Preparations for this bad boy

My plan for reading Kant goes like this:

>German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Terry Pinkard)
>German Idealism The Struggle against Subjectivism (Frederick Beiser)
>(May only read one of these two)
Kant's Critical Philosophy The Doctrine of the Faculties (Deleuze)
>A Kant Dictionary (Howard Caygill)
>(Onto the actual sick Kant now)
>Lectures on Logic
>Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
>Critique of Pure Reason
>Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
>Kant Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)
>Critique of Practical Reason
>Critique of Judgment
>Critique of the Power of Judgment

Copped from the Philosophy guide Veeky Forums made a while ago. Seems pretty bulletproof, but I'm no expert.

Assuming everything you wrote is true, you shouldn't have much trouble understanding Kant. His ideas aren't that difficult to grasp - his style makes his works notoriously difficult to read. Anyways, I suggest you to start with the critique of pure reason and I wish you the most of luck finding the meaning of Kant's words behind his bulwark of obscure writing.

Also check out uh

Eckart Forster's "Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy" and "Kant's Final Synthesis" maybe

if they interest you

Use secondary texts and/or listen to lectures on Kant or you will likely misunderstand him, he was a notoriously terrible writer.

Thanks a lot man.

I'll add those to the list

Why is Leibniz so important? I must admit I've found him less fascinating than any other rationalist (even after reading him). His epistemology and logic was the only thing I found mildly relevant.

Thanks for the advice, I'll look into these works

you're 100% ready my dude, jump right into the Critique of Pure Reason.

Also, the "difficulty" of Kant comes mostly when people skip the background reading and don't understand the terms he's using. Otherwise he's straightforward and systematic. It flies by after the first 200 pages.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-leibniz/#1

Leibniz was arguably Kant's biggest influence before he encountered Hume

That seems like a good list, but I think you should omit his lectures on logic. Kant firmly believed that logic was a "finished" branch of philosophy where nothing more could possibly be added. The logic Kant had in mind was entirely Aristotelian/Scholastic, and as we all (hopefully) know, things changed drastically starting with Frege. The old logic is literally garbage that should be read only for historical purposes if you are a masochist that has no trouble with going through hundreds of pages of nothing.

I'd like to add 1 more thing regarding Kant: don't read the interpretations until you've read the original works yourself - the beauty (or turmoil) of his work is that it can be interpreted in many radically different ways - the point is, do not put yourself in a situation where interpretators "force" you into a certain interpretative frame. Read it and understand it yourself.

So, are the lectures on logic not important in order to understand the system underpinning his philosophy? Genuinely asking, cuz I know very little about Kant at this point, besides general knowledge.

This is good advice. I was going to try to say earlier that you should try to pitch a balance in reading Kant between getting what he's saying, and allowing yourself to conclude "this is just fundamentally ambiguous!" at points. Because a lot of Kant really is his ambiguity, especially when you get to his major historical interpreters.

I don't know much about Kant's logic but I do know that I read Kant was actually pretty bad at "logic" in our modern sense, and that he had barely read / had a bad opinion of Aristotle himself. Formal logic doesn't really become interesting until mid 19th century and then it's still worthless shit you should ignore anyway.

Hegel's logic on the other hand..

I tried to read this shit and I didn't understand what he was talking about in the first five pgaes

that's what happens when you fail to start with the greeks

Nah I've started with Greeks and it's so weirldy written it's really hard to follow.

I feel like you could draw a diagram or graph or flow chart or something, that would trivially explain Kant's difficulty by showing where most of it lies.

It's not in high conceptual difficulty - you probably already get most of what Kant is saying already, simply because of how the post-Kantian world takes so much of it for granted. The pre-Kantian view of tabula rasa empiricism is assailed from all sides whenever it makes an appearance (e.g., vulgar behaviorisms). And the pre-Kantian philosphical faith in logical rationalism, as ontologically (and not just linguistically) meaningful is so dead, so buried, that it's almost incomprehensible to us now. The main difficulty in getting Kant's concepts is first forcing yourself to get what he's arguing against, because the latter is so out of date.

Most of Kant's difficulty lies in understanding what he's replying to, and in that he's using very stereotyped and specific language. In places this language is simply a product of his time, and in many places he's deliberately reappropriating it to mean something altogether different, but similar in the sense that a contemporary was supposed to see what he was doing. And yet, take into account that his contemporaries were all confused as fuck by him, and he had to rewrite the goddamn thing, and write the Prolegomena, and wait years before people really figured it out.

The Guyer edition is great because it gives you a synopsis of all this. It's basically an extended glossary with historical context for the terms and explanations for Kant's use of them. That's the only way to read Kant properly.

you are good to go

I agree that his conclusions are trivial by now but his actual thought process of *how* he arrived at these conclusions (from Kant's POV) is really dense. I would compare it to a proof in math that arrives at a trivial conclusion but going through it step by step it gets very difficult. I do agree though that a large parte of the difficulty is the writing and the fact that few people have read all his contemporaries.

>>His ideas aren't that difficult to grasp

It looks like they are very easy to misunderstand though. Almost every week I see a post on reddit along the lines of "Since Kant says that everything is just in our mind..." or "Since, as Kant has showed, the reality we are able to perceive will always be colored by our organs of sense..."

btw. I'm reading his 'only possible proof for the existence of god' (idk what the exact translated title is) right now and if you are religious philosophy, it's quite interesting and it also sums up the pre-critique kant and shows you from what standpoint he leaped towards the critique.

>skip the background reading and don't understand the terms he's using.

It may be useful to add that no background reading (unless we are talking of commentaries about Kant) will really prepare you from the terms he uses, since he created a completely new jargon borrowing from the thousand disciplines he was acquainted with (an example on the top of my head: the term "deduction" that he continually uses is taken from the legal jargon of the time, and doesn't have the usual meaning one would expect)

I think that's what makes him difficult, even though he was called the "crusher of everything" by nietzsche, his actual thought process isquite nuanced and argues for very specific things and as soon as you put on the mental autopilot, you will miss things.

you read all that crap but didn't study english idealism? didn't pick up Hume, Berkeley or Locke?

youtube.com/watch?v=d__In2PQS60

kant is pretty basic
read his three critiques
then proceed to shit on him for the rest of your life

As the title post says, I've read Hume. I have a general knowledge of Locke and Berkeley gained through lectures, articles etc., but I don't major in philosophy and I don't think I have time to thoroughly study every philosopher, so I study those who I find more interesting or those who one must read, but idk I think i understood their ideas and I'm content with that. If I had more time and didn't have to focus on my major, I'd probably study them too.

I started to watch some of the recommended lectures and will be starting with the Kant dictionary and Deluze's book on him that was reccomended here.

>German Idealism

Literally one long hissy-fit at the Anglo-French superiority of the Enlightenment.

Locke is trash, read Hobbes instead if you haven't already.

>English philosophers
>English political theorists
>English thinkers

GOOD point

I haven't read Deleuze's book on Kant but he generally takes some.. liberties in his interpretation (he refered to it as some kind of assfucking that spawns weird children) so if anything i'd read it afterwards and compare your interpretation with his.

Someone here mentioned Förster's "Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy", I haven't read it but it was recommed to me by a prof that's a german idealism nut so i'd read that instead.