ITT: Kant

Help me out Veeky Forums, I've read most major philosophers before Kant and now I'm finally cracking open his Critique of Pure Reason. While I haven't read too deeply into rationalism and empiricism, I feel confident enough with the basic ideas that I can move onto Kant. I know this work probably isn't the best place to start with him, but I like to dive into a writer's main work then go back later for the contextual stuff. That said, what are your thoughts and advice for a first time reader? What do you wish you knew the first time you read it? What is some good secondary literature I should read afterwards, and what other works by him are worth checking out?

Thanks

i too would like to know these things

Have you read Hume?

this has my attention tho

I've read his enquiry concerning human understanding a while back, I think I'm going to reread that and Descartes meditations real quick before i start kant

why wouldn't you start with his shorter earlier stuff? ignoring all the mystical and logical bits seems bound to lead to you thinking he was just dissing reason not saying don't go too far the other way. i hope you read swedenborg first though if you're going to read his early stuff.

>secondary literature I should read after
Schopenhauer. But you'll have to read the earlier works then too

>reading Deleuzian interpretations of philosophers to get an accurate picture of philosophers

It's even worse than reading Nietzsche to understand otger philosophers.

>I've read most major philosophers before Kant
>I haven't read too deeply into rationalism and empiricism
Does not compute.

Definitely reacquaint yourself with Descartes and Hume. Some Leibniz and Berkeley would help too. Feel free to check out the Prolegomena for help.

one genius writing about another genius

i'm ok with this

Christian Wolff systematized Leibniz. He's most closely what Kant thought of when he thought of Rationalism, I think.

>Deleuze's studies of individual philosophers and artists are purposely heterodox. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example, Deleuze claims that Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is an attempt to rewrite Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781),[41] even though Nietzsche nowhere mentions the First Critique in the Genealogy, and the Genealogy's moral topics are far removed from the epistemological focus of Kant's book. Likewise, Deleuze claims that univocity is the organizing principle of Spinoza's philosophy, despite the total absence of the term from any of Spinoza's works. Deleuze once famously described his method of interpreting philosophers as "buggery (enculage)", as sneaking behind an author and producing an offspring which is recognizably his, yet also monstrous and different.[42]

>The various monographs thus are not attempts to present what Nietzsche or Spinoza strictly intended, but re-stagings of their ideas in different and unexpected ways. Deleuze's peculiar readings aim to enact the creativity he believes is the acme of philosophical practice.[43]

so what books do you recommend then

And Baumgarten systematized Wolff. That doesn't mean that reading either will be tremendously helpful in understanding Kant. Kant is revolutionary, not a middling alteration of the thought of his teachers.

>What do you wish you knew the first time you read it?
it's not worth getting hung up on the schematism. just pretend it makes sense as the linchpin of the entire system and move on. no one talks about it anyway.

>What is some good secondary literature I should read afterwards, and what other works by him are worth checking out?
kemp smith's (whose translation you should be reading if ur gonna be reading an english trans) commentary was quite lucid. if you're looking for a radical, penetrating and fun take read heideggers kant and the problem of metaphysics.
as for kant the epistemologist, you might want to check prolegomena and logik (especially to get the notion of concept and judgement straight as employed in cpr).

I read a little bit of Kant and then did this because I'm a pseudo-intellectual

Life = (Space x Time)^entropy

Space = 5 sense
Time = speed of space

(Time x Space) = universe


Entropy = the randomness each life(person) contains due to their free nature


(Time x Space) ^ k = each universe of each person where K is total people in universe

It is imperative that you read Frege afterward to help sort out the analytic/synthetic distinction.

Important followups are Quines two dogmas of empiricism which futher problematizes the concept of non mathematical analyticity and Kripke who shows that if perhaps if there is non mathematical analyticity then it can indeed be a priori justified...

-PhD ABD philosophy

Don't bother, Einstein disproved Kant.

>not understanding the difference between metaphysics and physics

You mean newton... I hope

is pic related helpful for understanding kant or am i just going to be heideggerian afterwards

or both

t. brainlet

I mean a posteriori justified... Hesperus is Phosphorus

Kant is really hard, and Kant scholarship is dense and argumentative.

First, you should feel very strong in your Descartes and Hume. You should also be pretty strong in your Leibniz's metaphysics.

Second, I think it's sort of pointless to try to read Kant and THEN read the secondary literature. They should be read together. Kant is just too hard, and the context for his work too important to leave it "afterwards."

To that end, I think Sebastian Gardner's Routledge Handbook is overall pretty good. It's great for getting a skeletal understanding of the text and its ambitions, and can help you understand what's going on. Think of it like a "skeleton key" for it.

Henry Allison's "Kant's Transcendental Idealism" is also a standard secondary source to be read together with Kant the first time. It's, in many ways, a controversial bit of scholarship, but reading it alongside the Critique is very helpful, I think.

It's also useful to read, ahead of time, Kant's Prolegomenon, and also to read selections from the Leibniz-Clark correspondence on space and time.

There's obviously lots of other stuff one could recommend, but this was my approach when I first learned the Critique and I though it worked pretty well.

P.S. the standard academic translation these days is Guyer and Wood. And yes it's better than Kemp Smith. It's easier to read, and (I'm told by scholars) a better translation in other respects also.

Müller's translation is superior in every conceivable way. It should be the academic standard.

He's a Nazi

Both bb. Also read What is a Thing?

It is an unorthodox interpretation of Kant that is a further development of the project in Being and Time. So, no. You don't read Heidegger's book on other philosophers to get into those thinkers, you read them to get into H.

>I've read most major philosophers before Kant
>I haven't read too deeply into rationalism and empiricism
>I feel confident

lol pathetic

>To that end, I think Sebastian Gardner's Routledge Handbook is overall pretty good. It's great for getting a skeletal understanding of the text and its ambitions, and can help you understand what's going on. Think of it like a "skeleton key" for it.

I can second this. It's excellent and very clearly written. Though it does attempt to defend Kant (it's argumentative at points).

>it's okay for my philosophy to be retarded, it's just a thought experiment :^)

this is actually a really fucking good point

If anything, Einstein proved Kant right you stupid shit. Relativity of time points out to the fact that it's nothing other than the form of our intuition.

But Einstein didn't prove that time is "relative" dumbass, only that inertial frames of reference share one universal constant (c) and nothing else. Simultaneity being relative doesn't make time relative. Why talk pop-sci that you don't understand, much less its implications for Kant?

Reminder that scientific realism is spook clung to by liberals

Why would you be interested in Kant if you are not interested in rationalism & empricism