Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Brief Biography
Immanuel Kant was born in
Königsberg, in 1724. For eight years he attended the Collegium Fridiricianum at
the age of eight, a Latin school that taught primarily classicism. Later he
went to the University Of Königsberg, where he majored in philosophy,
mathematics and physics.
After his father’s death, he left
the university and earned a living as a private tutor. With the financial help
of a good friend, he resumed his studies, earning his doctorate in 1756.
At the University of Königsbergh he
became a tenured professor in logic and metaphysics. There he lectured and
wrote for the rest of his life. He died in 1804.
About the Prolegomena
Much like Rene Decartes, Kant
devised a model, an individual epistemology, by examining the basis of human
knowledge and its limits.
He brought together the ideas of
rationalism, influential thinkers such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff. But
what really woke him from “dogmatic slumbers,” was David Hume’s brand of
empiricism.
Kant's critical philosophy is presented
in the Critique of Pure
Reason (1781); the
idea of the Critique is to establish
and investigate the legitimate limits of human knowledge. Knowledge of sensible
objects shape up in advance through the structures of the human mind’s ability
to reason, and therefore all objects conform themselves a priori in such a relation. Since the mind’s
structures filter the objects, human knowledge then is limited to how these
objects appear to us. Such approach condemned man not to ever have direct
knowledge of the things themselves.
Kant felt that his Critique of Pure Reason by its depth and span of treatment was
inaccessible to many of his readers, and therefore misunderstood. Therefore, he
wrote his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, a kind of introductory primer.
Both the Critique
and the Prolegomena assert that we cannot know the things in themselves, but only
the things as they appear to us.
Did Kant achieve
his goal of writing a primer? To some extent, yes. For serious students of
epistemology, however, one must go beyond the primer and actually read the Critique. Although Kant attempted—with
the Prolegomena— to simplify and
popularize the ideas he had expressed in the Critique, it appears that he just wrote a shorter version of it,
which isn’t simple or easy to grasp because Kant’s style is dry and turgid, and
he didn’t change his style for the Prolegomena.
Our translation
uses a much accessible language so that even young readers and the general
public may grasp Kant’s basic ideas. To this extent, our translation is quite
different from others, while remaining true to the ideas.
How then has this
simplicity been accomplished?
The accessibility
comes from different sources: by providing shorter paragraphs, using sentence
variation (as opposed to literal translations), and marginal clues or notations
throughout the text. Older translations used the term “cognition,” which with
the advent of psychology has devalued its philosophical import. I have used
instead of cognition: knowledge.
General readers,
high school students, philosophy-student majors, and all lovers of philosophy
will find this accessibility refreshing.
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