Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials (Cambridge Philosophical Texts in Context)
Cambridge University Press, 11/26/2009
EAN 9780521787017, ISBN10: 0521787017
Paperback, 424 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
This volume provides English translations of texts that form the essential background to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Presenting the projects of Kant's predecessors and contemporaries in eighteenth-century Germany, it enables readers to understand the positions that Kant might have identified with 'pure reason', the criticisms of pure reason that had developed prior to Kant's, and alternative attempts at synthesizing empiricist elements within a rationalist framework. The volume contains chapters on Christian Wolff, Martin Knutzen, Alexander Baumgarten, Christian Crusius, Leonhard Euler, Johann Lambert, Marcus Herz, Johann Eberhard, and Johann Tetens. Each chapter includes a brief introduction that provides succinct biographical and bibliographical information on these authors, a concise account of their projects, and information on the importance of these projects to Kant's First Critique. Extensive references to the First Critique, brought together in a concordance, highlight the potential relevance of each text.
1. Christian Wolff
rational thoughts on God, the world and the soul of human beings
also all things in general (1720)
2. Martin Knutzen
system of causes (1735)
philosophical treatise on the immaterial nature of the soul (1744)
3. Alexander Baumgarten
metaphysics (1739)
4. Christian August Crusius
sketch of the necessary truths of reason (1745)
5. Leonhard Euler
letters to a German princess (1760–1762)
6. Johann Heinrich Lambert
treatise on the criterion of truth (1761)
new organon (1764)
7. Marcus Herz
first letter (1770)
second letter (1771)
third letter (1771)
observations from speculative philosophy (1771)
fourth letter (1772)
fifth letter (1776)
8. Johann August Eberhard
universal theory of thinking and sensing (1776)
9. Johann Nicolaus Tetens
philosophical essays on human nature and its development (1777).