Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is a great but difficult work. In this interview for Philosophy Bites A.W. Moore gives an accessible account of the main themes of the book and explains what might have been motivating Kant's approach to metaphysics (no mean feat in under 20 minutes!).
Listen to Adrian Moore on Kant's Metaphysics
That was the best brief summation of Kant's philosophy I've ever heard or read.
Posted by: Scott B. | September 18, 2008 at 12:52 PM
A.W. Moore does a great job of here, but I would like to add an additional complexity to the matter. When Kant decides that we cannot know things in themselves it isn’t as simple as him concluding that we simply don’t know about objects as they are beyond experience, but the concept of object itself is only able to reach beyond experience by means of an abstraction. Objects are only possible at all as a concept because they appear to us in experience, and their appearance is governed by the understanding (or we can continue the metaphor of the spectacles here if we wish). This shift in understanding of the object is incredibly important as it changes the understanding of object from being something that is separate and distinct from us to being something that is conditioned by us and impossible without us.
Posted by: Erik Christianson | September 24, 2008 at 08:54 PM