal stamps from the Weimar Republic. I think she never forgave me for accidentally using a Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg (known universally as Paul von Hindenburg) stamp for postage. She was a devoted fan of Immanuel Kant . Perhaps much so that it ate at her each day. I myself could not stand his pedantic ravings. I asked her to coffee a few times, even a movie or two. It wasn't until I got into an argument with my professor that she ignored me altogether. Our relationship lost, my admiration for Immanuel Kant at a low, I took up a course in basket weaving which saved my very soul.

The book itself is so abstruse that it defies any comprehension. Your best bet is to altogether avoid this book since it's entirely pointless.

The sole purpose of philosophy is thus: to assist us (that is to say, humanity) in understanding our internal and our external universes.
Philosophy should not be prejudiced. It should be accessible to, and comprehended by, all of us. If the universal truths that any given piece of philosophy purports to represent are not accessible to, and comprehended by, all of us, then that philosophy has failed.
Kant is an elitist, pure and simple. He writes philosophy for a select few (other philosophers, it would seem), and not for humanity in general. This critique of his is nothing more than a twisting, baffling exploration of verbosity. Kant's inability to logically and comprehensibly structure his thought processes, instead rendering his theories unclear and incomprehensible, marks nothing more than his failure as a proper philosopher.
Plato's philosophy was for the masses. Any reasonably intelligent individual can easily digest his arguments. There are dozens of other popular philosophers just as good, and better than, Plato. Their philosophies are remarkably informative, useful, and well-written. Kant is uninformative, useless, and poorly penned. If you have read this, and understood it, and then applied it, then you are to be commended. But that's not many of you.
My suggestion: avoid this unless you are looking to punish yourself. Your education, with Kant as a guide, will give you nothing more than an increasing understanding of your own ignorance. Philosophy is meant to be refreshing and fulfilling. The `Critique of Pure Reason' is not.