Accessing Kant a Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason

Accessing Kant A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason Jay F. Rosenberg CLARENDON PRESS Á OXFORD 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX26DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Jay F. Rosenberg 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 Excerpts from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, 1998), ß Cambridge University Press, reprinted with permission of the publisher and editors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–927581–5 978–0–19–927581–6 ISBN 0–19–927582–3 (pbk.) 978–0–19–927582–3 (pbk.) 13579108642 Preface My custom over the past forty years has been to reward myself for completing the manuscript of a book by giving myself free rein in writing its preface. This book is no exception. Consequently, what immediately follows is a free-wheeling, overly mannered, and self-indulgent preface. Some readers find that sort of thing off-putting. If you do, then just skip over to the Introduction. Otherwise, start here. Kant is hard to access. Understanding him requires a good bit of context, both historical and problematic, and mastery of a considerable amount of idiosyncratic terminology. Thus, although the classroom sessions during which, for the past thirty years, I’ve been introducing advanced philosophy students to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason have always nominally been meetings of a seminar, it has inevitably turned out that I’ve done most of the talking. In the course of three decades, I have consequently accumu- lated a thick collection of what are basically lecture notes. When I began seriously to consider formally retiring from teaching, it occurred to me that, once I did so, advanced philosophy students would subsequently have to be introduced to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by someone else. This was a sobering thought. I realized, of course, that even now most advanced philosophy students are introduced to Kant’s work by someone else, but the thought of a future in which this unfortunate state of affairs would become absolutely universal filled me with anticipatory regret. Perhaps, however, this dire consequence could be ameliorated. All need not be lost. There were, after all, all those lecture notes, and philosophers, I recalled, had been reading and profiting from Aristotle’s lecture notes for over 2,000 years. This was a heartening thought. Of course, I am not worth mentioning in the same breath with Aristotle, but the thought that perhaps some advanced philosophy students might someday read and profit from my lecture notes nevertheless sufficed to replace my anticipatory regret with a faint embryonic hope. Of course, because I am not worth mentioning in the same breath with Aristotle, I also realized that it was unrealistic to suppose that anyone would be interested in publishing my lecture notes as such. But, just as I was on the Preface verge of lapsing into ultimate despair, it occurred to me that, during the past thirty-five years, I had written several books which actually had been published, and this was a liberating thought. I immediately resolved to trans- form my mass of lecture notes into an engaging and instructive book, one that could introduce future generations of advanced philosophy students to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason my way, the way I had been doing so for three decades. The work that you have in hand is that book. My way of trying to help advanced students to access Kant is a direct descendant of Wilfrid Sellars’s legendary introduction to Kant and the First Critique. Sellars was a gifted and inspiring teacher, and it was under his tutelage that I first began to understand and appreciate Kant’s extraordin- ary philosophical accomplishments. In consequence, although it has been colored by almost forty years of subsequent ruminations, encounters with alternative interpretations, and interactions with bright doctoral students, what is offered here is a generally Sellarsian interpretation of Kant. (Among said bright doctoral students, three names especially stand out: C. Thomas Powell, Jim O’Shea, and Mary MacLeod. This is a good opportunity publicly to express my thanks for what they taught me about Kant.) The practice of presenting substantial philosophical theses and insights with the aid of pictures derives from Sellars as well. ‘‘All philosophers think in pictures,’’ he once said. ‘‘The only difference is that I put mine on the blackboard.’’ Most of the illustrations in this book are more or less mutated descendants of pictures that he passionately sketched for us on assorted blackboards in Pittsburgh more than four decades ago. The discovery that the transcendental synthesis of the imagination and the transcendental unity of apperception were actually suitable motifs for pictorial represen- tation was rather unexpected, but Sellars’s sketches proved surprisingly instructive. Although the technique indeed has its limitations, it has subsequently proved helpful to many generations of students, and I have consequently enthusiastically resolved to perpetuate it here. The operation of transforming my messy lecture notes into a first draft of this elegant book was completed during a year in Bielefeld, Germany, funded partly by my home institution, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as a Research and Study Leave, and partly by the remainder of a generous Alexander von Humboldt Research Award. I am grateful for both sources of support, but, since the euro gained 20 percent against a weak dollar during that year, especially for the second one. The year brought many worthwhile experiences—conferences, lectures, and symposia in various parts of Germany and stimulating visits with vi Preface colleagues in Ireland and Denmark—but none was more interesting and instructive than two semester-long seminars on substantial parts of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason conducted by Professor Michael Wolff in Bielefeld. Professor Wolff’s approach to Kant’s work is in the best German scholarly tradition, informed by a deep and wide-ranging historical knowledge and taking full advantage of all the subtle techniques of textual hermeneutics and classical philology. I had no idea how much fun it could be to spend an hour or two evaluating candidate antecedents for one of Kant’s am- biguous pronouns—or how much one could learn in the process. That research year also brought the war in Iraq, which, in one form or another, continues to provide an intrusively real and practical contrast to my purely theoretical intellectual pursuits. One can’t help but be disturbed by such contrasts, but, absent channels of influence or even a forum for effective self-expression, one’s options are rather severely limited. I take some comfort in the conviction that helping others to access Kant is an intrinsically worthwhile enterprise, whatever the transient political and military state of the world. Meanwhile, after having given the first draft of the book a test run with another group of bright graduate students back in Chapel Hill, I am now semi-retired and back living in Old Europe for another six months. The process of converting that first draft into the improved final version that you now have in hand has been much assisted by the reactions of said group of bright graduate students—especially Matthew Chrisman, who provided many pages of useful written comments and questions—and two officially anonymous colleagues who reviewed the draft manuscript for the Oxford University Press. My thanks to all of them, and to Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, who generously approved my making extensive exposi- tory use of their outstanding translation of the First Critique. Being semi-retired is enjoyable. One’s administrative burdens evanesce; one’s instructional obligations diminish; and there is finally enough time for lots of non-disciplinary reading. In contrast, being 62 years old is proving less enjoyable. Intimations of mortality proliferate, and the body increasingly rebels against what the

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