This book offers a radically new account of the development and structure of the central arguments of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: the defense of the objective validity of such categories as substance, causation, and independent existence. Paul Guyer makes far more extensive use than any other commentator of historical materials from the years leading up to the publication of the Critique and surrounding its revision, and he shows that the work which has come down to us is the result of some striking and only partially resolved theoretical tensions. Kant had originally intended to demonstrate the validity of the categories by exploiting what he called 'analogies of appearance' between the structure of self-knowledge and our knowledge of objects. The idea of a separate 'transcendental deduction', independent from the analysis of the necessary conditions of empirical judgements, arose only shortly before publication of the Critique in 1781, and distorted much of Kant's original inspiration. Part of what led Kant to present this deduction separately was his invention of a new pattern of argument - very different from the 'transcendental arguments' attributed by recent interpreters to Kant - depending on initial claims to necessary truth.

The book offers a detailed account of Kant's views on judgments of taste, aesthetic pleasure, imagination and many other topics.

Immanuel Kant famously said that he was awoken from his "dogmatic slumbers," and led to question the possibility of metaphysics, by David Hume's doubts about causation. Because of this, many philosophers have viewed Hume's influence on Kant as limited to metaphysics. More recently, some philosophers have questioned whether even Kant's metaphysics was really motivated by Hume. In Knowledge, Reason, and Taste, renowned Kant scholar Paul Guyer challenges both of these views. He argues that Kant's entire philosophy--including his moral philosophy, aesthetics, and teleology, as well as his metaphysics--can fruitfully be read as an engagement with Hume. In this book, the first to describe and assess Hume's influence throughout Kant's philosophy, Guyer shows where Kant agrees or disagrees with Hume, and where Kant does or doesn't appear to resolve Hume's doubts. In doing so, Guyer examines the progress both Kant and Hume made on enduring questions about causes, objects, selves, taste, moral principles and motivations, and purpose and design in nature. Finally, Guyer looks at questions Kant and Hume left open to their successors.

Kant announces that the Critique of the Power of Judgment will bring his entire critical enterprise to an end. But it is by no means agreed upon that it in fact does so and, if it does, how. In this book, Ido Geiger argues that a principal concern of the third Critique is completing the account of the transcendental conditions of empirical experience and knowledge. This includes both Kant's analysis of natural beauty and his discussion of teleological judgments of organisms and of nature generally. Geiger's original reading of the third Critique shows that it forms a unified whole - and that it does in fact deliver the final part of Kant's transcendental undertaking. His book will be valuable to all who are interested in Kant's theory of the aesthetic and conceptual purposiveness of nature.

The prevailing interpretation of Kant’s First Critique in Anglo-American philosophy views his theory of a priori knowledge as basically a theory about the possibility of empirical knowledge (or experience), or the a priori conditions for that possibility (the representations of space and time and the categories). Instead, Robert Greenberg argues that Kant is more fundamentally concerned with the possibility of a priori knowledge—the very possibility of the possibility of empirical knowledge in the first place. Greenberg advances four central theses:(1) the Critique is primarily concerned about the possibility, or relation to objects, of a priori, not empirical knowledge, and Kant’s theory of that possibility is defensible; (2) Kant’s transcendental ontology must be distinct from the conditions of the possibility of a priori knowledge; (3) the functions of judgment, in Kant’s discussion of the Table of Judgments, should be seen according to his transcendental logic as having content, not as being just logical forms of judgment making; (4) Kant’s distinction between and connection of ordering relations (Verhaltnisse) and reference relations (Beziehungen) have to be kept in mind to avoid misunderstanding the Critique. At every step of the way Greenberg contrasts his view with the major interpretations of Kant by commentators like Henry Allison, Jonathan Bennett, Paul Guyer, and Peter Strawson. Not only does this new approach to Kant present a strong challenge to these dominant interpretations, but by being more true to Kant’s own intent it holds promise for making better sense out of what have been seen as the First Critique’s discordant themes.

The first collective commentary in English on Kant's landmark 1871 publication.

This Element surveys the place of the Critique of Pure Reason in Kant's overall philosophical project and describes and analyzes the main arguments of the work. It also surveys the developments in Kant's thought that led to the first critique, and provides an account of the genesis of the book during the 'silent decade' of its composition in the 1770s based on Kant's handwritten notes from the period.