History Of Contemporary Philosophy 2023/2024

The Structure and Fundamental Problems of the *Critique of Pure Reason*

On the 300th anniversary of Immanuel Kant's birth, this course aims to present and invite the study of what for many "remains the greatest single book of modern Western philosophy" (P. F. Strawson). In it, Kant carries out his famous 'Copernican revolution', the general meaning of which can perhaps be summed up in the simple substitution of a verb: in order to understand the possibility of experience, do not assume that one *has* experience (presupposing the separate and pre-constituted reality of subject and object, mind and world), but rather that one has to *make* experience. After Kant, one should no longer think of the cognitive relation as a mirroring of the world in the mind, but understand it as a synthetic activity, conditioned by the specific forms and principles of the different faculties of the knowing subject and by phenomenal data, aimed at determining in a unitary and interminable process (experience) both the subject's self-consciousness and the knowledge of ourselves and the consciousness of the world and knowledge of external phenomena.

Module A

Will cover the first part of the *Critique*, Preface, Introduction, *Transcendental Aesthetics*, *Transcendental Analytics* up to and including the *General Observation on the System of Principles*.

Text for the final exam:

I. Kant, *Critique of Pure Reason*, in the Cambridge Edition of Kant's Works, the above chapters.

Module B

Will cover the remainder: chapter three and appendix of *Transcendental Analytics*, *Transcendental Dialectic* and *Doctrine of Method*.

Text for the final exam:

I. Kant, *Critique of Pure Reason*, in the Cambridge Edition of Kant's Works, the chapters indicated above.

With reference to both modules, the following books are recommended as introductions and commentaries for further study:

E. Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought, Yale University Press

S. Marcucci, Guida alla lettura della *Critica della ragion pura*, Laterza

G. Bird, The Revolutionary Kant. A commentary on the *Critique of Pure Reason*, Open Court

G. Mohr & M. Willaschek (eds.), Immanuel Kant. *Kritik del reinen Vernunft*, Akademie Verlag.

The Structure and Fundamental Problems of the *Critique of Pure Reason*

On the 300th anniversary of Immanuel Kant's birth, this course aims to present and invite the study of what for many "remains the greatest single book of modern Western philosophy" (P. F. Strawson). In it, Kant carries out his famous 'Copernican revolution', the general meaning of which can perhaps be summed up in the simple substitution of a verb: in order to understand the possibility of experience, do not assume that one *has* experience (presupposing the separate and pre-constituted reality of subject and object, mind and world), but rather that one has to *make* experience. After Kant, one should no longer think of the cognitive relation as a mirroring of the world in the mind, but understand it as a synthetic activity, conditioned by the specific forms and principles of the different faculties of the knowing subject and by phenomenal data, aimed at determining in a unitary and interminable process (experience) both the subject's self-consciousness and the knowledge of ourselves and the consciousness of the world and knowledge of external phenomena.

Module A

Will cover the first part of the *Critique*, Preface, Introduction, *Transcendental Aesthetics*, *Transcendental Analytics* up to and including the *General Observation on the System of Principles*.

Text for the final exam:

I. Kant, *Critique of Pure Reason*, in the Cambridge Edition of Kant's Works, the above chapters.

Module B

Will cover the remainder: chapter three and appendix of *Transcendental Analytics*, *Transcendental Dialectic* and *Doctrine of Method*.

Text for the final exam:

I. Kant, *Critique of Pure Reason*, in the Cambridge Edition of Kant's Works, the chapters indicated above.

With reference to both modules, the following books are recommended as introductions and commentaries for further study:

E. Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought, Yale University Press

S. Marcucci, Guida alla lettura della *Critica della ragion pura*, Laterza

G. Bird, The Revolutionary Kant. A commentary on the *Critique of Pure Reason*, Open Court

G. Mohr & M. Willaschek (eds.), Immanuel Kant. *Kritik del reinen Vernunft*, Akademie Verlag.