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

"Tackling Kant's seminal enlightenment text, Critique of Pure Reason, remains key for every student of modern philosophy. Michael Pendlebury distils his breadth of experience teaching Kant's first Critique to provide a short, accessible introduction that reveals its enduring inspirations, challenges and ideas to thinkers grappling with contemporary philosophical issues. Clarifying and making sense of Kant's account of perception, cognition, space, time, substance, causation, actuality, objectivity, and the presuppositions and limits of human knowledge makes Critique of Pure Reason digestible for all students, including those approaching it for the first time. Making Sense of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason concentrates on key portions of the text that are essential to a basic understanding of Kant's project, providing an introduction that situates his ideas as solutions to philosophical problems. The book offers a sympathetic account of Kant's theory of a priori cognition alongside its application for readers new to Kantian philosophy, and uses select quotations from the original text to foreground Kant's Critique independent of subsequent debates and interpretations. Pendlebury makes sense of Kant's own views and arguments, creating a stimulating read that provides a useful starting point for further study."-- Provided by publisher "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." -- Publisher's description 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