Critique of Pure Reason (original 1781; edition 1996)

To call Kant "dense" is an understatement on par with saying the same about the core of a neutron star. Kant's critiques are not easy going, but the bright side is that his description of the human condition, an attempt to restore science and knowledge in a world transformed by Newton and Hume, is worth the effort.

The Critique of Pure Reason is a (perhaps the) watershed in Western philosophy, rightly likened to Kant's own description of a "Copernican revolution" in thought. The book is Kant's groundwork for knowledge itself: the nature of space and time and logic as preconditions for knowledge, shared among all humans, at the cost of sacrificing metaphysics to the transcendental realm of the "unconditioned". In exchange, we restore free will, morality, and (for those so inclined) God to the world of human existence.

Kant is very much the "lawyer" and the detail-man, and his almost obsessive need to sort human nature into a concrete taxonomy is perhaps the weakest part of the work. Still, Kant's division into the phenomenal and the noumenal, the human and the unconditioned, remains foundational, and to understand Kant's argument here is to understand everything that comes after in the Continental tradition. Even if you disagree with Kant's conclusions, there is a wealth of thought to draw upon, from Kant's conception of human existence to his ideas on "things in themselves", morality, and freedom.

The Critiques are a chore, but the kind of chore that pays off dividends. ( )

Ongoing .....

The Guyer & Woods translation is the best available. ( )

Critique of Pure Reason - Translated by Norman Kemp Smith, 1929, published in USA in 1965 (1929 translation by Norman Kemp Smith) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Kemp_Smith ( )

Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (published by Verlag von Felix Meiner in Hamburg in 1956) was reissued in 1962 (this volume): Critique of Pure Reason ( )