From the new Introduction by Howard Caygill: Norman Kemp Smith's Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has become a classic of philosophical translation. Since its first publication in I 929 it has been frequently reprinted, providing an English version of one of the most important and influential texts in the history of philosophy. Kemp Smith's translation made a major contribution not only to the understanding of Kant, but also to the Enlightenment that preceded and the remarkable developments in German philosophy that suc- ceeded him. Kemp Smith's version of the Critique has become the translation of reference, serving as the touchstone of qual- ity not only for subsequent attempts at translation but also, apocryphally, for the original German. The success of the translation is due not only to its eloquence - it manages to translate Kant into the language of Hume- but also to the sense that the translation is itself a philosophical event of considerable significance. CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON IMMANUEL KANT TRANSLATED BY NORMAN KEMP SMITH WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HOWARD CA YGILL Revised Second Edition BIBLIOGRAPHY COMPILED BY GARY BANHAM pal grave ac il n Translation© the estate of Norman Kemp Smith 1929, 1933, 2003, 2007 Introduction © Howard Caygill 2003, 2007 Bibliography © Gary Banham 2007 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 2nd edition 2007 978-0-230-01337-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this * publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, london EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 1929 by PAlGRAVE MACMillAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press llC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-01338-4 ISBN 978-1-137-10016-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-10016-0 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging. pulping and manufacturing process are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 INTRODUCTION Howard Caygill Norman Kemp Smith's Kant's Critique rif Pure Reason has become a classic of philosophical translation. Since its first publication in I 929 it has been frequently reprinted, providing an English version of one of the most important and influential texts in the history of philosophy. Kemp Smith's translation made a major contribution not only to the understanding of Kant, but also to the Enlightenment that preceded and the remarkable developments in German philosophy that suc- ceeded him. Kemp Smith's version of the Critique has become the translation of reference, serving as the touchstone of qual- ity not only for subsequent attempts at translation but also, apocryphally, for the original German.i The success of the translation is due not only to its eloquence - it manages to translate Kant into the language of Hume - but also to the sense that the translation is itself a philosophical event of considerable significance. There are a number of reasons for the success of the encounter between Kant and his translator. The most impor- tant is Kemp Smith's status, in the words of Anthony Quin- ton, as 'without doubt the most distinguished philosophical ; The apocryphal preference of some German language speakers for the transla- tion over the original was reported by A. C. Ewing in his obituary 'Norman Kemp Smith I872-1958': 'I hav~ been told, namely, that a distinguished German philoso- pher, RudolfMetz, once said that if only his students could read English adequately, he would ask them to read the Critique of Pure Reason in Kemp Smith's translation rather than the original German itself!' Proceedings of the British Academy, XLV (I 959), p. 303. For subsequent attempts at translation of the critique, see \Verner S. Pluhar, Immanuel Kant: Critique ofPure Reason (Hackett Publishing Company, India- napolis/Cambridge, 1996), and Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998). v1 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON historian of philosophy in Britain in the twentieth century' .ii Born in I872, and, like Kant, of a modest family background (he was the only member of his family to attend university), Kemp Smith developed an original relationship with philos- ophy and its history. His approach to philosophising by means of the critical study of the history of philosophy was closer to his contemporaries Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson than to the then dominant Hegelian school.iii The history of philosophy was for him an aporetic discipline - the history of problems and not of solutions - that focused upon the activity of philosophising rather than the pres- entation of its results. This approach required close familiar- ity with the Greek and Latin traditions of philosophising along with those of the modern European languages, a familiarity that Kemp Smith gathered in his undergraduate studies at the University ofSt Andrews and then at the Uni- versities ofjena (I894), Zurich, Berlin and Paris (I8gs-6). Kemp Smith came to the close study of Kant during his time as assistant to Robert Adamson at the University of Glasgow from I 8g6. He accepted Adamson's critique of Hegelian readings of Kant, which saw the critical philosophy as but a stage on the way towards Hegelian speculative philo- sophy, and set himself to reconsider Kant's place in the history of philosophy. This required a fresh interpretation of the devel- opment of modern philosophy prior to Kant, a task to which Kemp Smith dedicated himself while at Glasgow, publishing his results as Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy (I 902). Subse- quently, during his decade as Professor of Psychology and then Professor of Philosophy at Princeton I go6-I 6, he focused on Kant's first Critique, writing a commentary and an aban- doned draft of what would become his translation. Kemp Smith's studies were interrupted by two years of war-service ii 'Norman Kemp Smith,' Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth Century Philosophers, eds Stuart Brown, Diane Collinson, Robert \Vilkinson !Routledge Reference, London, 1996), p. 396. iii For his extended critiques of \Vhitehead and Bergson, see the essays in The Credibility of Divine Existence: The Collected Papers of Norman Kemp Smith, eds A.J.D. Porteous, R.D. Maclennan, G.E. Davie (Macmillan, London, 1967). INTRODUCTION Vll in the Department of Information ( I9I6-I8) and resumed after accepting the Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh which he held from I9I9 to I945· During this period he completed his translation of the Critique ofPure Reason, made an original contribution in his Prolegomena to an Idealist Theory of Knowledge (I 924), admired by White- head, and continued his critical study of the history of Eur- opean philosophy, publishing The Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical Study ofits Origins and Central Doctrines (I 94 I), and, in his retirement, the New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes: Descartes as Pioneer (I 952). He died in Edinburgh in I 958. Kemp Smith's cosmopolitan and aporctic approach to philosophy and its history was already evident in his first work, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy. The title is unduly modest, since in these studies Kemp Smith reconstructs the modern tradition of philosophy from Descartes through Leib- niz, Locke and Hume, to Kant. Dedicated to Robert Adam- son, it extends and deepens the latter's critique of Hegelian interpretations of Kant. In Kemp Smith's reading, Kant is the critical heir of Descartes, posing new problems on the basis of a critique of Cartesian assumptions. Kemp Smith's understanding of these assumptions was for its time novel. Descartes' work is read in the light of a tension between the approaches of natural science and medieval scholasticism. Kemp Smith claimed that while Descartes was able to hold the tension in creative suspense, the Cartesian tradition that followed him tended to exaggerate the naturalistic and spiri- tualist extremes of natural science and scholasticism. Kemp Smith interprets Kant as offering a 'fresh start' to 'modern philosophy', one that freed it from the ten- sion between 'naturalism' and 'spiritualism'. His reading of Kant emphasises the totality of experience, and situates such apparent oppositions as 'self and not-self', 'inner and outer', and 'phenomenal and noumenal' as 'relative' distinctions within experience.iv For Kemp Smith, Kant does not seek to " See pp. 263-6 of Studies in the Cartesian PhilosojJhy (Macmillan, London, r goz). vm KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON overcome the Cartesian opposition, but rather to re-state the problems that it generated in terms of the philosophy of experience.