Post: #1

Wondering if any of you guys have read this and if so, can you recommend a good study guide to go along with it? It looks quite daunting but worthwhile.

Post: #2

It's extremely dull, but the book has questions you would never have thought to ask.

Post: #3

For anyone looking to read it as well:

http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/kant1781part1.pdf

I've noticed that study guides for works of philosophy will usually taint the original work with the biases of the guides author. So obviously no recommendations there.

Post: #4

(03-30-2015 05:48 PM)RexImperator Wrote:  Wondering if any of you guys have read this and if so, can you recommend a good study guide to go along with it? It looks quite daunting but worthwhile.

I have read it. My own view is that it is not worth reading, but it is worth understanding. Roger Scruton wrote a guide to it I believe, which I read after reading the Critique, and felt would have saved me a lot of time and heart ache.

I went through a long phase of reading philosophy, and most of it is dry as shit. My personal opinion is that very little philosophy is worth reading in its original format. A book like Bertrand Russell's 'History of Western Philosophy' (which again I read having read many of the great works of philosophy previously) also does an excellent job of getting the fundamental ideas across without you having to get bogged down in several hundred pages of intellectual masturbation.

I do feel quite strongly, and that may bias the response I gave you above, that unlike history which gives you knowledge and understanding, or great literature which gives you a facility for language and an elasticity of mind, philosophy can often encourage you to get bogged down in overly abstract thought about things that don't actually matter. It is rare that I have finished a philosophical tome and felt that I was enriched enough by the end of it to have merited the time investment in really getting to grips with it. A few notable exceptions spring to mind, like The Rights of Man, The Nichomachean Ethics, Utopia, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Meditations, and probably a few others. For the most part though, it leaves me pretty cold these days.

Post: #5

The Critique is poorly written, but its ideas contained within basically launched the scientific revolution of the 1800's and beyond. It's one of the most thought provoking books of all time, and has the best discussion of the nature of reality itself.

The best, and free guide to the Critique:

http://userpages.bright.net/~jclarke/kant/index.html

^ It's basically a sparknotes for the Critique, but done nearly perfectly. It helped me get an A in my Kant class, and write a thesis that eventually was accepted for presentation at Dartmouth.

Post: #6

I have read some of it-not even half- and turned in a decent essay. I used the Routledge guide by Sebastian Garner, which is OK-some classmates said you reach more insightful conclusions when you just do protracted reading of the Critque- but whatever helps. Either way, get the Norman Kemp Smith translation-it's widely regarded to be the best (unless you have another edition assigned). Keep notes in a dedicated notebook -or in the margins of the book as you read-there's so many points of argument rammed into every chapter that you'll lose the thread otherwise.
It was a challenging read and still is-the pages are dog-eared, marked and scribbled on in my copy, though that stops around the Transcendental Deduction and leaves the rest of the book crisp and clean. I've never read beyond that point.
If you only get assigned one chapter or point of argument for an essay, don't be afraid to read a summary to clarify what conclusions he's trying to reach in the passages. Then read the passages, multiple times.

Kant's arguments are interesting but generally unconvincing. The Critique is probably the high point of his work-I used some of his shorter works on moral philosophy in other classes, mainly "On a supposed right to lie" and, which provoked more lively discussion, his denouncement of masturbation on philosophical grounds. His metaphysics are more engaging and challenging than his moral philosophy.

Post: #7

(04-03-2015 01:57 PM)Samseau Wrote:  The Critique is poorly written...

It was written very well, in German. This means to really get at the meat of it the choices all come with substantial costs. A person could German reading skills up to a serious level, suffer an existing translation, or pick up a German Dictionary and Grammar then learn to read German through translating the critique.

I ended up reading a translation.

