Karl Ameriks here collects his most important essays to provide a uniquely detailed and up-to-date analysis of Kant's main arguments in all three major areas of his work: theoretical philosophy (Critique of Pure Reason), practical philosophy (Critique of Practical Reason), and aesthetics (Critique of Judgment). Guiding the volume is Ameriks's belief that one cannot properly understand any one of these Critiques except in the context of the other two. The essays can be read individually, but read together they offer a comprehensive guide to the main themes of the most influential of all modern philosophical systems.

Is there any justification for Heidegger's famous 'violence' against Kant's philosophy? An independent assessment of the worth of Heidegger's argument is also made all the more pertinent by the evident misgivings Heidegger had about his interpretation of Kant. We must ask of Heidegger's interpretation of Kant: 1) Is this good Kant? and 2) Is this good Heidegger?

In this illuminating study of Kant's theory of imagination and its role in interpretation, Rudolf A. Makkreel argues against the commonly held notion that Kant's transcendental philosophy is incompatible with hermeneutics. The charge that Kant's foundational philosophy is inadequate to the task of interpretation can be rebutted, explains Makkreel, if we fully understand the role of imagination in his work. In identifying this role, Makkreel also reevaluates the relationship among Kant's discussions of the feeling of life, common sense, and the purposiveness of history.

This volume discusses Kant's philosophical development in the Groundwork and his attempt to justify the categorical imperative as a principle of freedom.

Robert Hanna presents a fresh view of the Kantian and analytic traditions that have dominated continental European and Anglo-American philosophy over the last two centuries, and of the relation between them. The rise of analytic philosophy decisively marked the end of the hundred-year dominance of Kant's philosophy in Europe. But Hanna shows that the analytic tradition also emerged from Kant's philosophy in the sense that its members were able to define and legitimate their ideas only by means of an intensive, extended engagement with, and a partial or complete rejection of, the Critical Philosophy. Hanna's book therefore comprises both an interpretative study of Kant's massive and seminal Critique of Pure Reason, and a critical essay on the historical foundations of analytic philosophy from Frege to Quine. Hanna considers Kant's key doctrines in the Critique in the light of their reception and transmission by the leading figures of the analytic tradition—Frege, Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Quine. But this is not just a study in the history of philosophy, for out of this emerges Hanna's original approach to two much-contested theories that remain at the heart of contemporary philosophy. Hanna puts forward a new 'cognitive-semantic' interpretation of transcendental idealism, and a vigorous defence of Kant's theory of analytic and synthetic necessary truth. These will make Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy compelling reading not just for specialists in the history of philosophy, but for all who are interested in these fundamental philosophical issues.

The eminent philosopher delivers an illuminating interpretation of Kant’s magnum opus in what is itself a significant work of Western philosophy. The text of Martin Heidegger’s 1927–28 university lecture course on Emmanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason presents a close interpretive reading of the first two parts of this masterpiece of modern philosophy. In this course, Heidegger continues the task he enunciated in Being and Time as the problem of dismantling the history of ontology, using temporality as a clue. Heidegger demonstrates that the relation between philosophy, ontology, and fundamental ontology is rooted in the genesis of the modern mathematical sciences. He also shows that objectification of beings as beings is inseparable from knowledge a priori, the central problem of Kant’s Critique. He concludes that objectification rests on the productive power of imagination, a process that involves temporality, which is the basic constitution of humans as beings.

Kleist is a famous misreader of Kant, but this study pitches the latter's principles against the more restricted scope of his own examples in order to develop an ethics and an account of the sublime in keeping with Kleist's literary works.

Immanuel Kant's work changed the course of modern philosophy; Karl Ameriks examines how. He compares the philosophical system set out in Kant's Critiques with the work of the major philosophers before and after Kant. Individual essays provide case studies in support of Ameriks's thesis that late 18th-century reactions to Kant initiated an "historical turn," after which historical and systematic considerations became joined in a way that fundamentally distinguishes philosophy from science and art.

Henry Allison examines the central tenets of Hume's epistemology and cognitive psychology, as contained in the Treatise of Human Nature. Allison takes a distinctive two-level approach. On the one hand, he considers Hume's thought in its own terms and historical context. So considered, Hume is viewed as a naturalist, whose project in the first three parts of the first book of the Treatise is to provide an account of the operation of the understanding in which reason is subordinated to custom and other non-rational propensities. Scepticism arises in the fourth part as a form of metascepticism, directed not against first-order beliefs, but against philosophical attempts to ground these beliefs in the "space of reasons." On the other hand, Allison provides a critique of these tenets from a Kantian perspective. This involves a comparison of the two thinkers on a range of issues, including space and time, causation, existence, induction, and the self. In each case, the issue is seen to turn on a contrast between their underlying models of cognition. Hume is committed to a version of the perceptual model, according to which the paradigm of knowledge is a seeing with the "mind's eye" of the relation between mental contents. By contrast, Kant appeals to a discursive model in which the fundamental cognitive act is judgment, understood as the application of concepts to sensory data, Whereas regarded from the first point of view, Hume's account is deemed a major philosophical achievement, seen from the second it suffers from a failure to develop an adequate account of concepts and judgment.

A wide-ranging and original interpretation of Kant's Critique of Judgment.