Critique of Pure Reason (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant)

First of all, yes, this is a difficult read. If you're fairly new to philosophy, then Kant is not the place to start. What makes the Critique such a dense read is the simple fact that it assumes prior knowledge (no pun intended) of particular epistemological issues that had been hotly debated in the West up to that point (a period of roughly 2000 years). So, to jump into philosophy with Kant would be like walking into a room in the middle of a conversation that's already been going on for hours on end; you're going to be fairly lost. A basic familiarity with Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes and at least one Empiricist (either Locke or Hume) is greatly helpful in establishing the context of the Critique and helps the reader follow the general line of Kant's thought. Also helpful is a reading of Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics before the much larger Critique.

Just as it's nearly impossible to understand Kant without some general knowledge of philosophy up to his time, it's even more so to understand philosophy up to our time without reading Kant. His work was that influential. And while, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, the advent of non-Euclidean geometry and non-Aristotelian logic have rendered Kant's application of his theory to human knowledge and experience obsolete, Kant's general agenda is still very much the agenda of modern philosophy. We are still concerned with what constitutes consciousness, the structure of our faculties of knowledge and understanding (both practical and theoretical), and the nature of objective experience. In short, there's no avoiding Kant if you want to move on to any of the later philosophical movements.

Which is where a good translation of the Critique comes in for the English-speaking reader. The translation in this edition is up-to-date and in line with the most recent scholarship, and it has the added benefit of being eminently affordable. Extensive endnotes help clear up certain obscurities in the text owing to difficulties of rendering Kant's German into English; they also explain the frequent references to Scholastic concepts for the non-Latinate. I also like the manner in which this edition presents comparative passages of Kant's own different redactions of the work. It allows the reader to look at passages from both the earlier and later redactions or simply ignore the earlier redaction, which is often admittedly incomprehensible in spots. The introduction provides a decent enough biographical sketch of the man himself. No doubt there are more scholarly editions out there, but if you want a decent edition of the Critique for very little money, then this is your best bet.

What Alfred North Whitehead said about Plato (that all of Western philosophy was merely a footnote to Plato) could easily be said about Kant in regard to modern philosophy. It is interesting that Kant has had such an impact because in reality there are very few full blooded Kantians around. There are very few modern philosophers who would agree with the transcendental ideality of space and time, or who would agree that Kant succeeded in deducing the categories and their absolute validity in the transcendental deductions (the heart of the Critique of Pure Reason). But Kant completely changed the trajectory of philosophy. There are no philosophers doing pre-Kantian philosophy (dogmatic metaphysics) anymore. There is no modern Leibniz, and this is as true of the analytic as it is of the Continental tradition. Actually, it is true of our culture in general. Few people find the notion of pre-established harmony very convincing anymore, while lots of people found that doctrine convincing before Kant, and I would argue that that change is largely a result of Kant and his limiting of cognition to what we can experience.

So Kant is an extremely important philosopher. In my opinion Kant is the most important philosopher since Plato. Unfortunately the Critique of Pure Reason is also where philosophy started to become esoteric and inaccessible to the lay person. Of course it would be impossible for someone with no formal training in philosophy to pick up a metaphysical tract by John Duns Scotus and understand it. Philosophy has always been difficult. But I think Kant's Critique of Pure Reason introduced a qualitative change into philosophy. While John Duns Scotus may not be immediately accessible to the lay person it was still possible to become acquainted with the problems he was dealing with (the existence of God, the problem of universals, etc.) without necessarily being a professional philosopher. In other words, philosophical debates were not insulated from the debates taking place in non-professional circles, they were often the same debates just carried on at a higher more technical level. With Kant philosophy really becomes an insulated and esoteric discipline where philosophers are debating with themselves, and they are debating issues that non-philosophers do not even consider issues (whether and how categories can be derived from the table of judgments, the transcendental unity of apperception, the transcendental ideality of space and time, etc.). Obviously this is not a hard and fast distinction but I think there is some truth to what I am saying.

