Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics: and the Letter to Marcus Herz, February 1772 [Paperback]

Immanuel Kant (Author), James W. Ellington (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0872205932 | ISBN-13: 978-0872205932 | Publication Date: February 1, 2002 | Edition: 2

This edition of Prolegomena includes Kant's letter of February, 1772 to Marcus Herz, a momentous document in which Kant relates the progress of his thinking and announces that he is now ready to present a critique of pure reason.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Immanuel Kant; Translated with Introduction and Notes by James W Ellington

Product Details

• Paperback: 140 pages
• Publisher: Hackett Pub Co; 2 edition (February 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0872205932
• ISBN-13: 978-0872205932
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #23,732 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #3 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Nonfiction > Philosophy > Metaphysics
  • #5 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Nonfiction > Foreign Language Nonfiction > German
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More About the Author

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was one of the most influential philosophers of all time. His comprehensive and profound thinking on aesthetics, ethics, and knowledge has had an immense impact on all subsequent philosophy.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredibly Helpful in Understanding Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, February 24, 2006

By 

Amol Shelat (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics: and the Letter to Marcus Herz, February 1772 (Paperback)

Simply put, modern philosophy begins with Kant. If anyone wishes to understand the development of philosophy after the 18th century, you must have some grounding in Kant. That said, his works are not easy to read, nor are they well-suited to leisurely reading. While most individuals try a stab at the Critique of Pure Reason, many seem to get lost in his argument.

For all you such individuals, the Prolegomena offers a handy guide to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. This work is relatively short and far more accessible compared to the Critique. However, for a serious understanding of Kant, you must read this alongside the Critique of Pure Reason. Whereas the Prolegomena gives us a taste of the whole picture, the Critique provides us with all the details and nuances of his argument.

Lastly, the Hackett edition of this is quite nice in that it provides, at the end, a list of major words/phrases and the corresponding German.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Difficult but worth the effort, July 13, 2009

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not a natural "Bob Bickel" (huntington, west virginia United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics: and the Letter to Marcus Herz, February 1772 (Paperback)

Kant wrote the Prolegomena to assist readers who were having trouble understanding his Critique of Pure Reason. Nevertheless, the Prolegomena itself is difficult reading. In contrast to much of contemporary philosophy, however, it is worth the effort. One comes away from the Prolegomena with a different world view. This alternative perspective is not something that one need accept or reject, but a point of view that one may consider, part of our conceptual wherewithal for trying to make some sense of life.

Though commonly cast in the role of a philosophical idealist, Kant emphatically agrees that all knowledge is experientially determined. He parts company with philosophical materialists such as Marx, however, when he posits the existence of mind as organized a priori in a specific though unknowable way. Mind, thus, is not a tabula rasa on which our first experiences are inscribed and then used in making sense of what follows. Mind, instead, shapes all our experiences in terms of its inherent organization.

This leads Kant to the distinction between noumena, things as they actually are, and phenomena, things as we apprehend them upon their encounter with the organization of mind. This means that we can never know the world as it actually is.

Since there is no way to test this claim, we are left in the realm of speculative philosophical thought as an end in itself. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that modern linguistics, especially as practiced by Chomsky, makes a comparable assumption. Chomsky observes that the remarkable thing about the world's many languages in not that they are so different, but that in crucial ways they have a great deal in common. This suggests that the functioning central nervous system -- mind -- has a specific and universal structure, that it is organized in much the same way from time to time and place to place.

In addition, though Garfinkel might reject this assessment, his ethnomethodological notion of interpretive procedures which enable us to make the social world intelligible for ourselves and each other seems to presuppose a pre-existing cognitive structure. In the words of one critic, they are "psychologisms," mental artifacts that are used by all of us and not socially learned. Again, they seem to be inherent a priori in the structure of the mind.

There is, no doubt, a good deal in the Prolegomena that I've missed or forgotten or misunderstood. If, however, I've gained nothing but insight into the possibility of mind as something other than a primordial blank slate, something that has a structure of its own I've gained a great deal.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Analytic of the Critique, February 19, 2006

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Mr. Steiner (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics: and the Letter to Marcus Herz, February 1772 (Paperback)

This text is essentially a concise summary of the work accomplished by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, in which the great thinker answers the following: 1)How is pure mathematics possible? 2) How is pure natural science possible? 3)How is metaphysics in general possible? 4) How is metaphysics as a science possible? These are of course the most crucial topics in all transcendental thought, and this volume is possibly the most successful microcosm of Kant's thought. However, for all real students of Kant, the Critique must be read in its entirety.