Critique of Pure Reason
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~230,000 words · 1,082 passages
Cite this work
- APAImmanuel Kant. (n.d.). The Critique of Pure Reason [Critique of Pure Reason]. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/immanuel-kant/the-critique-of-pure-reason
- MLAImmanuel Kant. The Critique of Pure Reason [Critique of Pure Reason]. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/immanuel-kant/the-critique-of-pure-reason.
- ChicagoImmanuel Kant. The Critique of Pure Reason [Critique of Pure Reason]. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/immanuel-kant/the-critique-of-pure-reason.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The question of whether knowledge can reach beyond experience, and the answer that it cannot: space, time and the categories are our way of receiving the world, not properties of the world in itself.
Context and history
There are two editions, 1781 and 1787, and they do not say quite the same thing: Kant rewrote the transcendental deduction and recast the critique of rational psychology. Hence citation by 'A' and 'B' page according to edition, and serious translations print both numberings in the margin. A citation from the Critique without an A or a B cannot be checked.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Time was, when she was the _queen_ of all the sciences; and, if we take the will for the deed, she certainly deserves, so far as regards the high importance of her object-matter, this title of honour. Now, it is the fashion of the time to heap contempt and scorn upon her; and the matron mourns, forlorn and forsaken, like Hecuba: Modo maxima rerum, Tot generis, natisque potens... Nunc trahor exul, inops. —Ovid, Metamorphoses. xiii At first, her government, under the administration of the _dogmatists_, was an absolute _despotism_. But, as the legislative continued to show traces of the ancient barbaric rule, her empire gradually broke up, and intestine wars introduced the reign of _anarchy;_ while the _sceptics_, like nomadic tribes, who hate a permanent habitation and settled mode of living, attacked from time to time those who had organized themselves into civil communities. But their number was, very happily, small; and thus they could not entirely put a stop to the exertions of those who persisted in raising new edifices, although on no settled or uniform plan. In recent times the hope dawned upon us of seeing those disputes settled, and the legitimacy of her claims established by a kind of _physiology_ of the human understanding—that of the celebrated Locke. But it was found that—although it was affirmed that this so-called queen could not refer her descent to any higher source than that of common experience, a circumstance which necessarily brought suspicion on her claims—as this _genealogy_ was incorrect, she persisted in the advancement of her claims to sovereignty. Thus metaphysics necessarily fell back into the antiquated and rotten constitution of _dogmatism_, and again became obnoxious to the contempt from which efforts had been made to save it.…