(04-03-2015 03:04 PM)shameus_oreaaly Wrote:  I have read some of it-not even half- and turned in a decent essay. I used the Routledge guide by Sebastian Garner, which is OK-some classmates said you reach more insightful conclusions when you just do protracted reading of the Critque- but whatever helps. Either way, get the Norman Kemp Smith translation-it's widely regarded to be the best (unless you have another edition assigned). Keep notes in a dedicated notebook -or in the margins of the book as you read-there's so many points of argument rammed into every chapter that you'll lose the thread otherwise.
It was a challenging read and still is-the pages are dog-eared, marked and scribbled on in my copy, though that stops around the Transcendental Deduction and leaves the rest of the book crisp and clean. I've never read beyond that point.
If you only get assigned one chapter or point of argument for an essay, don't be afraid to read a summary to clarify what conclusions he's trying to reach in the passages. Then read the passages, multiple times.

Kant's arguments are interesting but generally unconvincing. The Critique is probably the high point of his work-I used some of his shorter works on moral philosophy in other classes, mainly "On a supposed right to lie" and, which provoked more lively discussion, his denouncement of masturbation on philosophical grounds. His metaphysics are more engaging and challenging than his moral philosophy.

I second the Norman Kemp Smith translation. A pack of multi-colored sticky notes is also going to be helpful. I ended up mostly using my notebook to create a sort of private dictionary for my self of the terms and ideas.

I'm not a fan of his moral philosophy or even his higher level metaphysics either. The first 2/3rds of the Kritik shows a dedicated mind trying to establish a framework for understanding its place in the world. After that though he seems to put out some stuff that's almost pathologically resigned and submissive.

Post: #8

Do you guys think reading Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics before tackling the Critique will significantly help clear things up? Apparently Prolegomena was written because too many people had trouble understanding the Critique.

Post: #9

(04-06-2015 09:15 PM)Wutang Wrote:  Do you guys think reading Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics before tackling the Critique will significantly help clear things up? Apparently Prolegomena was written because too many people had trouble understanding the Critique.

It might? I didn't read it until later. It probably wouldn't hurt to try to tackle it first to at least get an idea of whether you really want to spend time on the Kritik.

Post: #10

I'm actually tackling a bunch of other works before I even get to Kant. Back in 2013 I decided to start a project where I would go through Locke, Berekeley, Hume before finally tackling Kant. I know a big reason Kant wrote the Critique was to address the difficulties that Hume brought up and Hume himself was continuing the tradition where Locke and Berkeley were Hume's immediate predecessors. I was thinking of reading Descartes too but I knew I had to cut off how far I would go back to at some point otherwise I'd end up all the way back at Plato, whom I am reading too but more on an on and off basis. I even bought a notebook specifically for this little philosophy project so I can jot down notes as I go through these works with the notes being a mixture of commentary from me and also just me mere summing up what point I think a passage is trying to make - I find forcing myself to summarize whatever point is being made by the author and articulating it in written form helps me understand it better since I have to force myself to reason through it.

Just finally finished up with Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" which no joke, I spent almost 2 years going through. Now I'm on Berkeley's "Of the Principles of Human Knowledge" which thankfully is much shorter as well as being better written. I remember a lot of times with Locke I would spend a hour just reading a paragraph or two over and over again trying to decipher what he was trying to get at.

Post: #11

If you are already this invested in the project the Prolegomena would make a great introduction. Hume's writings can also be something of a slog, but it sound like you have the perspective to realize a lot of time went into writing these works and reading them isn't a trivial task. Your rereading is a credit towards your effort to understand the text.

Post: #12

My favourite writer/philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that reading and understanding the Critique is akin to an "intellectual rebirth". Another one of my favourite writers, Bryan Magee, who also wrote what is my favourite book (Confessions of a Philosopher) which I have invested more time into re-reading over and over again than any other book said that he thinks that it is worth studying philosophy just for the purpose of understanding the Critique which is actually what inspired me to undertake the reading of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in such an organized way. Even if I don't receive the same revelation that these two men apparently received from their reading of the Critique, the whole process and the intellectual benefits it has conferred on me makes this undertaking worthwhile. I can definitely detect a significant improvement in my reasoning ability as well as my writing skill and reading comprehension from when I started reading Locke to where I am now.

Post: #13

I hear you there. It's been a while since I've read of work of philosophy for the content. Mostly now I approach it for the exercise.