This book develops a new reading of the Metaphysical Foundations and articulates an original perspective of Kant's critical philosophy as a whole.

Why read Kant's Critique of Judgment? For most readers, the importance of the work lies in its contributions to aesthetics and, to a lesser extent, the philosophy of biology. Hannah Ginsborg, by contrast, sees the Critique of Judgment as a central contribution to the understanding of human cognition generally. The fourteen essays collected here advance a common interpretive project: that of bringing out the philosophical significance of the notion of judgment which figures in the third Critique and showing its importance both to Kant's own theoretical philosophy and to contemporary views of human thought and cognition. For us to possess the capacity of judgment, on the interpretation defended here, is for our natural perceptual and imaginative responses to involve a claim to their own normativity with respect to the objects which cause them. It is in virtue of this capacity that we are able not merely to respond discriminatively to objects, as animals do, but to bring objects under concepts. The Critique of Judgment, on this reading, rejects the traditional dichotomy between the natural and the normative: our natural psychological responses to the spatio-temporal objects which affect our senses are both causally determined by those objects, and normatively appropriate to them. The essays in this book aim collectively to develop and illuminate this understanding of judgment in its own right, and to use it to address specific interpretive issues in Kant's aesthetics, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of biology; they are also concerned to bring out the relevance of this conception of judgment to contemporary debates regarding concept-acquisition, the content of perception, and skepticism about rules and meaning.

This volume, originally published in 2002, assembles the historical sequence of writings that Kant published between 1783 and 1796 to popularize, summarize, amplify and defend the doctrines of his masterpiece, the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781. The best known of them, the Prolegomena, is often recommended to beginning students, but the other texts are also vintage Kant and are important sources for a fully rounded picture of Kant's intellectual development. As with other volumes in the series there are copious linguistic notes and a glossary of key terms. The editorial introductions and explanatory notes shed light on the critical reception accorded Kant by the metaphysicians of his day and on Kant's own efforts to derail his opponents.

Kant sought throughout his life to provide a philosophy adequate to the sciences of his time--especially Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics. In this new book, Michael Friedman argues that Kant's continuing efforts to find a metaphysics that could provide a foundation for the sciences is of the utmost importance in understanding the development of his philosophical thought from its earliest beginnings in the thesis of 1747, through the Critique of Pure Reason, to his last unpublished writings in the Opus postumum. Previous commentators on Kant have typically minimized these efforts because the sciences in question have since been outmoded. Friedman argues that, on the contrary, Kant's philosophy is shaped by extraordinarily deep insight into the foundations of the exact sciences as he found them, and that this represents one of the greatest strengths of his philosophy. Friedman examines Kant's engagement with geometry, arithmetic and algebra, the foundations of mechanics, and the law of gravitation in Part One. He then devotes Part Two to the Opus postumum, showing how Kant's need to come to terms with developments in the physics of heat and in chemistry formed a primary motive for his projected Transition from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to Physics. Kant and the Exact Sciences is a book of high scholarly achievement, argued with impressive power. It represents a great advance in our understanding of Kant's philosophy of science.

Preface 1. Metaphysical foundations of phoronomy 2. Metaphysical foundations of dynamics 3. Metaphysical foundations of mechanics 4. Metaphysical foundations of phenomenology.

Human subjects are both formed by historical inheritances and capable of active criticism. Insisting on this fact, Kant and Benjamin each develop powerful, systematic, but sharply opposed accounts of human powers and interests in freedom. A persistent constitutive tension between Kantian and Benjaminan ideals is woven through human life. By examining the two philosophers through this volume, Richard Eldridge attempts to make better sense of the commitment forming, commitment revising, anxious, reflective and acculturated human subjects we are.

Many students coming to grips with Kant's philosophy are understandably daunted not only by the complexity and sheer difficulty of the man's writings, but almost equally by the amount of secondary literature available. A great deal of this seems to be - and not only on first reading - just about as difficult as the work it is meant to make more accessible. Any writer deliberately setting out to provide an authentically introductory text thus faces a double problem: how to provide an exegesis which would capture some of the spirit of the original, without gross and misleading over-simplification; and secondly, how to anchor the argument in the best and most imaginative secondary literature, yet avoid the whole project appearing so fragmented as to make the average book of chess openings seem positively austere. Until fairly recently, matters were made even more difficul t, in that commentaries on Kant were very often of a whole work, say, The Critique of Pure Reason, with the result that students would have to struggle through a very great deal of material indeed in order to feel any confidence at all that they had begun to understand the original writings. Recently, things have changed somewhat. There are now excellent commentaries on "Kant's Analytic", "Kant's Analogies" etc. . We have also seen, (at least as reflected in book titles), a resurgence of interest in what is perhaps the most controversial and far-reaching Kantian claim, viz.

This book traces the alleged incoherences to attempts to assimilate Kant's ethical writings to modern conceptions of rationality, actions and rights.

This volume of new essays explores Kant's views on the laws of nature.