Customer Reviews

The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)

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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.

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).

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.

This volume of essays is of little or no value. Many are erroneous and the balance are devoid of significant content.

Just as with the Cambridge Kant translations, this too is to be avoided.