Year of manufacture: 1781/1998
Author: Immanuel Kant
Genre: Philosophy
English language
Publisher: University of Adelaide
Format: PDF
Number of pages: 372
The Critique of Pure Reason (German: Kritik der reinen Vernunft ) by Immanuel Kant, first published in 1781, second edition 1787, is one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. Also referred to as Kant's "first critique," it was followed by the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement.
Kant's work was stimulated by taking seriously Hume's skeptical conclusions about such basic principles as cause and effect and the implications of this skepticism for Kant's grounding in rationalism. In Kant's view, Hume's skepticism rested on the premise that all ideas are presentations of sensory experience. The problem that Hume identified was that basic principles like causality cannot be derived from sense experience only: as Hume argued, we experience only that one event regularly succeeds another, not that it is caused by it. Kant's goal, then, was to find some way to derive cause and effect without relying on empirical knowledge. Kant rejects analytical methods for this, arguing that analytic reasoning can't tell us anything that isn't already self-evident (Bxvii). Instead, Kant argued that we would need to use synthetic reasoning. But this posed a new problem — how can one have synthetic knowledge that is not based on empirical observation — that is, how can we have synthetic a priori truths?
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