A short, clear, and authoritative guide to one of the most important and difficult works of modern philosophy Perhaps the most influential work of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is also one of the hardest to read, since it brims with complex arguments, difficult ideas, and tortuous sentences. In this short, accessible book, eminent philosopher and Kant expert Yirmiyahu Yovel helps readers find their way through the maze of Kant's classic by providing a clear and authoritative summary of the entire work. The distillation of decades of studying and teaching Kant, Yovel's "systematic explication" untangles the ideas and arguments of the Critique in the order in which Kant presents them. The result is an invaluable guide for philosophers and students.

Throughout the nineteenth century, German philosophy was haunted by the specter of the French Revolution. Kant, Hegel and their followers spent their lives wrestling with its heritage, trying to imagine a specifically German path to modernity: a “revolution without revolution.” Trapped in a politically ossified society, German intellectuals were driven to brood over the nature of the revolutionary experience. In this ambitious and original study, Stathis Kouvelakis paints a rich panorama of the key intellectual and political figures in the effervescence of German thought before the 1848 revolutions. He shows how the attempt to chart a moderate, reformist path entered into crisis, generating two antagonistic perspectives within the progressive currents of German society. On the one side were those socialists—among them Moses Hess and the young Friedrich Engels—who sought to discover a principle of harmony in social relations, bypassing the question of revolutionary politics. On the other side, the poet Heinrich Heine and the young Karl Marx developed a new perspective, articulating revolutionary rupture, proletarian hegemony and struggle for democracy, thereby redefining the very notion of politics itself.

The Modern Philosophical Revolution breaks new ground by demonstrating the continuity of European philosophy from Kant to Derrida. Much of the literature on European philosophy has emphasised the breaks that have occurred in the course of two centuries of thinking. But as David Walsh argues, such a reading overlooks the extent to which Kant, Hegel, and Schelling were already engaged in the turn toward existence as the only viable mode of philosophising. Where many similar studies summarise individual thinkers, this book provides a framework for understanding the relationships between them. Walsh thus dispels much of the confusion that assails readers when they are only exposed to the bewildering range of positions taken by the philosophers he examines. His book serves as an indispensable guide to a philosophical tradition that continues to have resonance in the post-modern world.

This book grew out of over a decade of intermittent Kant studies. As a young undergraduate in Jerusalem, then under strong Neo-Kantian influece, I was led to think that Kant had spelled the doom of all metaphysics, and that his contribution to ethics lay in his formal, all too formal, doctrine of the categorical imperative. As for his essay on history, if they deserved attention at all, they were to be deemed incompatible with the system.

“The book is designed” writes the author in his preface, “to do the general reader a service and, of course, his demands concern the larger sweep of Kant’s thought rather than the minute details of the Critical Philosophy.” And Wenley’s style certainly corroborates this statement. His way of getting from the larger environment in which Kant lived to the circumstances in Kant’s life, and from there to his thought and its consequences, is penetrating but remarkably clear. And this clarity is evident as much in Wenley’s language as it is in the structure of the book. Attractive as all this makes the book for the general reader, Wenley’s scholarly nature does present itself at critical points making the work as useful to the Kant specialist or the historian of philosophy.

For more than two centuries, Kant scholars have operated on the unquestioned premise that Kant's three Critiques offered a systematic exposition of his philosophy. But this unitary view, argues T. K. Seung, is gravely mistaken. In Kant's Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy, Seung shows how each of the three works represents a major reformulation of the initial commitment to Platonism which Kant had made in his Inaugural Dissertation of 1770. For Kant, Platonic Forms are the basic ideas for constructing moral, aesthetic, and political norms and standards. This is the essence of Kant's Platonic constructivism, which Seung explicates with comparisons to other programs of construction, such as Hobbesian conventionalism and Hegelian historicism. Finally, he clarifies the link between constructivism and deconstruction.