Immanuel Kant Hauptwerke
Kant is enormously important to modern debates about morality and ethics. His lifelong obsession with opposing English empiricism was crucial in helping to undermine its power so that the modern world could be dramatically more morally relativistic. Kantian morality still stands in contrast to today's postmodern mob, which is a development of the modernist perspectives created by John Arthur Mill, Virginia Woolf, and the analytic philosophers, which are rooted in the empiricist morality of Lock & Co, especially and Kant's mortal enemy, David Hume. Kant's friction with Hume is an echo of the debates between the Skeptics and the Platonists, and today's functionalist verses structuralist anthropology is a reconstruction of the conflict between Hume and Kant. The aim of this new collection is to give the average reader a clear picture of a philosopher who is often obscure and inaccessible. As with all of our books, each edition includes the original German text (transliterated into the modern script) for reference. This is especially useful for those who are either at least partially bilingual, as the reader can look at the original paragraph to see how Kant phrased it.
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is his magnum opus and by far his most widely read work. But his other two critiques and subsequent works on metaphysics are crucial to understanding his philosophical project. His early works are vial for understanding the impact of Newtonian mechanics on European philosophical views and the Enlightenment's tendency toward a one-world naturalistic materialism. His refutation of Swedenborg's claims to see ghosts in his 1766 Dreams of a Ghost-Seer, Explained by Dreams of Metaphysic makes fascinating reading and explains Kant's concern that metaphysical belief systems were becoming irrational and anti-scientific. Carl Jung would be influenced by this work in his concept of "synchronicity". His Metaphysical Foundations of 1786 has some antiquated ideas of Newtonian mechanics, but amazingly contains the first ever claim that gravity acts on matter regardless of distance - in other words, this is the first time that quantum theory is postulated by anyone. Kant predates his contemporary Newton and anticipates Einstein. So his entire corpus makes for amazing reading.
We set out to give these obscure works a fresh, accessible, but literal translation in chronological order. His works on natural philosophy, anthropology, metaphysics, and epistemology contain elements of all the others, so it is difficult to separate them into separate editions. So each work gets it's own volume, except for the minor essays, which are collected in the last volume.
The following works are presented Chronologically in The Complete Works of Immanuel Kant:
1755 General Natural History and Theory of Heaven (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels)
1764 Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen)
1766 Dreams of a Ghost-Seer, Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics
1783 Prolegomena to any future metaphysics that will be able to appear as a science
1785 Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
1786 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science
1787 Critique of Pure Reason (second, substantially modified edition)
1788 Critique of Practical Reason
1790 Critique of Judgment
1793 Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason
1795 Toward Eternal Peace. A philosophical draft
1797 Metaphysics of Morals
1798 The Dispute of the Faculties Minor works
1763 Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Quantities into World Wisdom
1764 Investigation on the distinctness of the principles of natural theology and morality (Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral)
1798 Anthropology in Pragmatic Perspective
1763 The Only Possible Ground of Evidence for a Demonstration of the Existence of God
1770 De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (Inaugural Dissertation)
The original editions of Kant’s works are in the Fraktur script which fell out of use in the 1920s. This translation is based on the original printings by transliterating the Fraktur into modern German script and then translating the text from there into English.
This translation is as literal as possible, with the intention of being faithful to the original text without interpretation. The available translations of Kant's works into English are invariably creative in their reconstruction of the original manuscripts, and this translation is intended to be different. When rendering difficult German words into English, the most literal work is used, even if this is strange to the ordinary Anglophone. Words like "Mien" (continuance or appearance) and "Phlegmatisch" (a stoic disposition) are legitimate English words, but they are simply obscure.
These words reflect the difficulty of the original text and are often deliberately used by Kant to refer to specific concepts. Words like "assertoric" (a positive statement of a fact) and "apodeictic" (recognition of a necessary fact) both come from Aristotelian logic, and translating them into simple language for the modern reader would break the connection with the very specific philosophical constructs they refer to.
The Latin and French references he inserts have also been left untranslated to reflect Kant's original intent. The Latin words "schema" and "atoma" have obvious English equivalents, but the Latin words refer to concepts in Cartesian and Newtonian philosophy.
These manuscripts are not intended for the average reader, but for the scholars of his day, and the Latin phrases refer to their respective philosophies for specific reasons. He quotes extensively from the Skeptics, for example, because these debates between the Platonists are very relevant to the metaphysical project he was undertaking.
In addition to maintaining these connections, great care has been taken to make the text as informal and accessible as possible. The phraseology has been simplified and the sentence structures have been broken down into a manageable flow to allow even the most casual reader to digest this difficult epistemological treatise.
