Course Description:

In this course, we shall examine the single most influential and (arguably) difficult work in modern philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.  We shall consider it not only as answering certain problems given it by its philosophical predecessors but also as giving us answers to philosophical problems; in other words, we shall treat the Critique both as an historical work and as a contemporary work.  Insofar as we shall consider the Critique in its historical context it would be useful if students had some basic familiarity with the other thinkers of the early modern period who lurk in the background of the Critique: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. 

Course Requirements:

Students will be required to write five papers of approximately three to five pages in length during the course of the semester. 

Graduate students in philosophy may, after consulting with me, write one term paper of 20-25 pages instead.

Texts:

The following is required for this course (please use this edition):

•  Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason.  Trans. Guyer and Wood.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

There are many, many works on Kant.  But the following are good places to start:

• Allison, Henry.  Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense.  New Haven: Yale UP, 1982 (Rev. ed. 2004).

• Bennett, Jonathan.  Kant’s Analytic.  Cambridge: CUP, 1966.  (crusty classic)

• Friedman, Michael. Kant and the Exact Sciences. Cambridge: CUP, 1992.

• Guyer, Paul.  Kant and the Claims of Knowledge.  Cambridge: CUP, 1987.

• Guyer, Paul.  The Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cambridge: CUP, 1992.

• Henrich, Dieter. The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant's Philosophy. (Especially the essay "Identity and Objectivity".) Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994.

• Langton, Rae. Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves. Oxford: OUP, 1998.

• Longuenesse, Béatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

• Pippin, Robert. Kant's Theory of Form. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.

• Strawson, P. F.  The Bounds of Sense.  London: Methuen, 1966.  (crusty classic)

• Van Cleve, James. Problems from Kant. Oxford: OUP, 1999.

• Watkins, Eric.  Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality. Cambridge: CUP, 2005.

One could go on...