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The Powers of Pure Reason

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How many beggars one rich man can feed!/When kings build, the carters have their hands full,” writes Friedrich Schiller in Kant und seine Ausleger.1
In this poem carters are separated from the king as conspicuously as light is from darkness, or giants from dwarves. Should this division prove unjust, the king may be overthrown. Schiller’s poem, however, has nothing to do with political justice or exploitation. Instead, it is about the sense of awe inspired by an exceptional thinker like Kant, compared with whom writers relying on his philosophy are like laborers. It prophesies that all followers will be forced to refer back to and depend upon him.
There is a harsh edge, verging on contempt, in Schiller’s poem, for there is something parasitical and lowly about carters. Post-Kantian philosophy survives on the crumbs dispensed by a great thinker. The king who feeds the Lumpenproletariat inevitably engenders a natural resentment and social envy. If so, one wonders whether Schiller takes Kant’s writing to contravene the maxim Plato teaches in his Seventh Letter: “no serious man will ever think of writing about serious matters for the many. doing so will only make them both perplexed and envious” (644c).
As a carter, I feel enormous gratitude for the wealth of Kant’s thought, but I am also torn: not between perplexity and envy, but between perplexity and gratitude. Indeed, this book grew out of precisely this tension. While I have no doubts that Kant’s revolution in thinking is utterly pivotal in the history of philosophy, I do not believe that full justice has been done to it. I think the best way to pay a tribute to Kant’s depth is to take seriously and address the philosophical problems that threaten its unity. This is what I want to do in this book.
one important debt of gratitude, which is not ambivalent in any way, is toward my students at Boston university and at the university of Pisa. As every teacher knows, we learn more from the unexpected challenges posed by students than from years of research. I have taught the three Critiques many times and at different levels. The first Critique in particular has been the object of my renewed and repeated study—and ever amazed reading— over many years. Every time I pick it up again, I brace for new surprises. I realize not only that my previous reading missed many nuances or, luckily less often as years tick by, something fundamental, but also that once one part is critically reexamined, the whole book, and therefore Kant’s en- tire philosophical project, must be subjected to a global reinterpretation. As Kant himself says, changing one minor detail in a building or a system compels us to rethink the whole anew.

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Detail Information

Series Title

The Powers of Pure Reason

Call Number

-

Publisher

USA : University of Chicago Press, ltd., 2015

Collation

1-342

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

13: 978-0-226-24329-

Classification

NONE

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

1st Edtion

Subject(s)

Philosophy

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

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