The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) [Paperback]

Paul Guyer (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Cambridge Companions to Philosophy | Publication Date: January 31, 1992

The fundamental task of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been to determine whether the essential principles of both knowledge and action can be discovered by human beings unaided by an external agency. No one philosopher contributed more to this enterprise than Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) shook the very foundations of the intellectual world. Kant argued that the basic principles of the natural sciences are imposed on reality by human sensibility and understanding, and thus that human beings are also free to impose their own free and rational agency on the world. This volume is the only systematic and comprehensive account of the full range of Kant's writings available, and the first major overview of his work to be published in more than a dozen years. An internationally recognized team of Kant scholars explore Kant's conceptual revolution in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, moral and political philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion. The volume also traces the historical origins and consequences of Kant's work.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

After an excellent introduction by the editor, this volume consists of 14 essays by an international panel of Kant scholars, each dealing with a different element of Kant's thought and ranging over the entire body of his work. The essays are uniformly clear and well written, though some prior experience with Kant is necessary in order for them to be fully appreciated. The publisher is to be commended for the series, which will include studies of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Leibniz, and Spinoza. Recommended for all libraries supporting undergraduate programs in philosophy.
- Terry Skeats, Bishop's Univ ., Lennoxville, Quebec
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"This collection of essays attests to the high degree of maturity, richness, and depth recently achieved by English-langage Kantian scholarship. This book will certainly increase the already extraordinary interest that the revival of Kantian studies has produced in the Anglo-American philosophical world--an interest that has helped to erase some of the barriers between the analytical and other approaches to philosophy. The collection not only substantially advances the critical discussion of Kant's philosophy, it also can be used as an invaluable pedagogical tool at the graduate seminar level...giv[ing] an almost complete picture of Kant's critical philosophy." Ethics

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (January 31, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521367689
• ISBN-13: 978-0521367684
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #314,012 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A necessary corrective for the Anglo-Saxon Kantian fallacies, August 7, 2000

By 

Ernest Brown (Columbia, MO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) (Paperback)

Paul Guyer has done a great service to Kantian studies with his judicious editing of this anthology of essays on Kant's philosophy. By showing the balance between Kant's rationalistic background and his response to the English empiricists, the essays refute the common Anglo-American fallacy of viewing Kant as arbitrarily imposing categorical types on the objects of experience. The article on Kant's pre-critical development and philosophy is worth the price of the book alone.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Collection!, October 5, 2002

By 

Flounder (Substitution Instance) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) (Paperback)

If you're studying Kant for a college course, on your own, or as a scholar, this collection is quite excellent. Guyer is a major Kant interpreter, and so this anthology represents some of the best work in the field. I highly recommend this.

Guyer's article here is excellent. And so is Schaper's on the Third Critique.

I also recommend: Allison, Transcendental Idealism (for a sympathetic defense of Kant); Strawson, Bounds of Sense (critical); Bennett, K's Analytic (critical); Forster, Transcendental Deductions (Stanford UP); and Kitcher, K's CPR (Rowman/Littlefield). A current biography of Kant is: M. Kuehn, Kant (Cambridge UP, now in paperback).

13 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars False advertising, August 20, 2006

By 

Unhegel "wisdomlacker" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) (Paperback)

Far from the promised "convenient, accessible guide" to Kant for "new readers and nonspecialists," this is merely a loose collection of papers by Anglo-American Kant scholars. While a few of the papers might interest those in that circumscribed group, this book is both useless to the unintiated and often susbstandard to those who know Kant well.