Kant in 90 Minutes Book

I picked this up on a whim at the local library, looking for a brief refresher.

"It's difficult to know what to say about Kant's life. He didn't really have one (outside his head). Nothing of any real interest happened to him."

Despite Strathern's disclaimer, he spends more time on Kant's uneventful biography than his philosophy. You get a better sense of him as a character of eccentric habits than as a thinker. Perhaps that's inevitable in a slim volume of 100 pages, I don't know.

Beyond a general dislike for systematic philosophies and my sympathy for empiricism contra idealism, I offer three reasons for grave suspicion of Kant:

First, he was an awful writer. Reading Kant in his own words is something like chewing gravel and bits of glass, then swallowing it all with a chaser of formaldehyde.

Second, it's unwise to trust a man famous for his lectures on geography but who never travelled more than forty miles from home. Kant never saw a mountain. Though it was only twenty miles away, he never bothered to visit the sea.

Finally, per Strathern, Kant "was against the reading of novels." He thought "they caused our thoughts to become 'fragmentary' and weakened our memory." I mean, c'mon.