Making Sense of Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason”: A Philosophical Introduction

Description

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has had, and continues to have, an enormous impact on modern philosophy. In this short, stimulating introduction, Michael Pendlebury explains Kant's major claims in the Critique, how they hang together, and how Kant supports them, clarifying the way in which his reasoning unfolds over the course of this groundbreaking work. Making Sense of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason concentrates on key parts of the Critique that are essential to a basic understanding of Kant's project and provides a sympathetic account of Kant's reasoning about perception, space, time, judgment, substance, causation, objectivity, synthetic a priori knowledge, and the illusions of transcendent metaphysics. The guiding assumptions of the book are that Kant is a humanist; that his reasoning in the Critique is driven by an interest in human knowledge and the cognitive capacities that underlie it; and that he is not a skeptic, but accepts that human beings have objective knowledge and seeks to explain how this is possible. Pendlebury provides an integrated and accessible account of Kant's explanation that will help those who are new to the Critique make sense of it. Contents Preface How to Use This Book Note on Citations of and Quotations from Kant’s Works 1 Background 2 The Preface and the Introduction: Two Types of Metaphysics 3 The Transcendental Aesthetic: Sensibility, Space, and Time 4 The Metaphysical Deduction: Judgments, Concepts, and Categories 5 The Analogies and the Postulates: Fundamental Principles about Substance, Causation, Community, and Modality 6 The Transcendental Deduction: Why Intuitions Fall Under Categories 7 The Schematism: How Intuitions Fall Under Categories (B176–87) 8 The Dialectic: The Limits of Speculative Reason 9 Taking Stock Notes Bibliography Index of Citations of Passages in the Critique of Pure Reason Index of Subjects and Names