Reviews for The Cambridge Companion to Kant

The average rating for The Cambridge Companion to Kant based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-03-30 00:00:00 Mark Follon This is a really good book for people who find reading Kant himself too abstruse to be worth it. The only full work I've read by him is the Prologemena to Any Future Metaphysics (which is a kind of primer for the Critique of Pure Reason) and I definitely did not understand large chunks of it. Sometimes these academics seem as baffled by what Kant's trying to say as I am. So this is a bunch of essays, all equally dense. Schneewind's "Autonomy, obligation, and virtue" stands out for its utopian take on Kantian political philosophy (plus it's near the end of the collection). He implies that the "perfect good" must "exist," otherwise it's irrational to strive towards something (good) that has no way of taking place in pure form. "The moral agent, knowing herself required to act in a way that makes sense only if certain ends can be achieved, finds herself simply taking it that the world must allow the possibility of success." There are no details as to how this paroxysm could take place, but philosophy, according to Kant according to this essayist, helps by showing "that nothing can prove the attitude unwarranted." So the fact that we have a sense of good at all means the perfect good must be possible! This is just straight-up Descartes, right? Academics in the humanities, pragmatic about so much else, can be strangely softheaded when it comes to the possibility of Utopia. Maybe the following is kind of true about Kant: Kant was critical of what was called rationalism in his day. He held that "reason" did not correspond to reality but that it was "merely a subjective law for the orderly management of our understanding. . . ." The transcendental analytic seems to mean that we are locked into the way we see the world. Kant also seems to think that without relying on metaphysics or deductive reasoning, you are left with nothing to say about the world, no propositions with which to anchor experience: without metaphysics it's just phenomenal anarchy. Even though he disavowed the idea that there was a way to prove the existence of God, he did believe that the existence of God as a "substratum of possibility" was "a subjectively necessary hypothesis." It seems that it was somewhat common for philosophers to think that positing the existence of a God-like figure was somehow "necessary." Even Nietzsche conceded this on a certain level, I think. Here's a final Kantian quote to ponder: "Art is a mode of representation which is intrinsically final."

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-17 00:00:00 Gary Flesher 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.'