Paul Guyer, winner of the 2024 International Kant Prize, is one of the world's leading Kant scholars. This volume collects twelve of his essays on Kant's philosophy of Right, his political-legal philosophy, published since 2009. The essays definitely establish the foundation of Kant's philosophy of Right in his moral philosophy, and demonstrate the continuing need for motivation by respect for the moral law on the part of both those in positions of power and ordinary citizens in any govern...

This entirely new translation of Critique of Pure Reason is the most accurate and informative English translation ever produced of this epochal philosophical text. Though its simple and direct style will make it suitable for all new readers of Kant, the translation displays an unprecedented philosophical and textual sophistication that will enlighten Kant scholars as well. This translation recreates as far as possible a text with the same interpretative nuances and richness as the original...

Paul Guyer, winner of the 2024 International Kant Prize, is one of the world's leading Kant scholars. This volume collects ten of his essays on Kant's critical approach to metaphysics and epistemology that have been published since his path-breaking Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge 1987). These essays resolve long-running debates about the meaning of Kant's doctrine of transcendental idealism while criticizing Kant's fundamental argument for the position; show what is neverthele...

This Element surveys the place of the Critique of Pure Reason in Kant's overall philosophical project and describes and analyzes the main arguments of the work. It also surveys the developments in Kant's thought that led to the first critique, and provides an account of the genesis of the book during the 'silent decade' of its composition in the 1770s based on Kant's handwritten notes from the period.

Immanuel Kant famously said that he was awoken from his "dogmatic slumbers," and led to question the possibility of metaphysics, by David Hume's doubts about causation. Because of this, many philosophers have viewed Hume's influence on Kant as limited to metaphysics. More recently, some philosophers have questioned whether even Kant's metaphysics was really motivated by Hume. In Knowledge, Reason, and Taste, renowned Kant scholar Paul Guyer challenges both of these views. He argue...

The fundamental task of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been to determine whether the essential principles of both knowledge and action can be discovered by human beings unaided by an external agency. No one philosopher contributed more to this enterprise than Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) shook the very foundations of the intellectual world. Kant argued that the basic principles of the natural science are imposed on reality by human sensibility and understanding,...

Kant defined 'Right' (Recht) as the condition that obtains among a population of physically embodied persons capable of setting their own ends who live on a finite surface and therefore cannot avoid interaction with each other if each is as free to set their own ends as is consistent with the freedom of all to do the same. He regarded this rational idea, heir to the traditional idea of 'natural Right, as the test of the legitimacy of the laws of any actual state, or 'positive Right.' He cl...

'Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition.' In 1757 the 27-year-old Edmund Burke argued that our aesthetic responses are experienced as pure emotional arousal, unencumbered by intellectual considerations. In so doing he overturned the Platonic tradition in aesthetics that had prevailed from antiquity until the eighteenth century, and replaced metaphysics with psychology and even physiology as the basis for the subject. Burke's theory of beauty encompasse...

In this updated edition of his outstanding introduction to Kant, Paul Guyer uses Kant’s central conception of autonomy as the key to his thought.Beginning with a helpful overview of Kant’s life and times, Guyer introduces Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology, carefully explaining his arguments about the nature of space, time and experience in his most influential but difficult work, The Critique of Pure Reason. He offers an explanation and critique of Kant’s famous theory o...

The central project of the Critique of Pure Reason is to answer two sets of questions: what can we know and how can we know it? What can't we know and why can't we know it? The essays in this collection are intended to help students read the Critique of Pure Reason with a greater understanding of its central themes and arguments, and with some awareness of important lines of criticism of those themes and arguments.

This volume collects Kant's most important ethical and anthropological writings from the 1760s, before he developed his critical philosophy. The materials presented here range from the Observations, one of Kant's most elegantly written and immediately popular texts, to the accompanying Remarks which Kant wrote in his personal copy of the Observations and which are translated here in their entirety for the first time. This edition also includes little-known essays as well as personal notes ...

Immanuel Kant introduced a new paradigm into modern moral philosophy, first with his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785, followed by his Critique of Practical Reason in 1788, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason in 1793, and Metaphysics of Morals in 1798. For Kant, the fundamental goal of morality is not the realization of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, under some interpretation of that formula, but the realization...