For those non-philosophers who want to read the Critique of Pure Reason and want some guidebooks to help them make sense of the book I do have some books to recommend but my short answer would be: unfortunately there is probably going to be a limit to how much you can do with the Critique of Pure Reason if you do not have formal training in philosophy. It is like a book in quantum mechanics. There are popular books that can give lay people some sense of quantum mechanics but if you really want to understand quantum mechanics you have to engage in the difficult task of learning the math and the science behind it, which is something few people are capable of doing on their own. The same is true of Kant. You can find popular books on Kant that give you some sense of what he was up to, but if you really want to understand Kant's philosophy you have to commit years to really working at it, and few people are probably capable of achieving it on their own.

The first two books on Kant I would recommend to the beginner are not books I have actually read but were recommended to me by my Kant professor as books that are good for absolute beginners with Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. The first is A Short Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by A.C. Ewing and the second is Kant's Critique of Pure Reason a Commentary for Students by T.E. Wilkerson. The first is supposed to be more accessible than the second.

There is also a routledge philosophy guidebook to the Critique of Pure Reason Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks) by Sebastian Gardner (it will not let me link directly to the paperback edition but there is a cheaper paperback available). Personally I found Gardner's commentary to be quite accessible but I have also spent a fair amount of time studying Kant. Some of the other reviewers on amazon complain that it is not accessible to the beginner so if you find that to be the case I would recommend starting with one of the other two I listed above.

Finally, there are three books that are extremely important in Kant scholarship for those who want to have a deeper understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason. I actually have not read all of any of them (I have read parts of two of them) but I know that they are definitely not for beginners. They are, however, very important for those who are serious about the Critique of Pure Reason. The First is Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense by Henry Allison. The second is Kant and the Claims of Knowledge by Paul Guyer (Allison and Guyer offer different, and conflicting, interpretations and there has been a long-standing debate between them about the correct way to interpret the Critique of Pure Reason). The last book that I think is really excellent is Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the "Critique of Pure Reason" by Beatrice Longuenesse (I am currently working on a project using this book so I will probably be writing a review in a few months when I have finished).

I also want to say a word about the translation. I do not read German but I have a few comments to make. First, there is no such thing as a perfect translation. No matter what you do as a translator you are going to have some people complaining. Anyone demanding a perfect translation, or looking for one, is looking for something that does not exist. If you want to become a Kant scholar you have to learn German. Unfortunately Kant is so important as a philosopher that it is necessary for all philosophers, whether they specialize in Kant or German philosophy or not, to have some understanding of Kant, so translations become necessary. I would not put too much stock in the negative reviews of this translation. This is not a perfect translation, you should know that going in, but I think it is probably as good as any, and there are two reasons I recommend reading this one.

First, there are really two "standard" translations of the Critique of Pure Reason. The first is by Norman Kemp Smith and the second is this one by Guyer and Wood. My Kant professor has told me that the Norman Kemp Smith translation, while it was the standard for many years (and it was the first one I read), is very problematic. Specifically, Smith often corrects Kant's text to accord with his own interpretation of Kant. If you are not a serious Kant student that might not make much of a difference since you are probably not going to be delving into the subtleties of Kant's philosophy and Smith's translation should give you an accurate general picture of Kant's philosophy. But if you do plan on delving into the subtleties of Kant's philosophy it would be better to get a translation that has not been doctored to fit a particular interpretation.

Second, this is, whether you like it or not, going to be the standard translation of Kant for awhile I think, which means when you read secondaries they are probably going to be using the same terms that Guyer and Wood use. It will make it easier when you are reading secondaries on Kant if you are already using the same terminology as the secondaries. I have not really compared translations so I am not sure how much different translations differ when translating some of the more important terms (sensibility, intuition, understanding, determination, etc.) but I think you will be safe if you stick with Guyer and Wood. In other words, it will not do you much good if you read a secondary which discusses the role of the understanding in cognition if the translation of Kant you read translated "understanding" with a different word (this might be an unrealistic example but things like that can happen with translations).

So for those reasons I recommend getting this translation despite the fact that it is certainly not perfect. And good luck! Kant is an extremely exciting philosopher if you can succeed in understanding him (and do not feel too bad if you do not understand everything he says; no one does).