Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
It is obviously impossible to produce a single volume that includes all of the background texts that are minimally necessary for a reader to attain even a basic understanding of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. For when composing the first Critique, Kant was undoubtedly aware of and reacting to the views of numerous major thinkers such as Plato, Descartes, Locke, Newton, Leibniz, and Hume, and one must also keep in mind, especially in the cases of Newton, Leibniz, and Hume, that how their views were received and interpreted in eighteenth-century Germany may have been very different from our understanding today. Moreover, there are myriad “minor” figures whose views Kant would have been intimately familiar with. The scope of the relevant texts is simply too vast for all of them to be included in a single volume. Insofar as the texts of the major philosophers are currently available in high-quality English editions, readers of Kant are, comparatively speaking, already well served. The same cannot be said, however, of Kant's immediate predecessors and contemporaries, that is, eighteenth-century philosophers in Germany who wrote in Latin, French, or German.
The present volume thus represents a first attempt at providing English translations of selections of those German, French, and Latin works that would most help us to put the Critique of Pure Reason in its fuller historical context. It would naturally be highly desirable if all of the major works of all of the relevant authors were translated in their entirety.
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- Kant's Critique of Pure ReasonBackground Source Materials, pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009