Immanuel Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason

By Norman Kemp Smith

IMMANUEL KANTS CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON translated by NORMAN KEMP SMITH. Originally published in 1929. PREFACE: THE present translation was begun in 1913, when I was com pleting my Commentary to Kants Critique of Pure Reason Owing, however, to various causes, I was unable at that time to do more than prepare a rough translation of about a third of the whole and it was not until 1927 that I found leisure to revise and continue it. In this task I have greatly profited by the work of my two predecessors, J. M. D. Meiklejohn and Max Muller. Meiklejohns work, a translation of the second edition of the Critique was published in 1855. Max Miillers translation, which is based on the first edition of the Critique, with the second edition passages in appendices, was published in 1 88 1. Meiklejohn has a happy gift which only those who attempt to follow in his steps can, I think, fully appreciate of making Kant speak in language that reasonably approxi mates to English idiom. Max Miillers main merit, as he has very justly claimed, is his greater accuracy in render ing passages in which a specially exact appreciation of the niceties of German idiom happens to be important for the sense. Both Meiklejohn and Max Miiller laboured, however, under the disadvantage of not having made any very thorough study of the Critical Philosophy and the shortcomings in their translations can usually be traced to this cause. In the past fifty years, also, much has been done in the study and interpretation of the text. In particular, my task has been facilitated by the quite invaluable edition of the Critique edited by Dr. Raymund Schmidt. Indeed, the ap pearance of this edition in 1926 was the immediate occasion of my resuming the work of translation. Dr. Schmidts restoration of the original texts of the first and second editions of the Critique, and especially of Kants own punctuation so very helpful in many difficult and doubtful passages and his cita tion of alternative readings, have largely relieved me of the time-consuming task of collating texts, and of assembling the emendations suggested by Kantian scholars in their editions of the Critique or in their writings upon it. The text which I have followed is that of the second edition i 787 and I have in all cases indicated any departure from it. I have also given a translation of all first edition passages which in the second edition have been either altered or omitted. Wherever possible, this original first edition text is given in the lower part of the page. In the two sections, however, which Kant completely recast in the second edition The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories and The Paralogisms of Pure Reason this cannot conveniently be done and I have therefore given the two versions in immediate succession, in the main text. For this somewhat unusual procedure there is a twofold justification first, that the Critique is already, in itself, a composite work, the different parts of which record the successive stages in the development of Kants views and secondly, that the first edition versions are, as a matter of fact, indispensable for an adequate under standing of the versions which were substituted for them. The pagings of both the first and the second edition are given throughout, on the margins the first edition being referred to as A, the second edition as B. Kants German, even when judged by German standards, makes difficult reading. The difficulties are not due merely to the abstruseness of the doctrines which Kant is endeavouring to expound, or to his frequent alternation between conflicting points of view. Many of the difficulties are due simply to his manner of writing...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781446547878

Reviews for Immanuel Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason

[gottfried_leibniz-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Kant is systematic, thorough. I like his way of writing. He is intense, And dense, part of the reasons is because of concepts, definitions. However, I do not think he is the most difficult writer. The brilliant, deepest thinker so far I know is Jonathan Edwards. Kant is crucial to modern Philosophy, definitely worth reading his piece if you enjoy Philosophy.

The important things I learnt from this book was that, Knowledge we gain is systematized through our senses. Yes, our knowledge starts from experience but Kant does not claim that every knowledge must be from experience alone or through reason alone. He calls his system transcendental knowledge, which does not mean beyond our experience but it means knowledge which both synthetical and a priori.

Imagine you are wearing a blue glasses, And looking at the world. The world will be blue through your eyes, which you will never get to find out. Therefore, we are unable to completely understand the world. He classifies these as Noumena and Phenomena. Noumena is the reality, the thing itself and Phenomena is the appearance. Space and time constitute as a foundation for everything. His writings on cosmological, ontological arguments were impressive and makes me think more.


"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind" - Kant

[khanburikhan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A rigorous translation of the original 2nd edition. Kant's German is "difficult reading" even for accomplished German scholars.

[danielstj · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Far too complex. Nearly unreadable for the average reader.

[chaosmogony · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[lisamaria_c · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The Critique of Pure Reason is listed among Good Reading’s 100 Significant Books. I found reading through that list was a great education--as valuable as college, and I’ve learned enormously from reading it--much more aware of the underpinnings of Western culture. That’s why I stuck though this, even though I’d have ordinarily turned away from this book from the very first paragraph:Our reason has this peculiar fate that, with reference to one class of its knowledge, it is always troubled with questions which cannot be ignored, because they spring from the very nature of reason, and which cannot be answered, because they transcend the powers of human reason.OK, right there I thought this is not a guy really worthy of spending my time with, because if something transcends the powers of human reason, you can’t argue for it, so what’s the point of philosophy? The rest of the preface explains he’s going to resort to “pure reason”--by which he means reason without resort to experience. And without experience, how can we check out premises? I guess that makes me an empiricist, but that just there made me skeptical of learning much from Kant before I’d ever gotten beyond the Preface. Kant’s tone also grated on me more than any philosopher I’d ever read--much, much more than Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Locke... Take this from the Preface: But I beg to remind him that, if my subjective deduction does not produce in his mind the conviction of its certitude at which I aimed, the objective deduction, with which alone the present work is properly concerned, is in every respect satisfactory.And that’s just the impression from the first dozens of pages of a book over 400 pages long. Once I dove into Kant’s main argument, it was easy to get lost. I don’t think he’s quite as difficult as Spinoza, but then I was far more sympathetic to Spinoza’s arguments and tone, which helped me see his Ethics through. I probably have just about as much philosophical disagreement with Plato, but Plato is a very engaging writer--truly--I found The Republic, The Symposium, The Apology and the other dialogues very engaging reads. But Kant combines the thorny prose of Spinoza with a philosophy even more inimical to me than Plato. Yet I did find pushing through much of this valuable--for the same reason as the other works on the list. My rating reflects that I hated the style and substance of Kant--but that doesn't mean I don't think the ideas aren't important to grasp. Because I can see Kant’s lines of argument descending from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in The Republic and threaded through so many other thinkers after him:The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.

[jpsnow · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is it. This is where Kant sets his philosophy of epistemology based on the differentiation between that which can be known a priori and that which can be known only be experience. It is lame because it allows for no extension of principles to logical conclusions. Kant ignores the truly practical but does note the "unavoidable problems" in relation to "god, freedom, and immortality." He does divide the resulting thought process into the synthetic and analytic. This may have been a step forward. He also introduces the implications of a transcendental philosophy, which is necessary groundwork toward bridging the real and the spiritual.

[dizzyjosh_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fantastic translation, contains A and B editions of the work. The abstract image on the front cover may or may not relate to the contents of the book-- but are the noumena the center or the outer layer?

[praymont_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For most of the 20th Century this (the Kemp Smith translation) was the standard English translation of the 1st Critique. It still holds up well, although it's been superseded by two recent translations, one by Pluhar and the other by Guyer & Wood.

[silea_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is my first attempt to read Kant, as none of the various philosophy courses i took ever directly referenced his material, so i can't say with certainty whether the flaw i'm about to cite is the fault of Kant, the translator, or perhaps both. Regardless, here is my one-sentence review of this book:A typical sentence in this book may contain 32 words, adorned with no fewer than 7 commas (for reference, my rather long and comma-ridden sentence above has 45 words and only 4 commas).

[mossj_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reads better with no distractions. I sometimes have to re-read Kant numerous times before I understand what he's trying to promulgate.