accessing kant a relaxed introduction to the critique of pure reason nov 2005

[...]... reasonable grasp of what Kant in fact had to say—and since any introduction to Kant s First Critique, even a relaxed one, should also be an introduction to the text of the First Critique from time to time it will prove both inevitable and appropriate to adopt a more Apollonian stance and to engage at least some selected stretches of text in a comparatively rigorous historical and exegetical frame of mind... Self as an Idea of Reason: The Paralogisms The very idea of an idea of reason The ‘‘I’’ who thinks Dissolving the transcendental illusion 254 254 258 264 CHapter 13 Reason in Conflict with Itself: A Brief Look at the Antinomies In search of world-concepts The necessary conflicts of cosmological ideas The arguments of the First Antinomy Reason s interests and reason s attitudes Unraveling the Antinomies... course of developing and 2 Perhaps the two most important are Henry E Allison, Kant s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983) and Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) An elegant and accessible recent addition to the Apollonian literature is Sebastian Gardner’s Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (London... needs another book about Kant s Critique of Pure Reason By now, surely, everything worth saying about Kant s magnum opus has already been said, probably more than once There is a certain amount of truth in that As Richard Rorty has observed, the work is a sort of watershed text of academic philosophy [Kant] simultaneously gave us a history of our subject, fixed its problematic, and professionalized... to say about the Paralogisms, and I shall offer a brief exploration of one of the Antinomies, but I will essentially ignore the topic of God.9 Most of this book, however, will be devoted to the constructive aspects of the Critique of Pure Reason, the positive account of our conceptions and cognitions that Kant offers in the first two main divisions of the work, the ‘‘Transcendental Aesthetic’’ and the. .. philosophical choice to generate a conceptual space within which the general shape, the Gestalt, of Kant s constructive work can be discerned and then brought into sharper relief Metaphorically speaking, I will locate myself within Kant s work, and take a Janus-faced look at the balance of philosophical history, looking back at the essentials of the dialectics that formed the setting for Kant s contribution—roughly,... description of the relevant outcome-parameters by theoretical computations—Route A or we can first perform the physical operation on the inputs and then measure the value of the resultant outcome-parameters directly—Route B (see Fig 0.2) Again and again, it turns out to be a fact that the world contains physical operations and magnitudes that are in this way ‘‘well behaved’’ with respect to specific mathematical... knowledge of ourselves That all these sorts of knowledge in fact hang together—and how they do so—will turn out to be an important part of Kant s story In the first two chapters of this book, I will be basically engaged in attempting to secure and roughly situate, both historically and 9 Although Kant s insightful criticisms of the traditional ‘‘proofs’’ of the existence of God are certainly worthy of attention,... explain the unity here, and, as is well known, he makes an initially intuitively appealing move He reifies the Ones, separates them from the Manys, and sets the Manys in relation to them: Many particular individuals ‘‘participate in’’ one real separate Form The fundamental role of Platonic universals, the Forms, is thus to serve as principles of intelligible unity in explanations of sameness and change... ‘‘abstract idea’’ of a ‘‘triangle in general’’ that was neither right, acute, or obtuse, neither equilateral, isosceles, or scalene Berkeley was a determinate conceptualist On his view, all occurrent thoughts must be of absolutely specific qualities We cannot have Lockean general ‘‘abstract ideas’’ All our ideas are ideas of sense, and ‘‘abstractness’’ is a matter of the use we make of some of them in reasoning . that we also have a reasonable grasp of what Kant in fact had to say—and since any introduction to Kant s First Critique, even a relaxed one, should also be an introduction to the text of the. regard any of these Kantian accomplishments as a good thing. Parenthetically, the Critique of Pure Reason is also called the ‘‘first Critique ’—or, as I’ll henceforth write it, to avoid additional. call them ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionys- ian’. The Apollonian approach is marked by an especially close reading of the text, philological attention to nuances of interpretation, a careful tracing of