Question Is Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" still valuable in any philosophical and non-historical sense to think about knowledge and its conditions of possibility? André C.

Accepted:
October 4, 2007

Comments

As with other great works in the history of philosophy, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason -- the single greatest work of philosophy ever written, in my view -- is valuable more for the questions it poses and the ways it develops for pursuing these questions than for the answers. These questions and methods are understood and reflected in the best work done by philosophers today. Still, much current work in philosophy is not at this level -- mistakes of the kinds Kant exposed are still frequently made, esp. ones that are so "natural" to our ordinary ways of thinking. (For example, it is very natural to believe that you just know the temporal order of the events in your mental life ... until someone presses you to explain how a being with a plurality of mental items in her mind could possibly get from these the notion of time and some specific ordering of her mental items in time.)

Kant explored so much new ground in this book, pioneering the language needed in this exploration as he went along, that his exposition is certainly not as clear and elegant as it could be. Similar points can be made about Einstein and Gödel, say, whose pioneering achievements we now generally read in more elegant later formulations. With Kant, I think, we should stick to the original text (though good secondary literature can be very helpful in reading this text). The reason is that philosophy is so much more "messy" and unframed than physics and mathematics. Here what one is trying to do, and what would count as success, are not given in advance of the inquiry, but constantly in play during the work itself. As a result, there is much more controversy (than in the cases of Einstein and Gödel) about what exactly Kant thought of himself as achieving, and (relatedly) much greater interest in reconstructing the path on which Kant arrived at a specific picture of what he was trying to accomplish. And then there is the further bonus that the Critique of Pure Reason conveys an excitement of discovery, of gaining a wholly new view of the problem of human knowledge, which no later treatment could possibly convey.

one book with you for the rest of your life...?" Well, I would take this book. No contest. Yes, I have read it before, and not just once or twice. But I am sure I will never read it or teach it without new learning and wonder.

Question Is Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" still valuable in any philosophical and non-historical sense to think about knowledge and its conditions of possibility? André C. Accepted:October 4, 2007

Question Is Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" still valuable in any philosophical and non-historical sense to think about knowledge and its conditions of possibility? André C.

Accepted:
October 4, 2007