Unlike his contemporaries and heirs, he also travelled little preferring instead to remain in Konigsberg for much of his life. Kant was something of a late bloomer in philosopher, especially when compared to the other German idealists and romantics whom he is a sort of father of: Fichte and Schelling were famous by their early and mid twenties, Hegel by his mid thirties, but Kant did not garner his reputation until the 1780s, already in his fifties. As such, we’re going to explore the prefaces (17) and introduction to Kant’s great work: The Critique of Pure Reason. What Kant does do, irrespective of how one views his merits and legacy, is establish a rigorous defense of epistemological rationalism contrary to the popular views of him establishing the irrationalist tradition – and like the later German idealists after him (the post-Kantians), his famous works contain infamous prefaces which could stand alone as their own philosophical treatises. Bertrand Russell, for instance, regarded Kant as a second rate philosopher whose more important contributions to philosophy was ethics rather than what he is most remembered for in the continental tradition, which was his metaphysics and phenomenology. In the English speaking world, he is generally passed over as an inaugurator of the “irrationalist” tradition of Continental Philosophy. Using the methods of science, Kant demonstrates that though each mind may, indeed, create its own universe, those universes are guided by certain common laws, which are rationally discernible.Immanuel Kant is a philosopher with a divisive history. Kant saw the Critique of Pure Reason as an attempt to bridge the gap between rationalism (there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience) and empiricism (sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge) and, in particular, to counter the radical empiricism of David Hume (our beliefs are purely the result of accumulated habits, developed in response to accumulated sense experiences).

The Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781 with a second edition in 1787, has been called the most influential and important philosophical text of the modern age. Translated by John Miller Dow Meiklejohn (1836 - 1902) Download cover art Download CD case insert The Critique of Pure Reason

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