The Cambridge Companion to Kant Book

An excellent, comparatively recent (1992) collection of essays on Kant's overall views (epistemological, metaphysical, moral, political, aesthetic) by leading scholars, including Paul Guyer (the editor), Allen Wood and J.P. Schneewind.

Guyer's introduction nicely summarizes Kant's life and work in a readable, concise manner; however of real interest is Guyer's weighty tackling of the 'Transcendental Deduction' section in Kant's 'First Critique'; offering a very close reading, Guyer concludes that though the deduction fails to coherently achieve its goal of applying the a priori categories of reason to sensory intuitions (which is arguable the key section of the 'Critique'), its importance, historically, is inestimable:

'Formally speaking, the transcendental deduction is a failure, and at best sets the agenda for the detailed demonstration of the role of the categories in the determination of empirical relations in space and especially time in the following sections of the 'Critique of Pure Reason'. Nevertheless, the transcendental deduction also completely transformed the agenda of modern philosophy. While he had difficulty spelling it out, Kant clearly perceived that there was some inescapable connection between self-knowledge and knowledge of objects and this completely undermined the Cartesian assumptions that we could have a determinate knowledge of our inner states without any knowledge of the external world at all and that we had to discover some means of inferring from the former to the latter. And while Kant had difficulty in distinguishing between the categories as merely logical functions of judgment and as extra-logical constraints on judgment, he nevertheless clearly saw that both self-knowledge and knowledge of objects were intrinsically judgmental and necessarily involved logical structures as well as empirical inputs. This completely undermined the Lockean and Humean project of discovering the foundations of all knowledge and belief in the empirical input of sensation and reflection alone. Progress in philosophy is rarely dependent upon the formal soundness of an argument but on the compelling force of a new vision and from the point of view the transcendental deduction was a total success, turning Cartesian rationalism and Lockean empiricism into mere history and setting new agendas for subsequent philosophical movements from German idealism to logical positivism and the linguistic philosophy of our own times.'